Growhold
Close to half of the businesses leaving Salesforce or QuickBooks name no replacement. Most of them want their own system instead, shaped to their trade. The product opening is the starting point for that system.
In August 2024, Klarna's CEO said the company had shut down Salesforce and would drop Workday next, replacing both with a stack of its own built with AI. Marc Benioff asked how. Months later, Siemiatkowski said he doubts most companies will follow.
Smaller businesses are already doing a quieter version of it.
Leaving without naming where to
Businesses that want off Salesforce or QuickBooks often name no destination at all. Close to half of them leave without a replacement product in mind.
They are not undecided. Read what they ask for and the destination is there: a system of their own.
Businesses leaving Salesforce, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Zoho and similar tools.
Among those who name no replacement, about half want a system built around their own work. Fewer than one in ten look for another subscription.
The next CRM for many businesses is shaped like their trade.
Why the general tools stop fitting
The needs behind these exits are specific. A nonprofit tracking restricted grants and donor acknowledgements through tax season. A law firm keeping trust accounts that must never mix. An accounting firm running several companies on one set of books.
A general CRM or ledger covers most of it. The rest becomes workarounds, and the workarounds become the real system.
Building a focused system used to cost more than years of licences. AI has moved that line. A system shaped around one trade is now cheaper to build than it is to keep bending a general one.
The first problem is the data
Before any new system, there is the old one. About one in four businesses leaving these tools ask for help with their data first: duplicates, messy history, fields and accounts that match nothing else.
What to build
- A nonprofit back office. Restricted grants, donor records, acknowledgements and year-end reporting in one system, made to be adapted in an afternoon rather than configured for months.
- A trust account ledger for small law firms. Separate balances per matter, reconciliation that cannot be skipped, and the reports a bar audit asks for.
- An exit layer for Salesforce and QuickBooks. It audits, removes duplicates and maps the old data into whatever comes next, including a system the business builds itself.
Each one is a starting point, not a platform. The business shapes the rest.
Build the starting point for one trade.
