The Challenge
Meridian Growth Partners is a mid-size financial advisory firm with a 60-person sales and relationship management team. They had been using Salesforce Enterprise for four years, paying $150 per user per month — a total of $9,000 per month or $108,000 per year.
The cost was only part of the problem. Salesforce's standard opportunity pipeline did not map well to financial advisory deal flow. Meridian's team needed to track complex relationship networks between clients, advisors, and referral partners. They needed compliance-specific fields that Salesforce required expensive customization to support. And the reporting was so generic that their VP of Sales maintained a parallel spreadsheet to track the metrics that actually mattered.
The team spent an estimated 45 minutes per day per rep on data entry and workarounds — time that should have been spent with clients.
The Solution
SaaSAway built a custom CRM designed specifically around Meridian's advisory workflow. The system included a relationship-centric data model that mapped the connections between clients, prospects, advisors, and referral sources. Deal tracking was restructured around their actual process stages rather than a generic sales funnel.
The compliance module was built directly into the deal flow, automatically flagging missing documentation and generating audit-ready reports. Custom dashboards gave the VP of Sales real-time visibility into pipeline health, advisor performance, and referral source ROI without any spreadsheet maintenance.
Email integration pulled communication history directly into client records. A mobile-optimized interface let advisors update records during client meetings instead of batching data entry at the end of the day.
The Results
The custom CRM was delivered in five weeks and deployed with full data migration from Salesforce. The transition involved a one-week parallel run where both systems operated simultaneously to validate data accuracy.
Monthly software costs dropped from $9,000 to approximately $600 in cloud hosting — a savings of $8,400 per month or over $100,000 per year. The one-time build cost paid for itself in under four months.
More significantly, the team reclaimed an estimated 30 minutes per rep per day in reduced data entry and eliminated workarounds. With 60 reps, that translates to 30 hours per day of recovered productive time. The VP of Sales retired her tracking spreadsheet within the first week.
Meridian has since added three new features to their custom CRM — a client onboarding workflow, automated referral tracking, and a compliance reporting module — all at a fraction of what Salesforce customization would have cost.