Here’s something that happens depressingly often.

A growing sales team picks a CRM. They love it! It fits how they work, the price is right, and it doesn’t try to boil the ocean (or, let’s be honest: maybe it was just cheap, or it was the one they happened to already know). Then they go looking for a phone system. They find one they like, but when they check whether it integrates with their CRM. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Ok, maybe a Zapier connector that was last updated in 2021 and has a 2.3-star rating, but that’s all.

So they switch CRMs. Not to something better, but to one of the few that have bothered to build the right phone system integration. That’s no basis for a democracy buying decision!

It happens the other way round too. A team outgrows their phone system: the call quality is terrible, or it’s missing something basic like call recording. But they can’t switch because their entire CRM integration would fall apart, so they stay put, and grumble about it for years.

In both cases, the team ends up choosing a tool not because it’s the best fit, but because of what it connects to. That’s a side of vendor lock-in that we don’t hear about so often.

The integration tax

Native integrations are expensive to build and maintain. A phone system vendor has to decide which CRMs to support, and they’ll obviously prioritise the biggest ones. Salesforce. HubSpot. Maybe Zoho if they’re feeling generous. Everyone else can get in line.

This makes perfect business sense for the phone system vendor. But it creates a world where Salesforce’s sprawling integration ecosystem functions less like a feature and more like a moat: you’re not staying because it’s the best CRM for your team, you’re staying because everything’s plugged into it and the thought of unplugging makes you feel mild nausea.

Meanwhile, the CRM market is full of brilliant, focused tools. Capsule, Folk, Less Annoying CRM (a name I will never tire of). These are genuinely excellent products that do specific things really well. They just happen to be too small for many phone system vendors to bother building integrations for. Which is a shame, and also (spoiler!) a big part of why Kallio exists in the first place.

Two decisions that shouldn’t be one

Your CRM and your phone system serve fundamentally different purposes. Your CRM is about organising relationships, tracking deals, keeping your team aligned. Your phone system is about making and receiving calls reliably and cheaply. These are separate decisions, and there’s no inherent reason why making one should constrain the other.

And yet it almost always does. It would be like having to choose where your office is located based on what kind of desk chair your team likes! And if you’ve never worked with a team that cares deeply about desk chair ergonomics… well, perhaps that’s for the best.

When things change

The lock-in really bites when circumstances shift. Your CRM gets acquired and the new owners double the price (this is not a hypothetical, by the way, it happens constantly in SaaS) and suddenly you need to migrate. But your call history is trapped behind a native integration that only works with the old tool, your workflows break and your team has to spend valuable time re-configuring and re-learning - or worse, maybe they don’t, and they just put up with manually transcribing calls, a little unhappier and a little less productive.

This is the hidden cost of native integrations. They work well right up until you need to change something, and then they become the very thing preventing you from changing.

So what’s the alternative?

At Kallio, we sit in the middle. Rather than waiting for phone system vendors to build integrations with every CRM (they won’t) or CRM vendors to build integrations with every phone system (also won’t happen), we just connect whatever you’re using.

The obvious upside: more combinations work. 3CX with Attio. Aircall with Less Annoying CRM. Dialpad with Copper. Combinations that would otherwise require a Zapier setup held together with happy thoughts and not quite enough duct tape.

But there’s a less obvious benefit too. Because Kallio handles the integration layer, your two choices become genuinely independent. Switch CRMs without losing call data. Switch phone systems without touching your CRM. Each tool earns its place on merit, not because of what it happens to connect to.

Pick the best tools. Worry about the plumbing later.

We’re biased, obviously, we built Kallio to solve exactly this problem. But think about how you chose the other tools you work with. Would you put up with someone telling you that desk chair you like isn’t compatible with the company’s HR software?? You picked your email provider because it handles email well. You picked your calendar because it manages your schedule. You didn’t pick either based on whether they integrate with your doorbell.

Life is better when you can use the right tools. Pick the best CRM for your team. Pick the best phone system for your team. And if they don’t natively talk to each other… well, that’s what we’re for.

If you’d like to see how Kallio handles the integration between your phone system and CRM, get in touch, we’d love to show you how it works.