Can you put together your own CRM solution rather than buying one?

I would recommend considering the costs, resources, and scalability of building your own CRM solution. In most cases, it is more practical and cost-effective to leverage a commercially available CRM solution. Commercial solutions have been tested and refined over time, and they offer a range of features and integrations with other tools that can be tailored to meet your organization's needs. This can save valuable time and resources and provide greater scalability and flexibility in the long run.

I spend most of my time now finding applications that allow for easy and robust integrations. It turns out that a lot of our legacy stack doesn't allow for that. We've been slowly changing our pieces, and it's allowed me to meet with other C-suite folks or directors and quickly craft new solutions. They want a solution to do X and they know about product Y, but once they tell me the features they want, we can use a toolkit we already have that has all those features. We can put the pieces together to offer them a solution like that, with very little additional cost and little additional support. That's been transformational for us because I'm able to bring solutions to production much faster than finding, identifying, procuring and implementing a newly purchased tool.

We had a request for a CRM solution, which we didn’t have at the time. I asked the office, "What do you really want to do?" When they explained what they wanted to do, we could start assembling all the pieces we have into something that can meet their needs at a fraction of the cost. We were also able to deliver it in a fraction of the time, and iterate fast if there was something missing. That's been a game changer for our programmers and our campus. We can plug in and play these pieces together in clever ways that the manufacturers never intended.