FieldSoft

FieldSoft FieldSoft LTD is a unique Salesforce and CRM solutions provider. FieldSoft works in partnership with you, to tailor your CRM to your business processes.

Getting closer to your customers and your prospects will enable your business to develop.

Year one is the discount price.The real price arrives at year two.By then, AI features have been bundled into a higher t...
18/05/2026

Year one is the discount price.
The real price arrives at year two.

By then, AI features have been bundled into a higher tier than the one you signed for. Mobile access has become a separate licence. Premium support has stopped being included by default. The plan you signed for is no longer the plan you're on.

Typical year-two uplift: 15% to 40%.

Always model the three-year cost using the published list price, not the discounted year-one rate. Always ask for the renewal cap in writing before signing.

Vendors who refuse to give you a written renewal cap are telling you something useful about how the next conversation will go. Walk away.

This is the fifth and final post in our series on the hidden CRM costs sales leaders find out about too late.

The full breakdown is on the FieldSoft blog. Link below.

Year one: someone in operations builds the CRM on a Friday afternoon between other tasks.Year two: nothing reports corre...
13/05/2026

Year one: someone in operations builds the CRM on a Friday afternoon between other tasks.

Year two: nothing reports correctly. Automations conflict. Custom fields multiply. Two pipelines do the same job differently.

Year three: a consultant gets called in to rebuild it.

Most rebuilds cost more than a proper implementation would have in the first place. The range we see is £8,000 to £30,000 to fix what could have been built right for less.

The cheap setup is the expensive one.

You either pay for design upfront or you pay for a teardown later. There is no third option.

If you're about to roll out a new CRM and the plan is to "have someone in the team build it", that's the moment to bring in independent help. Not the rebuild three years later.

The full breakdown of the five hidden CRM costs is on our blog. Link below.

13/05/2026

One of the first questions I ask when scoping a CRM is what reports the customer wants to see.

This often surprises people. They expect questions about sales processes, onboarding requirements, automations and integrations. They believe Reports come up at the end.

The important reports are often not the generic ones. Every CRM does sales by owner and conversion rates as standard. The reports that actually drive a business are specific to that business.

The reports often need to answer questions like:

1️⃣ Which referral partners have produced the highest lifetime value clients in the last three years?
2️⃣ What's the average time from first conversation to signed contract for our most profitable service line?
3️⃣ How many onboarding hours did we deliver on each project, and how does that compare to what we quoted?
4️⃣ Which lost deals came back to us within 12 months, and why?

If we don't understand the reporting requirements the underlying data wasn't captured.

That's why reports come first. They tell me what the CRM actually needs to know before I add a single field.

If you scope the system first and the reports last, you almost always find gaps.

Going back to fix this later is slow, frustrating and can lead to mistakes, errors and delays.

Design backwards, from the outputs and then system follows.

I can assure you that most CRM problems i see are actually process problems.I've walked into businesses who were convinc...
11/05/2026

I can assure you that most CRM problems i see are actually process problems.

I've walked into businesses who were convinced they need to switch software.

After a conversation, what they actually needed was a few hours mapping how they sell and aligning the existing system with that.

In this situation we start off by asking:

Where does a lead come from?
Who picks it up?
What information gets captured?
When does it become an opportunity?
What triggers the next stage?
Who gets notified?

Once those questions have clear answers, typically almost any CRM can be made to work.

When you dont have clear answers, I’m afraid no CRM in the world will fix it.

The platform you're on is unlikely to be the reason your team isn't using it. What it tends to be is that nobody agreed how the team should be using it before the system was built.

Switching software without fixing the process is just buying a faster horse to ride in the wrong direction.

Dog has nothing to do with post but hopefully grabbed your attention.

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Poor user adoption is the number one reason CRM rollouts fail.32% of sales users spend more than an hour a day on manual...
08/05/2026

Poor user adoption is the number one reason CRM rollouts fail.

32% of sales users spend more than an hour a day on manual data entry. They quietly revert to spreadsheets, sticky notes, and group chats. The licence keeps getting paid.

The system sits empty.
A 10-user CRM with 4 active users costs the same as a 10-user CRM with 10 active users.
Adoption is the number that determines whether you bought a tool or paid for furniture. It also happens to be the cost no vendor will quote you, because they cannot control it.

