Gabriel de Chazournes, Sales Director at Ankorstore, explains why the company decided to leave Salesforce after spending a year simplifying its instance. After considering HubSpot, Monday CRM and Attio, Ankorstore ultimately chose Attio for its Sales teams and Pylon for CX.
Ankorstore spent a year cleaning up its 
Salesforce instance. Workflows, licenses, priorities: the company tried to reduce complexity built up during another period of its history. But the results fell short of expectations.
The company therefore chose a cleaner break. The Salesforce contract is set to end in the coming months, and the former system shared by Sales and CX will be replaced by 
Attio for Sales and 
Pylon for CX.
Tools in this section
Why had Salesforce become too complex at Ankorstore?
Ankorstore's Salesforce had been built at a time when the company was larger, was testing a lot of things and had more technical resources to administer its CRM. Over time, customizations and workflows piled up.
In the meantime, the sales organization changed. Gabriel now manages a team of 20 people, with no BDRs: the Sales reps work full cycle. The complexity of the Salesforce instance therefore no longer matched that of the current sales processes.
“There had been so much customization, so many flows created, that it was simpler to start over from scratch on a new tool.”
Gabriel points in particular to the lack of flexibility and the time it took to add a feature or change properties.
But Ankorstore did not decide to switch CRMs right away. Before getting there, the Ops teams spent about a year simplifying Salesforce with the sales teams. Gabriel took part in the project himself.
“We spent a year paring down our Salesforce, cleaning everything up, changing the workflows. A really huge amount of groundwork, getting back to the right license level, the right priority level, etc.”
The company therefore first tried to reduce the complexity of the existing setup. Gabriel, however, considers the result very weak. Ankorstore ultimately decided to “churn” Salesforce and start over with a new architecture.
HubSpot, Monday CRM or Attio: which one to choose to replace Salesforce?
Ankorstore considered 
HubSpot, 
Monday CRM and Attio, while naturally also considering the option of staying on Salesforce. HubSpot made a good impression during the sales process.
“HubSpot gave us a great demo too. The tool is very good.”
Yet Ankorstore did not choose it. Gabriel does not question the product itself. After a year spent trying to simplify Salesforce, the team mainly felt that moving to HubSpot did not represent the change of model it was looking for.
“We told ourselves that choosing HubSpot was like choosing to stay on Salesforce. It wasn't radical and it wasn't going to solve our problem.”
Monday CRM was also seriously considered, with positive feedback from Gabriel:
“Honestly, it's one of the ones I could most see myself using.”
Monday was therefore a real contender in the selection process, and not just a solution given a quick look.
Why did Ankorstore ultimately choose Attio?
The choice of Attio contains a rather unusual paradox: the product chosen is also the one whose sales demo Gabriel found the least convincing.
“Attio is maybe the one that did the worst job of selling us its tool.”
In the end, the demo showed fairly little of the product. But Attio enjoyed strong enough word of mouth to push Ankorstore to keep looking into it. The team notably spoke with several companies that already used the CRM and had rolled it out. This user feedback counted in the decision.
What Gabriel remembers most is the product's flexibility and the ability to customize it without advanced technical skills.
“Very flexible, very simple. You can customize it however you want without needing tech skills.”
Cost also played a part: Gabriel says the Sales CRM bill was cut by more than a factor of 3 compared with Salesforce.
Finally, Attio can be connected to compatible assistants such as Claude via MCP. In practice, depending on the user's permissions, the assistant can access CRM data, run searches and act on certain records. For Ankorstore, this capability is in line with the rest of the choice: avoid rebuilding an architecture that needs a few specialists to be understood and administered.
Why separate Sales and CX with Pylon?
Leaving Salesforce is not about replacing one single platform with another. Salesforce previously hosted both Sales and CX. Ankorstore decided to separate the two uses: Attio for Sales and Pylon for CX.
Gabriel describes Pylon as a tool specialized in customer support. He does not know exactly which other solutions the CX team evaluated. His feedback therefore concerns the chosen architecture more than the selection process for Pylon itself.
On the other hand, this separation forces Ankorstore to rebuild certain bridges between the two systems.
How will Attio and Pylon work together?
Ankorstore notably plans to surface Pylon tickets in Attio, so that Sales reps can see the problems their accounts are running into.
On the CX side, the need Gabriel cites is simpler: knowing which Sales rep owns the account. This information has already been migrated into Pylon.
Some connections can be built with the tools' APIs, and Gabriel explains that Claude makes developing these integrations easier. The trade-off is therefore fairly clear: accept building a few bridges between specialized software rather than keeping a single system that has become too complex.
Ankorstore did not, in fact, rely on an existing identical case. Gabriel spoke with several teams using Pylon and several teams using Attio, but does not know of any company using exactly both together.
Summary of the software this article mentions in Ankorstore's stack
| Status | Workflow | Tool | Usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Replaced | CRM |  SalesforceReplaced | Former CRM shared by Sales and CX |
| In use | CRM | Attio | New Sales CRM |
| Dropped | CRM | HubSpotDropped | Alternative seriously considered |
| Dropped | CRM | monday.comDropped | Alternative seriously considered |
| In use | Support / CX | Pylon | New solution for CX |
| In use | AI |  Anthropic | Tool cited for connections and workflows with MCPs |
