Salesforce quoted me $14,288 a year in licences, plus $49,020 for consultants to design and build the CRM itself. I’m running the same CRM today — still on Salesforce — for under $500 a month.
Here’s how that happened.
The quote
In May we hired a BDM starting 1 July, and needed a proper CRM before day one. The recommended path looked like this: Sales Cloud Enterprise at $198.45 per user per month for 6 seats, a 7-week, 474-hour consultant build at $49,020 ex GST, 40% up front, with a discount that expired if we didn’t sign by June. Call it $63,000 in year one.
What we did instead
I bought two Salesforce Pro Suite seats — $3,864 for the year, on the credit card — and connected Claude (an AI assistant) to the org.
Over the next six weeks, across about 30 working sessions, it imported 500+ accounts and contacts, built the custom fields, set up lead routing and call tracking, created 18 reports and 4 dashboards, wired up email sync, and linked the CRM to our ticketing system.
My total typing time: under 5 hours. The AI subscription that did the build: US$100 a month — about $230 of AI time against a $49,020 quote. Half a percent.
The honest caveat
The AI didn’t know what a good sales process looks like. I still paid a human sales strategist for that, and it was worth every dollar. The expensive part was never the thinking. It was the clicking.
Anna, our new BDM, started on the 1st of July with a working CRM waiting for her. Day one, she used it to book me two client meetings.
If there’s a big implementation quote sitting in your inbox right now, send it to me before you sign it. I’ll tell you what an AI could knock off it.