TMI
Platform
How It Works
The Audit
Compare
vs. Service Fusion
vs. Samsara
vs. Fleetio
vs. HubSpot
vs. Salesforce
Company
About
Field Notes
Salesforce is the most powerful CRM ever built. It is also the most expensive, the most complex, and the most thoroughly wrong tool for any business that moves physical things, deploys field crews, or runs operations in the real world.
Large enterprise sales organizations with 50-plus person sales teams managing complex, multi-stakeholder deals. Salesforce was built for this and it does it better than anything else.
Companies with a dedicated Salesforce admin and developer on staff - the platform's power is real, but only accessible when someone builds and maintains it full time.
Multi-national businesses that need a global CRM with compliance features, multi-currency support, and enterprise-grade data governance.
Companies that can afford a 6-month implementation project with a certified Salesforce partner and view the platform as a long-term infrastructure investment at scale.
Salesforce Field Service is a complex bolt-on that still requires extensive customization. You are paying enterprise prices to build, from scratch, what should already work for field operations.
The underlying architecture is a sales CRM. Every field service workflow sits on top of objects designed for deal tracking, not crew dispatch or equipment maintenance.
Implementation cost typically exceeds the annual value for any company under $50M in revenue. You spend more building the system than it saves in the first year.
For physical economy businesses - construction, oil and gas, field service - Salesforce is fundamentally the wrong architecture. It was designed for software companies selling to other software companies.
Salesforce's data model is built around Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, and Accounts. These are sales objects. When you add Field Service Lightning, you are building dispatch, scheduling, and work order management on top of a system that was never designed to think about crews, equipment, routes, or job sites.
Every customization you need - and you will need many - has to fight the architecture underneath it. Your Salesforce admin spends half their time working around limitations that would not exist in a system built for operations from the start. And when your admin leaves, the system becomes a black box that no one on your team fully understands.
TMI builds from the operation outward. Your dispatch logic, your service agreement structures, your reporting - all of it is built around how your business actually runs, not translated into Salesforce objects and hoped for the best.
| TMI | Salesforce | |
|---|---|---|
| What it was built for | Field operations and physical economy businesses | Enterprise sales organizations and deal pipeline management |
| Implementation complexity | Audit in 1 week. Build in 6-12 weeks. | 3-9 month implementation with certified partner |
| Admin overhead | Zero - TMI manages the system permanently | Dedicated Salesforce admin required. $80K-$120K/year role. |
| Cost model | Fixed build investment. No per-seat scaling. | $150-$300+ per user per month, plus Field Service add-on |
| Field operations fit | Purpose-built for dispatch, crews, equipment, and job sites | Field Service Lightning requires extensive customization |
| AI capabilities | Autonomous dispatch, predictive maintenance, operational intelligence | Einstein AI - primarily sales and marketing predictions |
| Time to value | System running in 8-12 weeks | 6-18 months to operational maturity |
| Who it's designed for | Operators, fleet managers, field service owners | Enterprise sales VPs, RevOps teams, Fortune 500 companies |
| Customization reality | Built custom from scratch to match your operation exactly | Configured on top of CRM objects. Fighting the architecture. |
| When it makes sense | Any physical economy or field service business at $1M-$100M | Enterprise sales orgs at $50M+ with dedicated SF team |
HVAC, electrical, or plumbing company with 20-60 technicians. A consultant recommended Salesforce. They spent $80K on implementation, hired a Salesforce admin, and two years later still cannot get the reporting they need and the dispatch board looks nothing like how their operation actually works. TMI rebuilds it in 10 weeks.
Upstream or midstream operator that bought Salesforce for customer and contract management. It tracks contacts and deals fine. But it has no concept of field tickets, equipment inspection cycles, crew certifications, or HSE compliance. They are running Salesforce plus seven other systems because Salesforce cannot touch operations. TMI consolidates it.
Any construction, logistics, or field operations company that signed a multi-year Salesforce contract based on a demo that looked good in a conference room. The day-to-day reality of the operation has nothing in common with the demo. They want out, and they want infrastructure that actually fits. That is TMI.
Yes. If your enterprise sales team is already on Salesforce and you need operational infrastructure for the field side of the business, TMI can build around Salesforce rather than replacing it. For companies that want to move off Salesforce entirely, TMI handles the full transition including data migration.
For any business under $50M in revenue, almost certainly. Salesforce licenses run $150-$300 per user per month before add-ons. A 20-person operation paying for Sales Cloud plus Field Service Lightning plus an admin to manage it often exceeds $10,000 per month. TMI starts with The Audit at $997, then a custom build. No per-seat scaling, no admin overhead, no implementation consultant fees.
Yes, and it replaces it with something built specifically for field operations rather than bolted onto an enterprise sales platform. Salesforce Field Service is a complex add-on that requires significant customization and still carries the architecture of a sales CRM underneath. TMI starts from the operation, not from a CRM.
Salesforce is genuinely built for large enterprise sales organizations - companies with 50-plus person sales teams managing complex enterprise deals, companies with a dedicated Salesforce admin and developer, and businesses where the primary system of record needs to be a global CRM with multi-region support and compliance features. If that describes your business, Salesforce is the right choice.
Any field service company, fleet operator, construction company, oil and gas operator, or physical economy business that was sold on Salesforce but is spending more time managing the platform than running the operation. TMI is for operators, not enterprise sales organizations.
Salesforce implementations for mid-market companies typically run 3-9 months with an implementation partner, and the system still requires an ongoing admin to manage it. TMI's Audit takes one week. Build runs 6-12 weeks for most operations. No ongoing admin overhead - TMI manages the system after build.
The Audit is $997 and takes one week. It maps every infrastructure gap in your operation and tells you exactly what to build. The build investment depends on complexity - most mid-market operations land in the range of a 12-18 month Salesforce contract, but with no per-seat fees, no admin overhead, and a system that runs the operation rather than requiring the operation to run the system.
Yes, and it does it without the complexity of building on top of an enterprise CRM. TMI handles dispatch scheduling, work order management, technician routing, service agreements, parts tracking, and field reporting. The difference is that TMI is purpose-built for operations from the ground up - not a field service module added to a sales platform.
The Audit maps what your operation actually needs - and builds it right, without the admin overhead or enterprise price tag.
Start with The Audit - $997 →What field-first AI delivers that Salesforce was never designed for.
Operational AI built for the field, not enterprise CRM workflows.
What custom AI actually costs and what the ROI math looks like.
Why adding software doesn't fix the real operational problems.