Tool Overload

During my MBA internship last summer, my primary objective was to help define the strategy of transforming a successful services company into a SAAS company. We had a number of hypotheses around where we should double-down to take advantage of certain market opportunities, but a common theme that I heard from a number of users after trying the software was surprising. To paraphrase:

“The information I received was valuable, but I have a list of tools I already need to log into on a daily basis and can’t deal with one more. Will you be integrating with X or Y or Z anytime soon? Would be great to just get alerts through those on an as needed basis rather than sifting through yet another tool. I won’t be willing to pay if this stays as a stand alone.”

This was a light-bulb moment. While Technology leaders believe that preventing issues in their infrastructure is extremely important to them AND their customers, only having to deal with it on an as needed basis is also extremely valuable. Put another way, having to log into (yet) another tool on a regular basis to take time and parse through information, and then determine what action to take (if any) is not productive. Thus, I spent the rest of the summer constructing strategy around how to position ourselves as a strategic and important technology partner, but relatively hands-off; doing much of the information analysis ourselves through services and automation to preserve our user’s valuable time.

Snowflake

This phenomenon does not exist in a vacuum. For those that don’t know Snowflake beyond their $66B market cap on less than $600M in yearly revenue, Snowflake is the pioneer in this space. That is, they organize enterprise data and turn it into actionable insights. No longer having to parse through information living across disparate toolsets is a massive time and cost-savings.

As the “data-driven decision making” age matures, it will make way for the “actionable-information decision-making age” to deal with the negative byproduct of information overload.

Understanding Your Customers

No function outside of those responsible for company growth (sales, marketing, product) is there a bigger need for actionable insights. The two levers to boost profitability or scale revenue, from start-ups to large conglomerates, is through increasing the life-time value of a customer (“LTV”) or decreasing customer acquisition costs (“CAC”). CRM tools like Salesforce, sales enablement tools like Gong, and automated prospecting tools like Outreach are enormously helpful in providing growth leaders valuable information for pulling these levers. But as the need for ALL of these tools have become a requirement for companies, growth leaders are now experiencing the negative byproduct of data-driven decision making; that is, the challenge of parsing through heaps of information across disparate platforms to identify actionable-insights.

The new new thing in enterprise software will be Business Intelligence tools that provide CXO’s a single source of truth for all metrics relevant to their decision-making. The tool stack they probably paid 7-figures for between 2010 and 2020, while still valuable, is not something they will log into ever again.Too many dings, bells and whistles. To them, these tools are just data feeds that power the high-level KPIs on their single pane of glass.

As a CXO, wouldn’t you rather have a needle presented to you on top of the haystack than have to go digging?