Your CRM partner now sells the outcome, and for any organisation planning a CRM investment over the next year that is one of the more encouraging shifts the services market has produced in a decade. On 1 September 2026 the Futurum Group published its 2H 2026 Partner Ecosystem Survey, drawn from 400 channel partners and written up by the firm’s ecosystems practice lead, Alex Smith. The headline number was a fall. Only 25.9 per cent of partners now name enterprise applications, the category holding CRM, ERP and HCM, as a growth driver for their own business, down from 57.0 per cent six months earlier. Read one line further and a far better story appears. Custom application development is cited by 71.0 per cent of partners as a primary growth driver, and technology strategy advisory has climbed 12.2 points to 53.2 per cent. The money has not left CRM. It has moved off the licence line and onto the work.
That is a good trade for the buyer. A services market that grows by advising and building is one whose revenue depends on whether the thing actually works. The same research found that 29 per cent of enterprise software spending now goes directly to vendors and a further 20 per cent through hyperscaler and cloud marketplaces. Buying the software and buying the expertise have come apart. For an organisation choosing a CRM platform, that separation is leverage: the licence negotiation and the delivery conversation can now be run on their own merits, with different counterparties and on different timelines.
The opportunity is wider than a procurement tactic. Futurum’s companion survey of enterprise software decision makers asked what would raise their budget confidence, and the top four answers were all delivery outcomes rather than product features. Buyers are asking for exactly what the advisory and build side of the channel has just reorganised itself to sell. The teams that get the most out of the next twelve months will be the ones who notice that the two halves of the market have converged, and who write their next partner brief accordingly.
What did the 2H 2026 partner survey actually find?
The Futurum Group’s 2H 2026 Partner Ecosystem Survey, published on 1 September 2026, collected responses from 400 channel partners on where they expect revenue growth. Enterprise applications, the category covering CRM, ERP, HCM and commercial productivity software, were named as a growth driver by 25.9 per cent of partners, a fall of 31.1 points from the 57.0 per cent recorded in the first half of the year. Over the same period infrastructure surged. Networking rose 20.7 points to 57.1 per cent, servers leapt 31.3 points to 49.5 per cent, and infrastructure software reached 56.5 per cent. AI software remained the leading category at 78.3 per cent. Services held up strongly throughout, with custom application development at 71.0 per cent and technology strategy advisory at 53.2 per cent.
Futurum attributes the enterprise application figure to three structural causes, and each one is more interesting than a simple downturn. The first is budget cannibalisation, as spending shifts towards server hardware, networking upgrades and the token costs of running large language models. The second is disintermediation, with that 29 per cent of software spend going direct to the vendor and another 20 per cent through cloud marketplaces. The third is a change in build economics, as generative AI and low-code assistants make it cheaper to build the specific thing than to buy a general one and bend it into shape. None of those describes organisations wanting less from their CRM. They describe organisations buying it differently, with more weight on judgement and less on procurement paperwork.
Why does an independent CRM partner matter more now?
An independent CRM partner is a consultancy that advises on and implements more than one CRM platform without its income depending on which licence a client signs. That independence carries more weight in 2026 because buying and building have separated. When close to half of enterprise software spending reaches the vendor directly or through a marketplace, the partner is no longer the route to the licence, so the partner’s value has to be the design, the delivery and the adoption. An independent firm can tell a client that the platform it already owns is the right one, that a smaller footprint will do the job, or that the honest answer involves two platforms rather than one, without that advice costing it margin. The recommendation and the invoice point the same way.
This is the part of the survey worth acting on rather than simply noting. A partner whose growth comes from advisory and custom development has every reason to be candid about scope, because the engagement that goes well is the one that gets extended. Buyers can test for it easily enough: ask how the firm’s revenue splits between licence-linked income and fees for work, and ask for the case where it told a client to stay on the platform it already had. The answers come quickly from firms built this way.
Buyers and partners now want the same four things
Futurum’s 2H 2026 enterprise software research asked decision makers what would increase their budget confidence. Faster time to value and better integration tied at 47.9 per cent, customer experience improvement followed at 45.1 per cent, and lower total cost of ownership at 42.4 per cent. Measuring CRM return on investment starts from exactly those four. How long until the first workflow is live and genuinely used? How much manual data movement did the integration remove? What moved in the customer experience measures the business already tracks? And what does the platform cost across three years in licences, administration and rework? None of that needs a new measurement framework: each figure exists somewhere today.
