I believe Dante wrote a book on the subject…
Even those won't be specialized enough, a legal firm that handles corporate megers and acquisitions has very different processes from one that does class action litigation or criminal defense. Successful CRMs are not opinionated, but are customizable - requiring an army of consultants to deploy and an internal role to support. Small companies may be coerced to using opinionated processes (quickbooks + whatever process the part-time bookkeeper wants), but every medium-sized enterprise or larger is a snowflake
They can't be that different from one another that they would require bespoke software, other than an off-the-shelf solution for criminal defence lawyers? Or is there sufficient difference e.g. state to state that this would never work?
1. https://www.salesforce.com/uk/solutions/industries/business-...
The good reason is even within an individual industry each company is different enough that the software needs to be extremely customizable or there will be too much adoption pain required. I don't think opinionated does it when you would need to enforce change across large swathes of people. I have seen this tried and be an expensive failure across more than one organization where malicious compliance basically killed multimillion-dollar rollouts of this kind because people simply weren't prepared to change their workflows. I've seen the CTO of a very large organization first instruct, then ask, then plead, then beg for people to adopt the CRM that had been installed at great cost all to no avail.
The bad reason is that lots of big software companies (but definitely CRM people like Salesforce) rely on big consultancy firms to sell their product. Consultancy do that because they "don't sell software, they sell solutions", meaning they come in and do the implementation etc. They wouldn't do this if they didn't get the sweet sweet billable hours, so your software better be customizable up the wazoo for them to be interested in being your sales army.
And then piled on top of that, salesforce have created an ecosystem of developers who do the customization. So if you're a small bank, you might want ncino to do your loan workflows etc. That means Ncino are selling salesforce everytime they sell their product etc.
It sounds like they want you to pay for developers to help develop their unfinished crm system and the benefit you will receive is the crm system will be completely customized for your business.
Personally, my experience is that large software like CRM can be very very expensive and very very risky in the sense that you become dependent on the people you hire for it and those people can start out or become very very expensive. But most developers I know many of whom are on hacker news believe they can churn out a CRM quickly all they need is javascript, a server and a database.
After all, they just want to re-implement their current, CRM solution (which is terrible, and is why they want to buy a new one in the first place) in the new fancy CRM.
This isn't my first rodeo either, and in my experience, most firms have at least a few idiosyncratic rules and process that they aren't willing to change just to conform to the limitations of software.
If you build opinionated software, your customer base will be limited to businesses that either already operate according to the assumptions you've baked in to your design, or else have the resources to implement their own solutions -- at higher complexity than customization -- to compensate for what's missing from yours.
When I meet a CRM salesperson, and they're like our software will do whatever you want and we will create it, you have to read between the lines and translate it. What they really mean is "Our software isn't designged to work for most general use cases, implementation will require a team of really expensive developers to create and maintain, we will tell you we are making custom fitting "cuture" software and you will be sending us a boat load of money for the rest of your company's life if it works or you will burn a giant pile of money until it doesn't work.
This isn't my first rodeo. If you have to extensively customize the software then the cost of the software will end up being moot and the cost of the people to run it will end up costing a fortune forever.