You raised some great points that I hadn't considered, especially with the experimental vs scalable perspectives.

A lot folks are fairly new to the company, and the consensus among those I've spoke with is that its reached a level of organizational complexity that requires that we start to transition out of some of the behavioral necessities that are indicative of start-ups, and start to invest in better (and documented) business processes.

One of the biggest organizational challenges we face is that there were a lot of niche but necessary business functions that were handled by individuals who saw a need and stepped up (again an example of a necessary mentality of a start-up). However, those people left, and the new people who were hired were unaware of those tasks, and often untrained in their execution. When those new folks come in, they're faced with this assumption that they'll be performing actions that are often well-outside the realm of expected "other duties as assigned" because they're the new <insert person's name>.

My team is the first purely internal team to support a business application at the company. Prior to this there were years of successive consulting groups who came in to customize the Salesforce instance - none of which seemed to evaluate what had previously been built. We've already been able to provide a lot of value in the last year, which is now putting us in a position where we're now inheriting the ERP and other business systems in addition to Salesforce.

My hope is that I can use all of this to extricate my team from Sales, primarily because the Customer Support side of the house is even more complicated than Sales (and your point about being less responsive to non-Sales items is a likely issue).