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Having implemented a few different CRM systems, I think that CRM systems should be opinionated and enforce business rule best practices for most users. When I

Having implemented a few different CRM systems, I think that CRM systems should be opinionated and enforce business rule best practices for most users. When I meet a CRM salesperson, and they're like our software will do whatever you want and we will create it, you have to read between the lines and translate it. What they really mean is "Our software isn't designged to work for most general use cases, implementation will require a team of really expensive developers to create and maintain, we will tell you we are making custom fitting "cuture" software and you will be sending us a boat load of money for the rest of your company's life if it works or you will burn a giant pile of money until it doesn't work. This isn't my first rodeo. If you have to extensively customize the software then the cost of the software will end up being moot and the cost of the people to run it will end up costing a fortune forever.

mavelikara 3y ago
Can it be built as layers - a flexible platform, with an opinionated product built on top of it? That way, simple use cases are easy and complicated use cases are possible.
- civilitty 3y ago
  That would be the promise of companies like SAP and Salesforce. I believe Dante wrote a book on the subject…
- daft_pink 3y ago
  Development and developers are extremely expensive, especially when you have to train them how to use your custom home built product. You are generally far better off using the off the shelf product that everyone has been trained on than using some custom product when you have to start hiring and training developers. The software costs are generally minimal compared to hiring smart people to design, implement and code projects with complex business logic.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    This used to be the SAP philosophy; build your company processes around SAP, not the other way around.
danjac 3y ago
By opinionated, do you mean buying specialized off-the-shelf CRM solutions for a specific industry? For example, if the customer runs a legal firm, they should buy a CRM with functionality targeted towards legal firms?
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > For example, if the customer runs a legal firm, they should buy a CRM with functionality targeted towards legal firms Even those won't be specialized enough, a legal firm that handles corporate megers and acquisitions has very different processes from one that does class action litigation or criminal defense. Successful CRMs are not opinionated, but are customizable - requiring an army of consultants to deploy and an internal role to support. Small companies may be coerced to using opinionated processes (quickbooks + whatever process the part-time bookkeeper wants), but every medium-sized enterprise or larger is a snowflake
  - danjac 3y ago
    Again, not an area I know much about, but: there are going to be hundreds, if not thousands, of medium sized legal firms in the US handling, say, criminal defence. They can't be that different from one another that they would require bespoke software, other than an off-the-shelf solution for criminal defence lawyers? Or is there sufficient difference e.g. state to state that this would never work?
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      While selling the simpler product, the financial position of a company selling "Criminal Defense CRM" is substantially different to a more general "Legal Firm CRM" one; both would be competing with "Salesforce for Law Firms[1]", with the first having the smallest Total Addressable Market. 1. https://www.salesforce.com/uk/solutions/industries/business-services/law-firms/ https://www.salesforce.com/uk/solutions/industries/business-...
seanhunter 3y ago
I'm pretty sure this implementation gap is done partly for a good reason and partly for a bad reason. The good reason is even within an individual industry each company is different enough that the software needs to be extremely customizable or there will be too much adoption pain required. I don't think opinionated does it when you would need to enforce change across large swathes of people. I have seen this tried and be an expensive failure across more than one organization where malicious compliance basically killed multimillion-dollar rollouts of this kind because people simply weren't prepared to change their workflows. I've seen the CTO of a very large organization first instruct, then ask, then plead, then beg for people to adopt the CRM that had been installed at great cost all to no avail. The bad reason is that lots of big software companies (but definitely CRM people like Salesforce) rely on big consultancy firms to sell their product. Consultancy do that because they "don't sell software, they sell solutions", meaning they come in and do the implementation etc. They wouldn't do this if they didn't get the sweet sweet billable hours, so your software better be customizable up the wazoo for them to be interested in being your sales army. And then piled on top of that, salesforce have created an ecosystem of developers who do the customization. So if you're a small bank, you might want ncino to do your loan workflows etc. That means Ncino are selling salesforce everytime they sell their product etc.
rtpg 3y ago
Aren’t all successful CRMs basically around customization? Like SFDC is functionally a distributed Smalltalk OS
lucb1e 3y ago
I can't tell from your comment: are you saying that TwentyCRM is not opinionated or enforcing business rule best practices, or is this just a general blanket statement about CRMs that may or may not be relevant to the submission?
- daft_pink 3y ago
  I'm saying that based on the text in the submission there are numerous red flags that they are touting as 'open source' features that would makes me skeptical of buying their product based on my general experience purchasing CRM systems. It sounds like they want you to pay for developers to help develop their unfinished crm system and the benefit you will receive is the crm system will be completely customized for your business. Personally, my experience is that large software like CRM can be very very expensive and very very risky in the sense that you become dependent on the people you hire for it and those people can start out or become very very expensive. But most developers I know many of whom are on hacker news believe they can churn out a CRM quickly all they need is javascript, a server and a database.
isodev 3y ago
I like the idea of an open source CRM, it means you can take it and do the customizations in-house (as opposed to paying consultants to do it) or both. Out of the box and on a small scale, this feels very much like a self-hosted version of Notion.
- zacharycohn 3y ago
  In most cases, you do not want to do that customization in house. Your engineers don't know anything about your crm, probably don't want to, and have more customer-facing-value/important things to do.
bluedino 3y ago
It has to be customizable or people won't buy it. After all, they just want to re-implement their current, CRM solution (which is terrible, and is why they want to buy a new one in the first place) in the new fancy CRM.
cloudquelle 3y ago
Hard to be more expensive than S/4Hana
Gormo 3y ago
If you can't customize the software, then you'll implement external hacks and workarounds that are much uglier and costlier to maintain than customizations layered on top of a more flexible system would be, or else you just won't use the software. This isn't my first rodeo either, and in my experience, most firms have at least a few idiosyncratic rules and process that they aren't willing to change just to conform to the limitations of software. If you build opinionated software, your customer base will be limited to businesses that either already operate according to the assumptions you've baked in to your design, or else have the resources to implement their own solutions -- at higher complexity than customization -- to compensate for what's missing from yours.