If you want to know whether your CRM is healthy, don't look at the licence count. Look at the daily login report. If less than 70% of your seats are logging in daily, you have a problem worth fixing.

The full breakdown of the five hidden CRM costs is on our blog. Link in the comments.

I am sick of seeing the same post. Im convinced they are designed to rage bait me and sadly they are working. A tombston...
06/05/2026

I am sick of seeing the same post. Im convinced they are designed to rage bait me and sadly they are working.

A tombstone graphic, RIP CRM 2026, along with some confident claim that users will never interact with their CRM again because they'll just chat to an AI.

Most of these posts are 100% AI generated. I think there's some irony here. (Yes I use AI to help me make my posts read better)

As a CRM expert, here is what i believe

A CRM is a database with structure, permissions, automations and reporting wrapped around it. None of that goes away just because you bolt a chatbot on top.

For some interactions, yes, an AI interface makes sense. Logging a call by talking to it or perhaps asking a quick question about a customers history.

So to these posters, I'm afraid that does not mean the death of CRM. It is simply a different way of interacting with the same system.

The CRM still has to exist underneath:

The data still has to be structured.
Permissions still have to be set.
Automations still have to run.
Reporting still has to be configured (albeit I believe AI will reduce the requirement for one off reports).

If anything, AI makes a well configured CRM more important. An AI reading messy data will give messy output faster and we all know AI likes to hallucinate when it's not quite sure. That could be dangerous to businesses.

The people writing RIP CRM posts have either never implemented one, never managed one, or are selling you something that requires the CRM to be dying for their pitch to work.

Usually it's all three.

The CRM quote was £10,500 a year. The integrations bill came in at another £6,200Marketplace apps carry their own monthl...
05/05/2026

The CRM quote was £10,500 a year.
The integrations bill came in at another £6,200

Marketplace apps carry their own monthly fees. API call limits trigger overage charges. Storage caps cost extra past the included allowance. The five integrations a sales team needs on day one (email marketing, accounting, telephony, e-signature, document storage) almost never come from one bill.

Stack five connections at £500 to £2,500 each per year and you've added the equivalent of another user licence in monthly cost without adding a single user.

None of this appears on the original quote. It appears on month three's invoice.

Before you sign any CRM contract, ask the vendor in writing which integrations are included at this tier and which cost extra. Then ask what the API call, storage, and record limits are, and what overage costs.

Vendors who can't answer those questions clearly are telling you something useful.

Full breakdown of all five hidden CRM costs on our blog. Link below.

01/05/2026

Quick question for my network.

If you want to know whether your CRM is healthy in under 60 seconds, run this one report.Pull a list of every contact re...
01/05/2026

If you want to know whether your CRM is healthy in under 60 seconds, run this one report.

Pull a list of every contact record created in the last 90 days. Count how many have a phone number, an email address, and at least one note or activity logged against them.

If less than 70% of new records have all three, your CRM is being used as a name-and-email dump, not a relationship system.

Your reporting will lie to you.
Your forecasts will miss.
Your users will stop trusting it.

The fix isn't more training. What you need to do is make the three fields mandatory at record creation. You then need to and remove every other field that isn't necessary.

Less choice + More data = Better decisions.

The Scimitar is running.After months of pulling the engine, a partial rebuild, a rushed refit before moving house, and w...
30/04/2026

The Scimitar is running.

After months of pulling the engine, a partial rebuild, a rushed refit before moving house, and weeks of chasing timing issues and airlocks, she finally fired up properly this week.

I didn't crack it on my own.

A man who has owned Scimitars for years came round and helped. He spotted things I'd missed in minutes. Things I would have spent another month chasing if I'd carried on alone.

There's a reason for that. He'd seen these exact problems before. He knew what to look for and where to look first.
I'm reasonably good with cars. I can hold my own under a bonnet. But I'm not a Scimitar specialist and It will take me many years still to become one.

Trying to learn what someone else already knows is a slow and expensive way to get to the same answer.
I see the same thing with CRM.

Business owners trying to work it all out themselves. Watching tutorials. Reading forums. Building things twice because the first attempt didn't quite work.

Sometimes the right call is finding the person who has already solved your exact problem.
It will save you months of time, money and above all your sanity.
The Scimitar is proof of that this week.

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