The integration estimate came back at six figures. That was just to connect Salesforce or HubSpot to their existing platform, before the per-seat licensing even kicked in.
A high-value asset tracking platform had built software that thousands of distributors relied on daily. Inventory management, asset valuations, pricing data, all in one place. But their distributors kept asking for the same thing: CRM functionality. They wanted to track accounts, manage contacts, follow up on quotes, coordinate their sales activities. Reasonable request. The obvious answer was Salesforce or HubSpot.
Except Salesforce doesn’t know what an asset valuation is. Neither does HubSpot.
The platform already tracked assets with serial numbers, condition reports, usage metrics, and AI-generated valuations. A distributor looking at an asset could see its history, its market comps, its likely sale price. None of that lived in Salesforce. To make it work, they would have needed to sync inventory data constantly, build custom objects for valuations, create workflows connecting quotes to specific assets, and somehow bridge the gap between “asset with a serial number and condition report” and “Salesforce opportunity.”
Every distributor using Salesforce or HubSpot would pay per-seat licensing, and at their scale, that’s hundreds of thousands annually. Every integration point would need maintenance. Distributors would spend their days bouncing between two systems: the asset platform for inventory, Salesforce for relationships. Same customer, same deal, two different places.
They came to us before attempting that integration. They had seen other platforms struggle with CRM bolt-ons, where the data never quite syncs, the experience never quite flows, and users resent the extra clicks.
We spent weeks understanding how their distributors actually sell. They don’t think in “leads” and “opportunities,” they think in valuations, quotes, inspections, and deals. A customer calls about trading in an asset. The distributor evaluates it, enters specs, gets a valuation, creates a quote, negotiates, closes. That workflow doesn’t map cleanly to Salesforce’s data model, and forcing it to would mean fighting the tool instead of using it.
So we built the CRM as a native extension of the platform. Same login, same interface, same data. When a distributor opens a customer record, they see everything: contact info, activity timeline, quotes, and the actual assets involved (with photos, specs, and condition reports). No sync needed, no integration layer, just one system.
The CRM launched with sales pipeline configuration, Outlook email integration (conversations logged automatically), account and contact management with full activity timelines, task management with reminder notifications, and global search across everything. Distributors could import contacts in bulk from spreadsheets. The quote workflow included an inventory picker, so a distributor could start typing an asset and pull matching items from their actual listings, with current pricing and condition data.
The technical detail that made this work: AI-powered valuations built directly into the quote process. The platform already used AI to parse asset specs and estimate market value. In a Salesforce or HubSpot integration, that capability would live outside the CRM, requiring another API call, another sync point, another thing to break. But here, when a distributor builds a quote, valuation suggestions appear automatically. Same AI, same data, no integration needed.
Weekly demos during development caught issues early. Distributors wanted to see asset photos inline while building quotes, and that was added before launch. They wanted activity checklists for different sales processes, added shortly after. The CRM kept evolving based on what distributors actually needed, not what a generic platform assumed they would want.
The results: zero per-seat licensing (compared to $50+ per distributor per month for Salesforce at their scale). No additional hosting costs, since the CRM shares infrastructure with the main platform. Mobile-friendly for salespeople working in the field. And most importantly, distributors have one system instead of two. Their inventory, their valuations, their CRM, their quotes, all in the same place, all speaking the same language.
The platform now offers a complete workflow: inventory management flows into valuations, valuations flow into CRM, CRM flows into quotes, quotes flow into sales. Distributors who previously juggled separate tools (or no CRM at all) now have everything integrated. They spend less time on data entry and more time closing deals.
Building a CRM from scratch isn’t the right answer for most businesses. If your sales process is standard B2B, buy HubSpot. But when you already have a platform with domain-specific data, when your workflows don’t fit standard CRM concepts and you need AI, inventory, and relationships to live in the same system, building native makes sense. For this asset platform, it meant giving distributors something Salesforce or HubSpot couldn’t: a CRM that actually understands their business.
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