mavelikara 3y ago

Can it be built as layers - a flexible platform, with an opinionated product built on top of it? That way, simple use cases are easy and complicated use cases are possible.

civilitty 3y ago
That would be the promise of companies like SAP and Salesforce. I believe Dante wrote a book on the subject…
daft_pink 3y ago
Development and developers are extremely expensive, especially when you have to train them how to use your custom home built product. You are generally far better off using the off the shelf product that everyone has been trained on than using some custom product when you have to start hiring and training developers. The software costs are generally minimal compared to hiring smart people to design, implement and code projects with complex business logic.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  This used to be the SAP philosophy; build your company processes around SAP, not the other way around.

danjac 3y ago

By opinionated, do you mean buying specialized off-the-shelf CRM solutions for a specific industry? For example, if the customer runs a legal firm, they should buy a CRM with functionality targeted towards legal firms?

sangnoir 3y ago
> For example, if the customer runs a legal firm, they should buy a CRM with functionality targeted towards legal firms Even those won't be specialized enough, a legal firm that handles corporate megers and acquisitions has very different processes from one that does class action litigation or criminal defense. Successful CRMs are not opinionated, but are customizable - requiring an army of consultants to deploy and an internal role to support. Small companies may be coerced to using opinionated processes (quickbooks + whatever process the part-time bookkeeper wants), but every medium-sized enterprise or larger is a snowflake
- danjac 3y ago
  Again, not an area I know much about, but: there are going to be hundreds, if not thousands, of medium sized legal firms in the US handling, say, criminal defence. They can't be that different from one another that they would require bespoke software, other than an off-the-shelf solution for criminal defence lawyers? Or is there sufficient difference e.g. state to state that this would never work?
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    While selling the simpler product, the financial position of a company selling "Criminal Defense CRM" is substantially different to a more general "Legal Firm CRM" one; both would be competing with "Salesforce for Law Firms[1]", with the first having the smallest Total Addressable Market. 1. https://www.salesforce.com/uk/solutions/industries/business-services/law-firms/ https://www.salesforce.com/uk/solutions/industries/business-...

seanhunter 3y ago

I'm pretty sure this implementation gap is done partly for a good reason and partly for a bad reason. The good reason is even within an individual industry each company is different enough that the software needs to be extremely customizable or there will be too much adoption pain required. I don't think opinionated does it when you would need to enforce change across large swathes of people. I have seen this tried and be an expensive failure across more than one organization where malicious compliance basically killed multimillion-dollar rollouts of this kind because people simply weren't prepared to change their workflows. I've seen the CTO of a very large organization first instruct, then ask, then plead, then beg for people to adopt the CRM that had been installed at great cost all to no avail. The bad reason is that lots of big software companies (but definitely CRM people like Salesforce) rely on big consultancy firms to sell their product. Consultancy do that because they "don't sell software, they sell solutions", meaning they come in and do the implementation etc. They wouldn't do this if they didn't get the sweet sweet billable hours, so your software better be customizable up the wazoo for them to be interested in being your sales army. And then piled on top of that, salesforce have created an ecosystem of developers who do the customization. So if you're a small bank, you might want ncino to do your loan workflows etc. That means Ncino are selling salesforce everytime they sell their product etc.

rtpg 3y ago

Aren’t all successful CRMs basically around customization? Like SFDC is functionally a distributed Smalltalk OS

lucb1e 3y ago

I can't tell from your comment: are you saying that TwentyCRM is not opinionated or enforcing business rule best practices, or is this just a general blanket statement about CRMs that may or may not be relevant to the submission?

daft_pink 3y ago
I'm saying that based on the text in the submission there are numerous red flags that they are touting as 'open source' features that would makes me skeptical of buying their product based on my general experience purchasing CRM systems. It sounds like they want you to pay for developers to help develop their unfinished crm system and the benefit you will receive is the crm system will be completely customized for your business. Personally, my experience is that large software like CRM can be very very expensive and very very risky in the sense that you become dependent on the people you hire for it and those people can start out or become very very expensive. But most developers I know many of whom are on hacker news believe they can churn out a CRM quickly all they need is javascript, a server and a database.

isodev 3y ago

I like the idea of an open source CRM, it means you can take it and do the customizations in-house (as opposed to paying consultants to do it) or both. Out of the box and on a small scale, this feels very much like a self-hosted version of Notion.

zacharycohn 3y ago
In most cases, you do not want to do that customization in house. Your engineers don't know anything about your crm, probably don't want to, and have more customer-facing-value/important things to do.

bluedino 3y ago

It has to be customizable or people won't buy it. After all, they just want to re-implement their current, CRM solution (which is terrible, and is why they want to buy a new one in the first place) in the new fancy CRM.

cloudquelle 3y ago

Hard to be more expensive than S/4Hana

Gormo 3y ago

If you can't customize the software, then you'll implement external hacks and workarounds that are much uglier and costlier to maintain than customizations layered on top of a more flexible system would be, or else you just won't use the software. This isn't my first rodeo either, and in my experience, most firms have at least a few idiosyncratic rules and process that they aren't willing to change just to conform to the limitations of software. If you build opinionated software, your customer base will be limited to businesses that either already operate according to the assumptions you've baked in to your design, or else have the resources to implement their own solutions -- at higher complexity than customization -- to compensate for what's missing from yours.