Not everyone makes a good Salesforce Consultant

Salesforce is rapidly  becoming a "skill of choice" for people wanting to become part of today's rapidly expanding "cloud based customer focused" world. 

You actually can do anything you want with Salesforce - If you have the right resource -  unlimited time and unlimited people with the right skills.

We are yet to find a  business process issue or a business opportunity that Salesforce couldn't be configured to solve or support. - although there will be cases where other technology solutions might be a better choice.

At the same time we have yet to come across an organisation with the luxury of unlimited time and  unlimited skilled resource.

It takes less than five minutes to download and be given a login to Salesforce. ie any organisation can be "using Salesforce" in under five minutes. You then have 30 days before you have to pay the first bill

Unless your organisation is fully committed to CRM becoming a core business strategy with the appropriate resource you should not "log in"

The most important thing

If you are going to just replicate your spreadsheets - stick with the spreadsheets

You need to start with someone who understands how to create/setup a flexible data structure to support your known (and unknown) business requirements.

You need someone who can help you think about your requirements from a data journey point of view.

You need someone who has "data journey" and business experience (a lot of common sense) and an in depth knowledge of how your chosen tool fits together to guide you on your journey.

You can get a developer in who can use Salesforce programming tools to do anything - BUT a business savvy "super" Salesforce administrator can normally configure Salesforce without the need for development.

Like many specialist skills it can take years to build up that experience - and even then not everyone can deliver the right results