Every manufacturer we've moved off Salesforce in the past couple of years had the same trigger, and it wasn't reporting, licensing cost, or admin overhead. Those were all real complaints. The thing that made them pick up the phone was quoting.
Here's the pattern. The sales team lives in the CRM. The quotes live in the ERP or a dedicated quoting tool. And the two systems either don't talk, or talk badly enough that nobody trusts what they say.
One client, a shop doing additive, CNC, and injection molding, had reps quoting off incorrect data because the integration between Salesforce and their quoting platform kept failing. Think about what that means in practice. A rep gets a customer on the phone, pulls up the account, and the quote information in front of them is wrong. Not missing. Wrong. They found out from customers.
Another client, an industrial group with seven business lines, sold in the CRM and quoted in Epicor. Reps re-keyed everything by hand, every time. At one point someone tried to fix it by running the CRM inside the ERP itself. That experiment collapsed under duplicate records, which is what happens when you ask a system of record for finance to also be a system of engagement for sales.
For that seven-line industrial group, the answer wasn't moving quoting into the CRM. Epicor stayed the system of record for quotes. What changed is that quote status and confidence now flow both ways, so a rep looks at a deal and sees where the quote stands, and a sales leader looks at the pipeline and sees a live forecast built from real quoting data. Seven business lines now run one playbook-driven sales process on HubSpot.
To be fair, Salesforce can do all of this. With enough middleware, enough admins, and enough budget, Salesforce can do nearly anything. That's the honest steelman, and for a company with a large RevOps and IT team it might be the right call. But most manufacturers I meet have one admin, maybe a fractional one, and an IT team that answers to the plant first. A quote-to-CRM integration that needs constant care is an integration that will quietly die, and then you're back to reps asking customers what we quoted them.
Whenever this comes up, someone wants to jump straight to CPQ or Revenue Hub. That's the upsell conversation. The low-hanging fruit is much less glamorous: get quote status, amount, and confidence from the ERP onto the deal record, and get the deal context in front of whoever builds the quote. Do that first. It's a fraction of the cost, and it's the part that stops the bleeding.
If you run sales at a manufacturer, try this today: ask a rep how many systems they touch to answer "have we quoted this customer, and for how much?" If the answer is more than one, I'd genuinely like to hear what that's costing you. Disagree with the thesis? Even better. Tell me why.