Sales Agility (Sweet CRM)

Greg Soeper, with 45 years of IT experience, grew frustrated watching enterprises hemorrhage budgets on proprietary CRM licensing. A $2.5 billion company was spending $3M annually on Salesforce—and couldn't afford to customize it for their actual business needs. Every additional user cost another $200/month in licensing fees, making it impossible to extend the system as the company grew. Greg realized the fundamental problem: companies were forced to contort their business around software, rather than the other way around.

In 2014, Greg launched Sales Agility with an open-source CRM called Sweet CRM. The model was radical: give away the software for free (about a million downloads over five years), and monetize through consulting, customization, support, and hosting. About 1% of downloaders engage with the company; the other 99% use it independently. The SaaS offering launched around 2019-2020, but performance was poor: "It was okay. It wasn't great. There were flaws in performance." Customer retention suffered. But instead of abandoning the model, Greg and his team invested revenues back into building a world-class SaaS platform, planning a Q4 launch based on containerized, load-balanced infrastructure.

Customers came primarily through the open-source community and inbound interest from enterprises facing Salesforce licensing constraints. Large, demanding corporations—"globally scaled leaders"—discovered that they could hire Sales Agility to customize Sweet CRM to their exact business processes. This consulting-led model became the revenue engine: the majority of the company's $5M ARR comes from multi-million-dollar customization and development projects, not from SaaS subscriptions.

The consulting model worked brilliantly. Year-long enterprise projects provided steady revenue and deep customer intelligence. Customer requirements fed directly back into product development. Less than 5% of revenue came from the SaaS offering (~100 customers paying $15/month per seat), yet Greg refused to make it free because "you don't burn money in this business." The original SaaS platform didn't work—poor performance, low retention—but Greg used that failure as tuition, rebuilding it with modern infrastructure. The real insight: a hybrid model of consulting + product is viable in CRM, where modeling business processes remains a service, not a product feature.

Sales Agility is 40 people, almost entirely based in Sterling, UK, totally bootstrapped with no venture capital. They're approaching $5M ARR and preparing a major SaaS relaunch in Q4 with containerized, load-balanced architecture. Greg's vision is to scale both consulting (which keeps them close to customer needs) and SaaS (which offers higher margins and recurring revenue). While some industry observers argue this is impossible—that WordPress and others succeeded only by choosing one—Greg believes CRM's requirement for business process modeling makes both essential.