Salesforce is the enterprise standard for a reason. Given enough configuration it will model any sales process you can describe, integrate with anything, and report on it in any shape a board asks for. There is no capability question. There is a cost question, and it has two parts.
Licence and implementation
The licence is billed per user per month in US dollars on an annual commitment. That is the visible number. The invisible number is implementation, and in South Africa a realistic Sales Cloud implementation through a local partner runs into six figures in rand for a mid sized business. The rule of thumb our reviewers keep repeating is that year one total cost is two to three times the licence.
Then there is the ongoing administration. A serious Salesforce deployment needs an administrator, either a person or a retained partner. Budgeting for the licence alone is the single most common mistake we see.
What you get
Complete configurability without code for most requirements, and a development platform for the rest. Territory and quota management that actually works at scale. Forecasting a CFO will trust. An ecosystem, AppExchange, that has an answer for almost any adjacent requirement. And a local partner community in Johannesburg and Cape Town with real depth.
What frustrates people
Complexity, consistently. Simple changes need an administrator. The interface has more of everything than most users need. New sales people take longer to become productive than on any other CRM in this list.
Costs also creep. Sandboxes, additional API calls, extra storage, premium support and each additional cloud all carry a price, and the renewal conversation is rarely a happy one.
Who should buy it
Organisations with genuinely complex sales processes, multiple business units, formal territory and quota structures, or an existing group standard. Businesses under about twenty users are almost always better served elsewhere.
MZ
South AfricaDurban2 to 10 employees
