What a CRM setup costs a small Australian business

A CRM has two prices and almost every guide quotes you one of them. The licence is published, it is per seat, and you can check it in a minute. The setup is not published, it is where most of the money goes, and it is the half that decides whether anybody in your business actually uses the thing.

Worth knowing what company you are in: the last time the ABS counted, in the year to June 2022, 17 per cent of Australian businesses used CRM software. That figure is stale, the current release does not repeat it, and it is still the most recent official Australian number that exists. Most small businesses here are running on a phone, a shared inbox and somebody's memory.

This is the first line that surprises people, and it is on the vendor's own pricing page in small type.

• HubSpot requires paid onboarding above Starter. Sales Hub Professional carries a required one-time onboarding fee of US$1,500, Enterprise US$3,500, and Marketing Hub Professional US$3,000 rising to US$7,000 at Enterprise. Starter has no mandatory onboarding.
• Salesforce's Premier Success Plan is 30 per cent of net licence fees. The Standard plan is included with every licence; Premier is the one that gets you faster support and guided services, and it is priced as a percentage rather than a fee. You will see 20 per cent quoted around the internet. Salesforce's own current page says 30.
• Zoho gives you onboarding sessions free and sells hours separately. Its classic onboarding is four ninety-minute sessions at no extra cost to paid CRM customers, while its Jumpstart service is US$200 an hour with a ten hour minimum.
• Pipedrive includes implementation above a threshold. Its own FAQ says implementation is free once you sign up to a plan over $400 a year.

Data migration

Self-service migration tools price by record count, and at small business volumes they are cheap: the common tiers run from about US$149 under five thousand records to US$599 under twenty-five thousand, with an assisted option for a few hundred more. If your data lives in a spreadsheet and a shoebox, the cost is not the tool, it is the two days somebody spends deciding which of the four versions of each customer is the real one.

Integration

Website form, phone system, accounting package, booking calendar, the two channels your customers actually message you on. Each connection is a piece of work, and the ones people forget are the phone and the messaging apps, which are usually the highest-volume channels in a small Australian business and the least likely to be in the box.

Training, and the person who does not want it

Public CRM training courses in Australia run to real money, around $2,995 a head for a one-day instructor-led course from a major training provider, which is why almost nobody sends staff to one. The alternative is training built into the implementation, which is what the better Australian partners include. Budget for it either way, because a CRM nobody was taught is a CRM nobody uses.

Questions

The ones that come up first

How much is a CRM per user per month in Australia?

Entry tiers from the major vendors sit roughly between $12 and $40 a seat a month, and mid tiers between about $90 and $150. Check the currency: Salesforce and Microsoft publish real Australian dollar prices, while HubSpot, Pipedrive and monday publish in US dollars, and Zoho serves pricing by location so an Australian may not see a figure at all.

Do I have to pay HubSpot's onboarding fee?

On Professional and Enterprise editions, yes, it is a required one-time fee stated on HubSpot's own pricing page: US$1,500 for Sales Hub Professional, US$3,500 for Enterprise, US$3,000 for Marketing Hub Professional. Starter editions have no mandatory onboarding. Some higher-tier HubSpot partners can waive the fee as part of an engagement, which is worth asking about before you buy direct.

How long does a CRM setup take?

For a small business on a simple product, one to four weeks is normal, and the Australian partners who publish timelines say the same. The variable is not the software, it is how long it takes you to decide what your pipeline stages actually are and to clean the data you are bringing across. That part is yours and nobody can do it for you.

Is it true that most CRM projects fail?

Not at the rate you have been told. The famous 70 per cent figure is unsourced and traces back to a report that never contained it, and Gartner's own analyst put absolute failure nearer 5 per cent, with 55 per cent failing to meet expectations in their 2001 study. The most defensible number is around a third, from a range of analyst estimates spanning 18 to 69 per cent. What failures have in common is not the software, it is data nobody cleaned and staff nobody trained.

Can I just set it up myself?

Yes, and for a very small business you probably should. The modern entry tiers are genuinely usable out of the box. Do it yourself if you have one or two users, one channel and a simple pipeline. Pay somebody when leads arrive on five different channels, when you need the phone system and the website talking to it, or when you have tried once already and the team went back to the spreadsheet.