Should I use Salesforce to integrate multiple systems? We are in a very specific desktop/hardware niche.

I setup Salesforce for larger companies as a major part of my profession. I also consult with a lot of startups and small businesses and tend to steer them away from Salesforce for the time being. A SUPER BASIC Salesforce setup with a consultant will cost you at least $5,000. What you want to do is more in the tens of thousands (or more) unless you are lucky and a tool actually does what you want.

A lot of companies try to solve their business problems with a tool, but sometimes you need to start with just streamlining how you run your business and standardizing how you run your business. The more complex or unique you build your business the more money it will cost later to customize Salesforce to your needs.

What you might actually want to look into is a WordPress Membership management tool like iThemes Exchange or WooCommerce. You can have clients signup up for different recurring membership levels and have an account and then assign them a key. Possibly you could store this key in their product info so they could login to retrieve it. These solutions have integrated payment processing and will integrate with Quickbooks Online, etc. you might have to do some work though to ensure you can confidently store activation keys in WordPress securely.

If you are interested in going down either path and want to talk, let me know. I have a site called GrowthHeroes.com that helps people DIY websites, CRM, marketing automation, etc. It's still in the early stages but has some free public content.

You're definitely thinking in the right direction as far as standardizing on a single tool to automate your processes and migrating away from some of the custom solutions you're currently using. Maintaining a bunch of one-off solutions that only solve individual business processes is costing your organization a lot of money that you should be spending in more strategic areas. Also, like you said, you're probably falling behind your competitors in the space because you can't keep up with the changes they're making to their sales and marketing automation systems fast enough (whereas most SaaS applications like Salesforce have scheduled automatic updates to keep their customers up to date).

Here's the rub though - is Salesforce really the right tool for what you're trying to do? Possibly. Based on my knowledge of Salesforce, it does look like it will meet a lot of your needs at a high level. That being said though, I wouldn't feel comfortable recommending a specific tool at this point because your individual business processes might have nuances would require customizations to be made within Salesforce.

So my advice would be this: before you start looking at the technology, put together a detailed set of your requirements and thoroughly map out your business processes (i.e. How do you use each tool today? How do you want to use each tool in the future? What are the specific areas where you feel like you're falling behind your competitors? etc...). Then from there, you can reach out to multiple vendors (Salesforce should definitely be one of them, but check out Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, NIMBL and a few of the other CRM software companies). You can show them your requirements and ask them to put together a proposal for how they would solve them. Then you can decide which tool will give you the most value for your money.

You'll probably will have a slightly bigger expense up front to stand up a new tool and then configure it, load data into it, train people on it, etc... (even if it's SaaS based, there's still work that will need to be done before it's usable by your business).... But standardizing on a single platform and eliminating as much of a need for overlapping tools and custom development as possible will save your organization a lot more money in the long run. Good luck!