there's a saying in Marketing: "I know half my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don't know which half."

It's not that SaaS products don't offer some value, it's that they offer a nebulous, hard-to-quantify value, and when the CEO says "Can we ditch Salesforce?" the immediate response is "how will we track client relations then?" And while you can imagine a much more lean, custom-fitting CRM costing a lot less for the company, it's hard to imagine them finding it, either as a different SaaS offering or an internally developed project.

A big part of SaaS stickiness is organizational intertia.