Part I: The Spreadsheet From Hell

Today’s feature - Part I: I Told the CFO They Were Different Tools. They Weren't. 🤨

A TALE OF TWO TOOLS 📝

It's a Tuesday morning, roughly seven years ago. I'm sitting in a glass-walled meeting room that is slightly too warm, staring across the table at our CFO. For today’s story let’s call him Martin.

Martin is a good guy. He likes golf and has photos of his golden retriever (and his kids) on his desk. But right now, Martin is not looking at me with the warmth of a fellow dog-lover. He is looking at me like I have just set a small pile of his money on fire in the middle of the boardroom table.

Between us sits a printout. It's our marketing technology stack annual budget.

He points at two line items. One is our Customer Data Platform — Tealium. The other is our web analytics tool — Heap.

"These are different things, right?" he asks.

"Completely different," I say, with the confidence of a man who did not decide to buy them, and has not yet Googled the feature comparison.

"One is our CDP. It unifies customer data. The other is analytics. It tracks behaviour on the website."

Martin nods. We move on.

About six weeks later, I'm knee-deep and several coffees into a data architecture review with our tech overlords and I discover that both Tealium and Heap aren’t just good at playing well together - in our business they’re basically twins!

Both do customer journey mapping. Both do customer segmentation. Both do identity resolution. Both do real-time analytics. Both do data integration.

Both procured by completely different teams 🤦 

Five doubled-up capabilities. Sitting in two tools that I had confidently told the CFO were "completely different."

We we’re probably looking at about a 60% feature overlap when it came to how we we’re using these tools.

Same capability, different logo on the side of the box. Terrible feeling in my gut.

HERE COMETH THE TAXMAN 👺

We've talked before about martech bloat — the ghost tools that sit on the shelf gathering dust. But there is a more insidious problem lurking in your stack right now.

It's not the tools you aren't using. It's the tools you are using, that do exactly the same thing as the other tools you're using.

You're paying HubSpot for landing pages, but your team insists on using Unbounce because "the builder is better." You've got conversational intelligence in Gong, but someone in sales enablement just bought a standalone tool for call recording. You have three different heat-mapping tools running across four different subdomains because three different product managers refused to talk to each other.

You are paying the Overlap Tax.

How does this happen? It happens because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy and a cognitive bias known as the Endowment Effect. Once a team adopts a tool, they value it higher simply because they use it. Asking them to switch to the 'good enough' module built into your core CRM feels like asking them to give up a child.

Learning a new tool is friction.

So, you keep paying the renewals. You keep adding new tools. And the Venn diagram of your tools and capabilities slowly aligns like blurry vision coming into focus, until it becomes a giant, expensive circle of surplus and waste.

And a CFO wants answers.

WELCOME TO SPREADSHEET HELL 🔥 

After that meeting with Martin, I decided to fix it. I was going to map every single capability of every single tool in our stack, find the overlaps, and trim the fat.

Months of hell.

I built a spreadsheet so complex it made my laptop fan sound like a Boeing 747 taking off. I spent weeks cross-referencing vendor feature lists, trying to figure out if ABC’s "dynamic content routing" was the same thing as XYZ's "smart traffic distribution" (spoiler: it is).

It took me three months (and way too much time in sharepoint) to find $187,000 of completely redundant, overlapping spend.

By the time I finished the audit, two of the tools had updated their feature sets, three new ones had been bought by rogue departments, and my spreadsheet was already out of date.

I realised something fundamental that day: the human brain is simply not equipped to hold the architectural architecture of 40 different SaaS platforms in its working memory at once.

We are fighting a losing battle against vendors who deliberately obscure their capabilities behind proprietary jargon.

THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING NEW 🌱 

That spreadsheet almost broke me. But it also planted a seed.

I kept thinking: There has to be a better way to do this.

We have algorithms that can write code, drive cars, and generate unsettlingly realistic images of the Pope in a puffer jacket. Why are senior marketers still manually cross-referencing vendor feature lists in Excel just to figure out if they're paying twice for the same thing?

Why do we accept this as normal?

I've been thinking about this problem for a long time. And recently, those thoughts started turning into something much more concrete.

But that's a story for next week.