The Enterprise Stack a Twenty-Person Company Bought

A twenty-person company with eight people in revenue roles runs Salesforce, Pardot and Outreach. Every one of those is a good product. Every one was chosen by somebody competent, usually somebody who had used it successfully at a much larger company. And the combined bill is comfortably more than the salary of the junior hire the team keeps deciding it cannot afford.

Entry pricing from the same registry our comparison pages use, at ten seats.

The second number is the one worth sitting with. Halving the team does not halve the bill, because Pardot is flat and starts high. A five-person company on this stack pays about $2,500 a month, which is 67 per cent of what a ten-person company pays for twice the people.

Nobody sits down at fifteen people and decides to buy an enterprise stack. Three routes lead here and all of them are reasonable in the moment.

The experienced hire. You hire a VP of Sales from a company ten times your size. They bring the stack they know, because it is the stack they know how to run and they were hired for their judgement. This is the most common route and the hardest to argue with, because the person is usually right about what the tools do.

The board expectation. Somebody senior asks what you are running, and Salesforce is the answer that ends the conversation. Nobody is ever criticised for choosing it.

Buying for the future company. The reasoning is that migrating later is painful, so start on the platform you will grow into. The logic is sound and the arithmetic frequently is not: the cost of being early is paid every month for years, against a migration that might have happened once.

The licence total above is the visible part, and for this particular stack it is a smaller share of the true cost than usual.

Configuration.Salesforce's strength is that it can model almost any process, which means it must be told which one. That is implementation work, and it is either a consultancy invoice or somebody's job.

Administration. Not a one-off. Fields change, processes change, someone has to maintain it. In a large company that is a role. In a small one it is a percentage of somebody hired to do something else.

Integration. These three connect, but connecting them to everything else is project work, and it breaks when any of them changes.

Adoption. The most expensive and least measured. A system reps find slow gets used minimally, so the data is incomplete, so the reports are wrong, so people stop trusting the reports. You are then paying enterprise prices for a system nobody believes.

It would be easy to write this post as though the answer is always to leave. It is not, and the cases where this stack earns its money are specific enough to check yourself against.

Genuine process complexity. Multiple products, territories, approval chains, partner channels. This is what Salesforce is for and nothing simpler does it as well.

A real compliance or audit requirement. Regulated industries needing detailed permissioning and audit trails are paying for something they actually need.

Scale that is already here. Not scale you are planning. Fifty people in revenue roles is a different problem from eight.

Someone who owns the system. If you have a competent admin, the configurability is an asset. Without one it is a liability with a subscription attached.

These are behavioural rather than financial, which is what makes them reliable.

Reps keep a private spreadsheet. The single clearest signal. If the people who use the CRM every day maintain their own version because it is faster, the system of record has stopped being the record.

Nobody can change anything without a consultant. Adding a field or altering a stage takes a ticket and a wait. The flexibility you paid for is not available to you.

Marketing automation runs a fraction of what it can do. Pardot is a large flat cost and it is common to find it sending basic campaigns a far cheaper tool would send identically.

Nobody trusts the forecast. If the number gets rebuilt by hand every month before the meeting, the stack is not doing the job it exists for.

If the signals apply, the sequence matters more than the destination, and the timing matters more than either.

Export everything while you still have access. Contacts, accounts, opportunities, activity history, campaign membership and consent status. Do this first, before any decision, and keep it. It costs nothing and it is the thing people regret skipping.

Move marketing automation before the CRM. Pardot is the largest flat line and the least entangled, so it is the biggest saving with the lowest risk.

Run in parallel for a quarter, not a fortnight. This stack usually holds years of history and a longer overlap than usual is warranted.

Time it to the contract, not the calendar. Enterprise agreements are annual and auto-renew. Start the process months before renewal or you will pay for another year of the thing you decided to leave.

The general migration plan is in the GTM stack consolidation playbook, the Salesforce-specific version is in replacing Salesforce, and the individual head-to-heads are on the Salesforce, Pardot and Outreach comparisons. This post is about what the three cost together, which is the number that makes the decision.