The convergence is the useful part. For most of the past decade the buyer’s priorities and the channel’s incentives pulled gently against each other, because a partner earning on resale had a quiet interest in a larger footprint and a longer deployment. A channel growing on advisory and build wants the first workflow live early, because that is what earns the next phase. So capture the baseline now rather than at kick-off: today’s quote turnaround, today’s percentage of opportunities with a clean close date, today’s time from enquiry to first response. Those three figures will shape a partner conversation better than any requirements document.
Custom build got cheaper. Where should it go?
CRM technical debt is the accumulated cost of customisations, integrations, automations and data structures that made sense when they were built and now slow every subsequent change down. It shows up as releases that take months, reports nobody trusts, and a routine platform upgrade that turns into a project with its own steering group. It is worth naming in the same breath as cheaper custom development, because low-code and AI assistants make components easy to add and no easier to remove. The organisations getting the most from the new build economics give every custom component a named owner, a stated purpose and a review date, so that what is built quickly this year can be retired just as quickly next year.
With that discipline in place, the 71.0 per cent figure becomes an invitation rather than a warning. Standard platform capability now covers a great deal of what a sales or service organisation needs, which means custom work can be aimed at the part that actually differentiates the business. In manufacturing that is usually the configuration and pricing logic for complex products, where a well-built CPQ layer is worth more than any amount of tinkering elsewhere. In energy and construction it tends to be the project and asset data the CRM has to reconcile with an ERP. Ten years ago building either of those well was a major undertaking. The economics Futurum’s partners are responding to have brought both within reach of a single quarter’s budget, which is a genuinely new option for mid-sized organisations.
What does a CRM implementation partner actually do in 2026?
A CRM implementation partner is the firm that takes a chosen CRM platform and makes it work for one specific organisation: shaping the data model and the process, configuring and building, integrating with the ERP and the wider stack, migrating data, training users and supporting adoption after go-live. What has changed in 2026 is the proportion of each. Less of the effort goes into configuration, because the platforms ship far more out of the box, and more of it goes into deciding what the business rules are, preparing data that AI agents will read and act on, and governing what those agents may do. The survey numbers track that shift precisely: growth sits in advisory and custom development, both of which follow a decision rather than precede a licence.
Anyone watching the platform releases of the past month will recognise the pattern. The vendors are steadily moving governance and business logic out of the interface and into the platform, which makes the definitions underneath a CRM the most valuable thing an organisation owns. That work carries no licence and never appears on a price list, which is exactly why it has historically been hard to fund. A channel that now grows by doing it is far better aligned with where the value sits. It pairs neatly with the total cost picture set out in The Licence Price Is the Easy Part, where the delivery and adoption line, not the subscription, decides what a CRM programme is really worth.
How should you choose a CRM implementation partner this year?
Choosing a CRM implementation partner in 2026 comes down to five questions worth asking in the first meeting. How does the firm earn its revenue, and does any part of it depend on which platform is selected? Which platforms has it delivered on in the past eighteen months, and can it name those clients? Who exactly will do the work, and are those named people actually available for the dates in question? What happens in the first ninety days, and what is live and in daily use by day ninety? And how does the handover work, so the internal team can maintain and extend what has been built? A partner growing on advisory and custom development will answer all five without checking.
Two additions make the shortlist sharper. Ask for a reference from a project that ran into trouble, because how a firm behaves in month four of a difficult delivery tells you more than any success story. And consider starting with a short pre-study rather than a full programme. Three or four weeks mapping the process, the data and the integration points produces a scope both sides can price with confidence, and it is a cheap way to learn how a partner thinks. Buyers who have already narrowed the platform field, perhaps with an analyst shortlist of the kind covered in Gartner Just Widened Your CRM Shortlist, will find the pre-study is where the decision really gets made.
The Sirocco perspective
We have always worked this way, so a survey describing the channel moving towards advice and delivery reads to us less as disruption and more as the rest of the market arriving somewhere useful. Sirocco Group is an independent CRM consultancy working across Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics 365, and our income has never depended on which of those a client chooses. That sometimes makes a first conversation slower, because the honest answer is occasionally that the platform already in place is the right one. A market where 71.0 per cent of partners grow on custom development and 53.2 per cent on strategy advisory is one where that conversation becomes the normal one.
Our advice for the coming quarter is simple and cheerful. Capture the three or four numbers you would want a CRM programme to move, before anyone pitches you anything. Ask every prospective partner how it gets paid, and listen for how readily the answer comes. Then start small, with a pre-study or a single workflow taken all the way to daily use, and let the result decide the size of the next step. Separating the licence from the work has handed buyers more control over CRM programmes than they have had in years, and the organisations that use it well in 2027 will be the ones asking the better questions now.
If you are shaping a CRM investment for the year ahead and want an independent read on scope, platform fit and the first ninety days, schedule a consultation with our team.
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