Lumo or Salesforce: platform or product

Salesforce grew big as a platform. You get a CRM, but you can also build your own objects, processes, screens and code on top. There are separate clouds for sales, service and marketing, and a huge marketplace of extensions. For an international organization with its own processes and its own admin team, that is exactly what you want.

For a B2B team of ten to a hundred people, that freedom sometimes works the other way. Every wish is possible, so every wish gets built. After a few years there is an environment only the admin or the implementation partner still understands. When that person leaves, every change becomes a project. That is not Salesforce's fault. It is the cost of a platform that can do everything.

Lumo is a product. The structure is fixed: persons, organizations, leads, deals, activities, tickets and projects. Within that you configure a lot without code. You create pipelines with stages and win probability, custom fields in twelve field types, roles, labels, data-quality rules and automations. You switch fourteen modules on or off per workspace, from campaigns to helpdesk and live chat.

Sales Surge has done more than 150 CRM implementations. What we learned is that most B2B teams do not get stuck on what the system can do, but on what the team does with it every day. That is why Lumo has in-product guidance: tours, checklists and rules that really stop a deal from being saved without a required field. Below we go through the themes.

Pipeline and forecast

Salesforce is strong in forecasting, with its own screens and categories. Lumo has no separate forecast screen. What it does have: every stage has a win probability, the board shows value and weighted value per stage, and you build a weighted forecast as a report. Every stage change is stored with its duration. Products on a deal have a billing frequency, from one-time to annual, with an optional number of cycles. That keeps the deal value right for subscriptions too.

Email and calendar

Salesforce connects to Outlook and Gmail. Lumo syncs with Gmail and Google Calendar today, and the Outlook and Microsoft 365 integration is planned. Only mail involving a known contact is stored, and it is matched to person, organization and deal automatically. Google meetings with a known contact become meetings in Lumo, linked to the most recently updated deal. If you work in Outlook, you use the personal BCC address: put it in Bcc or forward a mail to it, and it lands on the right records.

Quotes and signing

In Salesforce, quotes and signatures often run through extensions or additional products. In Lumo they are built in. The quote takes over the deal products, with VAT, intro text, terms and a valid-until date. The customer signs with a typed name and a six-digit code sent by email. The signed PDF gets an evidence page with time, IP address, device and a SHA-256 hash. Read more about quotes and e-signatures. What you should know: quote documents are in Dutch, and there is one signer per quote.

Service

Service Cloud is one of the strongest helpdesk products for large contact centres, with many channels. Lumo keeps it smaller and closer to sales. Tickets come from a mailbox, the portal or chat, or are created by hand. There are SLA targets per priority with business hours and a warning at 75 percent, macros, assignment across available agents and a satisfaction survey after solving. Every organization gets a health score from 0 to 100 based on ticket signals. Phone, WhatsApp and a social inbox are not included.

Marketing

Salesforce has separate marketing products. In Lumo email campaigns and web forms are part of the same product. You send to segments from your filters, consent is checked again at the moment of sending, and an unsubscribe applies to the whole workspace. Forms support multiple steps, conditions, hidden fields for UTM values and double opt-in.

Reporting

The Lumo report builder has nine chart types, goal lines, periods up to the fiscal year and drill-down to the records. Dashboards are private or shared, and exchange rates keep multi-currency reports correct. For heavy analysis across several systems Salesforce has its own analytics products. Lumo does not, but you can pull data into your own data warehouse through the API and CSV export.

AI

Salesforce builds its own AI and agents across the whole platform. The Lumo AI assistant is more modest and tightly scoped. It searches, creates and updates records, and builds segments, campaigns, automations and reports. Anything outward-facing or irreversible waits for your approval. It runs with your role and permissions, every tool call is logged, and it stays off until an admin switches it on. By default it runs on Google Gemini.

Data and security

Salesforce has extensive SSO options and field-level security. Lumo has its own login with two-factor authentication, a list of sessions and devices you can sign out remotely, four roles and separation per workspace in the database. The audit log is append-only. Data is hosted in London. There is no SSO, and per-record visibility is not enforced yet.

Implementation and switching

A Salesforce implementation is often a project of months. You configure Lumo in settings, or have Sales Surge do it. There is no automatic import from Salesforce, so we handle the switch by hand. Read how we approach implementation and onboarding.

Salesforce is one of the largest CRMs in the world for good reasons.

• Customization. Custom objects, processes, screens and code. What Lumo cannot do, you can often build in Salesforce.
• Scale. Built for very large and international organizations with many teams, countries and currencies.
• Forecasting. Extensive forecast screens and categories. Lumo builds a forecast as a report.
• Marketplace and ecosystem. A very large marketplace of extensions, and many certified admins and partners.
• SSO and field-level security. For organizations with strict access requirements.
• Mobile app. Lumo is a web app.

If you have your own admin team and processes that really differ from the standard, Salesforce is strong there.