The tools were supposed to make things easier.
A task management platform for seeing tasks. A Customer Relationship Management system to manage customers. An invoice software that can be used for billing. A help desk with support. An alternative to the email marketing platform.
An email marketing alternative platform. All of them have been selected due to their capability to perform well, simplicity of installation, and cost-effectiveness. For some time, this seemed to be a viable strategy.
After that, the business increased. The team expanded. As it increased, the number of tools increased. But somewhere in the process, the stack which was supposed to support operations was creating problems of its own, problems that nobody had thought to face when picking the individual tools.
That is the most common scenario that most businesses which are growing face today. And the answer is growing more and more, to take the whole disconnected model away.
Those who do the math find the cost of tool sprawl evident.
The typical business with 10 to 15 SaaS subscriptions used for critical business processes typically subsidises a lot of overlapping functionality. Both provide two tools that enable reporting. The three tools are all used to manage some variety of contact data.
A communication platform that replicates the features of other communication platforms that are already in the CRM. This overlap was never intended; it happened because of the quick “reactive” buying that has been carried out by different groups independently.
A larger part of the damage that can be caused is the operational cost, which is less obvious than the licensing cost. If every system uses a different data source, it is a constant stress on manual effort to ensure consistency of the data.
If you’re selling in the CRM and billing is on a separate spreadsheet, you will have to reconcile them before an invoice is sent. If the support team doesn’t have the sales history of the person they’re supporting, they’re working without context, and the customer knows it.
Such costs are not allocated to one budget line. They manifest themselves as hours wasted on administrative tasks, mistakes that need to be fixed, decisions made on incomplete or outdated information. They exist, but they cannot be seen until they are sought.
It’s important to appreciate the journey a business took to get to this point, before you criticize their choices.
Weighing up the pros and cons of the best of breed argument, it was a strong one ten years ago. Specific tools that had been created to serve a specific purpose truly outperformed the integrated alternatives. A dedicated helpdesk was more effective than a standard ticketing system.
An email marketing platform designed specifically for the purpose was superior to the basic email campaign features offered by a CRM system. It made sense to purchase a tool that was best suited to the task at hand.
The scene has been drastically altered. Integrated platforms are fully developed. The need for separate tools has decreased because functionality gaps are closing. Although it takes engineering time to integrate it in, it also has an ongoing cost because all the connected systems have to maintain it as they evolve, and other platforms have cut out the middle man by embedding them.
Meanwhile, the cost of fragmentation has become more apparent. Those who have been dealing with disconnected stacks for a few years now have gathered enough proof of the operational challenges that disconnected stacks pose to make a strong case for change. The CFO who once rubberstamped individual tool purchases is now asking whether they’re all working together. This is a tougher one to answer, than it once was.
The shift from siloed SaaS ecosystems is not usually brought on by a single spectacular failure. It’s more likely that it’s a build-up of small frustrations that finally reaches a boiling point.
A sales director realizes that at month end, the numbers in the pipeline in the CRM don’t match the numbers in the accounting system. A support manager learns that agents are wasting a lot of time copying data between the helpdesk and the CRM system and are not assisting customers.
An operations lead attempts to create a report that pulls together data from three systems, but the systems are incompatible, and they give up.
These moments come one at a time and can be recovered independently. They build a case that it’s the architecture itself that is the problem; it’s not any one tool, not the folks using the tools, it’s the basic design of a stack that was pieced together on the fly.
Once people realise this, the discussion of consolidation starts in earnest.
Those platforms that have captured the business world’s interest are the ones that provide true breadth and quality depth.
A single platform should, at least as a minimum, include CRM, billing, customer support, marketing automation and analytics. It needs to have those functions and share data natively, rather than through integrations that need to be maintained.
In other words, a customer record in one application must be the same customer record in any other application. It also must be flexible enough to align with the specific processes in the business, rather than the business having to tweak its processes to fit the setup.
This specification is more demanding than may be first thought. Several places provide “breadth”, but that breadth comes in the form of loosely coupled modules, which are only loosely associated with one another under the same brand name as opposed to a common data structure.
When it comes to the native integration story, where data flows without custom work, it’s less common than it is sold to be by vendors.
One of the platforms to make this architecture more than real is Zoho. The Zoho One suite (which includes Zoho CRM, Zoho Books, Zoho Desk, Zoho Campaigns, and more) has a common platform layer that enables seamless data transfer across applications by default. Before an invoice is created, a deal can be viewed in Books when it is closed in CRM.
In Desk, the agent will now have access to the customer’s complete commercial history in the same interface as the ticket is opened. This connectivity is the reason the consolidation argument is as much a reality as a theory.
The transition from the fragmented stack to a single platform is not easy and companies that have made the move will attest to that.
The first problem is data migration. The data that needs to be connected across years of customers, years of deals, years of support tickets, years of financial transactions, needs to be centralised, deduplicated and mapped to a new data model.
The quality of the data that already exists is generally inferior to what is anticipated. Individual records appear to be consistent in one record, and inconsistent when compared between systems.
Process redesign is the second challenge. Over the years, many workflows have been developed in the business based on the capabilities of the tools that were available. As those tools evolve, so do the workflows. The new approach is not necessarily welcomed by teams with long-standing methods, even if it’s clearly superior.
The third challenge and the one that is nearly always underestimated is change management. A successful technical migration can be followed by an unsuccessful consolidation if the users of the new system do not know the ‘why’ of the change, how the new tools will be used and what the expected behavior will be.
Companies that do these things well and grow to be the successful ones are those that view consolidation as a strategic initiative, not a technical migration. They collaborate with established Zoho Consulting Solutions groups that possess both the Zoho platform and organisational expertise that impact the likelihood of the implementation’s success.
They will continue to invest in training, they will invest in documentation, and they will invest in the support that will help teams adapt. They measure results, not only if the migration itself is complete, but if the problems they identified during the migration are being addressed.
Companies which have a careful consolidation describe a change in the manner of the business once it works within the organisation.
There are fewer logins required. Less trade in goods. Reduced month end reconciliation work. Less discussion about people not being able to find information. A better understanding of the customer relationship with all teams that interact with it.
All of this is not due to more advanced technology alone. It is a consequence of better architecture, that is, a deliberate decision on how the business’s operational systems are to be configured and implemented, which is done once, and done right.
The disjointed SaaS environment was never a long-term plan. It was a series of short-term decisions that added up to what nobody had intentionally planned.
The companies bidding adieu to it are not following a trend. They’re attempting to repair something that has been silently draining them of more resources than they knew.
It’s something quite logical to do. And more and more, it is that growing businesses are opting for.
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