The world of customer engagement is evolving rapidly with the advent of AI. Businesses that cling to outdated tools are playing a dangerous game. Platforms like Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, Marketo, etc have long been the mainstays of enterprise CRM. But the landscape has changed. 

Today’s customers demand a more agile, consistent and personalized experience. This experience cannot be served by legacy systems - yet many enterprises remain anchored to them. 

The reason? Inertia. 

The perceived pain of change, disruption and training outweighs the clear advantages of innovation. But this cost-benefit analysis is quite flawed. Let’s explore how staying on legacy systems can be a hidden liability. 

#1 - Innovation Debt Accumulates Interest

“Nobody gets fired for buying Salesforce”

That’s a fairly dangerous precedent to set in today’s business world. Legacy systems were build for a different era - when data lived on-premise, integrations were hard-coded and customer experiences were static. 

The longer your business stays on with legacy platforms, the more you you’ll fall behind competitors who are leveraging:

• AI-driven insights
• Seamless omni-channel experiences
• Automation
• Real-time customer journey mapping

Each year of delay is compounding innovation debt. 

#2 - Training Pain vs. Opportunity Cost

It’s true that most CRMs come with training challenges - for example, it takes roughly 6 months to start seeing basic value when a business onboards Salesforce. And growth teams are inherently adverse to change. Therefore, CXOs always worry about downtime and adoption curves. But CXOs should be asking the following questions: 

• How much time do your teams waste navigating complex workflows? 
• How many leads are lost due to siloed systems or poor automation?
• How much budget is wasted on customization and consultants to keep legacy systems running? 
• How many poor decisions are being made due to lack of complete customer data? 

Tools like Hubspot are intuitive enough where even for complex use cases, the training period is not more than 3 months. The short-term pain of training may often be dwarfed by the long-term gains in productivity, agility and growth. 

#3 - Data Silos and Fragmented Customer Experiences

A modern CRM acts as the central nervous system of customer experience - pulling data from marketing, sales, service and even other product usage data to deliver a unified, intelligent view of customers across the lifecycle journey. 

This is simply not feasible with older platforms without expensive and fragile custom integrations. The result of staying on these legacy systems is catastrophic. Siloed data can lead to extremely incorrect business decisions that just may contribute to poor growth metrics. 

#4 - The Risk of Vendor Lock-In

In my sales career, I’ve faced many situations where enterprises have declined an upgrade because “we’ve already invested so much”. 

But that’s a classic sunk cost fallacy. Legacy vendors often lock customers into long-term contracts, slow release cycles and high cost upgrades. Newer platforms are: 

• Built on flexible open APIs
• Priced transparently with scalable tiers
• Evolving rapidly based on user feedback

#5 - Customer Expectations Have Shifted

The most compelling reason to leave legacy systems behind? - your customers have moved on. They expect: 

• Instant responses
• Personalized messaging
• Omnichannel continuity
• Seamless support transitions

You can’t deliver any of the above if your CRM is designed for pre-cloud, pre-AI era. 

So what now? 

• Audit your CRM performance - are teams using it? Are they frustrated? Results? 
• Identify high-friction points - which parts of my growth journey take the longest? 
• Pilot a modern CRM - can we get a few members of sales and marketing to test it out?
• Champion change from the top - Executive buy-in? Change management? 

Final thoughts

Fear of change is real. Cost of inertia is even more real. Don’t let inertia cost you the future. At Vera Verto Consulting, we help businesses with change management and ensure that they are set-up for a proper digital future. Talk to us.