HubSpot, Salesforce and the rest are built for the sale most companies have. For a lot of teams that's exactly right, and setting one up well is usually cheaper than building anything.
The question isn't which CRM is better. It's whether your sale looks like most companies' sales.
Signs a general CRM will fit
Your stages look like everyone's. Lead, qualified, proposal, closed.
The reports you need are the standard ones. Pipeline, forecast, activity.
Your team will use it as it comes. The best CRM is the one people actually open.
Signs it won't
Your sale has its own steps. SiteFacts sells to home builders: a builder, a lot, a demo, a pilot, a financing question, a yes. Every missed follow-up happened in the gaps between those steps, and a generic CRM wanted them to sell the way everyone else sells.
The method is the product. Don Sherman's capture method for engineering firms isn't a sales stage. It's a way of deciding which pursuits to chase and how. RevWin encodes it, so the tool runs the method instead of just recording what happened.
You've already tried bending one. In Don Healy's words: "SiteFacts' unique combination of custom reports and software solutions for the builder community didn't lend itself to any off-the-shelf CRM. We didn't have the time or bandwidth to modify an existing solution."
What a custom CRM actually looks like
For SiteFacts, the deal is the center of everything and the stages are SiteFacts' own. A daily queue tells each person who to call and why. Talk tracks change with the deal's stage and the person on the other end. Emails log themselves, and outreach sequences run from the same screen.
None of that is exotic. It's just shaped to one sale instead of every sale.
The honest middle
Start with a general CRM if you can. Move when bending it costs more time than it saves. When that happens, custom CRM development is what we do, and the cost guide covers what drives the price.