Case B
Salesforce, sold to itself as an inventory system
- Company
- Same Silicon Valley medical device company, earlier in the timeline.
- Speaks loudest to
- CEO, CFO
- Lesson
- Founders take advice from people who do not know the regulated-product context. "It is just a database" is the kind of casual sentence that costs a multi-year contract and a missing primary system.
Challenge.
Someone advised them, "Salesforce is just a database, we can configure inventory on top of it." They signed a multi-year Salesforce contract on that premise and assumed it was both their CRM and their inventory backbone.
For a medical device company that ships physical product, this is exactly backward. Inventory and traceability are the foundational systems. The CRM is secondary in direct enterprise medtech sales.
Solution (what we now do).
A regulated-product inventory and traceability platform first, sized to 1 to 100 employees and appropriate for 21 CFR Part 11 and QMSR / ISO 13485 interfaces. The CRM later, when direct enterprise sales actually require one.
Result.
- Multi-year
- Contract paying for the wrong primary tool
- Missing
- Inventory management still missing on go-live
- Time + legal + 2nd buy
- Eventual unwind cost on top of the Salesforce spend
What this means for you.
When someone says "we can build it on top of [tool]," ask: "Is this tool appropriate for regulated product inventory, traceability, audit trails, and Quality-owned validation?" If the answer is no, or "I don’t know," the second purchase is already coming.