Can you imagine having 257 SaaS vendors?
That's what Moderna had last year. They've cut that number down to *ONLY* 200 this year.
According to the WSJ, Pegasystems has 192 vendors (again, down from the highs) and Carhartt has 121 SaaS subscriptions.
We are a small, bootstrapped company and have 20+ subscriptions.
So what issues does this all cause?
Let's throw out all the concerns around security, administrative costs, and time to manage all the relationships. All super important, but a whole separate discussion. The main issues are:
1) Redundancies - with that many tools, you almost assuredly will have tools that have redundant features. That means you are paying for features that you aren't using. Given that every tool in the world wants to be a platform, this is becoming even more prevalent every day.
Redundancies cause two issues: waste of money on overlapping tools and:
2) Confusion - where do you or your sales reps go when they want to accomplish a task? When multiple tools do the same thing, you would need the best enablement in the world to untangle that web.
Do they use Salesforce or HubSpot or Outreach to check for leads?
Do they use Salesforce or Gong or Winn.ai to log their call notes?
Do they use Salesforce or Clari or Gong to do their forecasting?
See the issue here?
3) Shadow IT - people paying for and using separate tools on the side. There are so many great pieces of software these days, its hard to keep up. But if 4 people on your team are using something, and the rest of the team is not, that's a problem. Issues like cost, security, consistency, and visibility are all rampant with shadow IT.
So while the shiny new tool might sound good in principle, be careful with what you sign up for, regardless of the price.
Keeping the tools and sales process as simple as possible will ensure focus on what really matters - driving revenue.
That, and your favorite #revops professional will thank you.
