Anyone who is a fan, as I am, of the work of Scott Brinker in pulling together the Chief Martech diagrams of all of the Martech in various GTM categories will be aware of the almost exponential growth in applications designed to serve the needs of businesses. In 2011 there were just 150 sales and marketing applications available, now there are over 11,000, each one of them offering a specific solution to a specific problem or problems. Amazing! You might say, free market economics at work to provide choice and to drive down costs, ensuring we all get our problems solved cheaper and easier than ever.
Well, what if I told you that productivity has increased a mere 1% since the millennium, the lowest rate in any period since before the Industrial Revolution. In the UK, productivity has risen a mere 0.3% since 2010! Surely there being an app for everything should have skyrocketed our efficiency and enabled us to all get more done, just as all of their websites promised?
There have been a number of studies on this and the results are fascinating. The average mid-market organisation uses say 130 applications across the business (the numbers on this vary wildly but this seems a sensible average), with some large organisations using up to 1,000! Clearly any one individual employee only uses a fraction of this number day to day, but the number is still high. As I sit here writing this I have just taken stock of my own computer and I have 14 applications running (not counting Chrome extensions and background processes my Mac may or may not be up to). 14, well a recent study found that this is taking a toll on the human brain leading to a significant amount of low productivity across the working day. The study found that we suffer from a phenomenon known as context switching, the time it takes to move from performing a task in one application and getting fully up to speed in another, on average this took 9.5 minutes.
This was particularly bad in sales teams, with a very high concentration of applications dedicated to the sales function and a great many varied tasks completed by the average salesperson during the course of the day - researching, list building, calling, emailing, InMailing, Updating the CRM, building outreach sequences, the list goes on and on. A separate study found that in sales teams up to 50% of the working day is taken up with context switching and entering data into various applications as opposed to actually selling - communicating with prospects.
Another phenomenon within businesses is the propensity to fix problems by acquiring or changing these applications, buying the next big thing to power a pivot in their demand generation strategy, perhaps an AI tool to help said sales team write their emails faster. The average mid-market organisation has a 32% annual technology churn rate, with the cycle of identifying, evaluating, purchasing and onboarding a new tool taking between 3 and 6 months.
When we add together the impact of context switching, multi-application data entry and new application onboarding time it's a wonder anyone gets anything done at all.
When you zoom out from the experience of the individual and take in the broader organisational context the picture gets bleaker. Technology buying inevitably happens in silos, with perhaps IT offering a guiding hand in areas of security and deployment etc. The effect of this siloed buying compounds the existing problems in two ways, integration challenges and the inefficient deployment of capital.
Let's look at the inefficient deployment of capital first. There is an ever-increasing trend of application providers broadening the scope of their products to take in more use cases and this leads to what we call feature overlap - multiple tools deployed within a single business that do the same thing. Businesses that use Salesforce and HubSpot are a classic example, every business that has Salesforce for CRM and HubSpot for marketing automation has in effect two CRM systems. This is a fairly extreme example, albeit a hugely common specific scenario, but this feature overlap will be happening all over your tech stack. Ultimately, this leads to businesses underutilising what they have and spending lots of money in doing so.
In a time of constrained budgets, this is a big issue, but perhaps not as big an issue as that of integration. There is an argument to say that the customer journey experienced by most buyers in the B2B space has never been more fragmented as a direct result of the sprawling tech stacks in play within most organisations. The number of point solutions that a single customer's data touches during the course of a typical sales cycle is enough to bring your CIO out in hives.
In a typical B2B organisation, a prospect journey might look a little like this. An intent signal is captured by Bombora, this is pushed to Rollworks, who serve ads via the AdRoll exchange to the company, prospects from the company interact and come to your website where you capture cookies via HubSpot, the prospect then fills in a form via TypeForm and records a contact and company record in CRM, there is a notification via email and Slack to your sales team who go to ZoomInfo to get additional contacts and upload these to CRM too. These are then enriched via Clearbit. The data that the company is engaged goes back to Rollworks and you push the audience to LinkedIn for lower funnel ads, all of this data is captured via GA4 and also pushed via Funnel.io into Looker Studio. The engaged prospect is then enrolled in sequences in Outreach and when they get more engaged they are pushed to Sendoso to send out some swag…. I could go on…and on.
Almost every one of these handoffs is an integration, or should be, in many cases some of these data transfers will require manual intervention, and in many others the data being passed from one system to another will be the bare minimum, lacking sufficient context to be useful for anything other than creating the record. The fragmentation of the journey comes because valuable context is lost at each stage resulting in a slowing of the sales cycle and a poor customer experience, as the customer potentially explains time and again their requirements as they pass from initial marketing touches to BDR outreach to sales process, to onboarding, to customer success.
Integration and its close associate automation is an essential part of every organisation and yet very few of even the most forward-thinking companies have progressed to a point of maturity where they have an organisation-wide strategy for integration and automation. Even the best of them still see automation as a mechanism for replacing manual processes and plugging holes in the myriad handoffs that occur in a process like the one detailed above. Part of the reason for this is related to the very problem that is causing the issue, feature sprawl in various applications is ensuring that integration and automation capabilities are available within these point solutions and in use within some of these operational silos. Bigger business processes are handled by IT, there is no one owner who can transcend these teams and crucially no centralised budget to pull on to solve this problem.
The opportunity, however, is clear, seeing integration and automation as an organisational strategy offers untold opportunities not just to smooth the creases in the customer journey and reduce manual tasks, but to actually reimagine the way we work full stop. It is now possible with tools like Workato to almost eliminate context switching, by creating common interfaces to these many and various tools by using Slack or Teams as our intermediary, rather than switching to Salesforce to create an account or to enrol the lead notification you just received into an Outreach sequence, you can simply type a command, or hit an option button. Rather than using multiple apps to create and enrich a record, build an enrichment automation that does it all hands-free and notifies the rep when it’s done. Rather than running reports from 101 apps and amalgamating these into a dashboard for leadership, simply push all the data into your data lake or BI tool in real-time.
To unpick ourselves from the era of “there’s an app for that”, we must now reframe to a new reality of - ‘we need an automation for that’. Not quite as catchy perhaps, but an idea that holds the power to deliver on the promises we all brought into and actually produce the productivity gains that will propel truly forward-thinking companies ahead of their competition.
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