Colin (00:01.231)

Hello and welcome to today's episode of The Growth System, the podcast that looks at B2B growth through a systems thinking lens. I'm Colin Shakespeare.

Chris (00:10.476)

and I'm Chris Bayless.

Colin (00:12.217)

And today we're going to talk about a type of system we haven't really touched on yet. And that's what you might loosely describe as non-human systems. I on the growth system, we're all about sales and marketing really. it isn't really true to describe these systems as sort of genuinely non-human, as they are after all going to be used for the benefit of humans and by humans, like sellers and marketers. But we're going to be drawing our episode boundary today around the tech stack essentially.

Let's get into it and we'll discuss what the world of systems theory can teach us about building effective tech stacks that actually support growth. So let's frame the issues and the organization challenges we normally do in the first part of the episode. Chris, what's going on with the tech stack? Why is this a problem?

Chris (01:00.574)

going on with the tech stack? mean that that is a great question. don't know whether, I know you've seen them Colin because I share them on occasion, but if anyone out there seen the sort of Scott Brinker Chief Martech maps of the kind of the tech landscape, because they are just mind-boggling, we could probably do a whole episode where I rant about you know the...

the sort of bias that VCs have towards sort of SaaS products. But we'll sort of swerve that one and just go on to say the Enbridge organization uses about 130 applications. Now I have seen some wildly varying figures here from as low as kind of, I don't know.

Colin (01:42.168)

Yeah, huge.

Chris (01:45.294)

I saw one actually that was 30 in the course of researching for this. Typically I say they range like 80 to 150. And I actually saw again a stat that suggested that just a little under a thousand, something like 983 applications and APIs consumed in a large business. Whatever the number is.

I think we can all agree on one thing, which is most businesses use a lot of SaaS. And the sort Scott Brinker landscape staff suggest that, I last time I checked, and I should have checked ahead of this episode, but something like 14,000 SaaS applications just in the sales and marketing space alone. So it's just like a massive amount of options out there.

and sometimes we go into companies and it does seem like they've bought almost all of those 14,000 and with that comes problems because you've got lots of applications and therefore you've got lots of data stored in lots of places and the data is normally pretty disconnected.

And that sort of disconnected data ultimately is kind of what we're talking about on the episode today. It is the issues presented by that, but ultimately how we can take a systems view of sort of stitching that together in the most effective way possible. Because the problems are pretty significant. If we think about the journey of a prospect, how they travel through an organization.

it's predominantly by touching different applications, whether they are

Chris (03:29.888)

out there in the dark funnel as some people like to call it these days and their third party intent data you know they are out there and we're consuming information about a prospect or a prospect account through Bomboa or Leedsift or you know whatever it is you're you're using you know that's a data point they hit your website as an anonymous visitor you know that's a data point typically if we're using a system like HubSpot maybe you know your

capturing the cookie and IP data of that anonymous visit, that you're sort of storing it in the background, you're associating things later when they keep moving down the funnel. You know, I could go on and on and on, but ultimately we all get what we're talking about here. The prospect journey is really characterized by the systems that they touch and the sort of information they consume along the way and the sort of digital footprint that they leave and

with all of that sort of myriad data being generated, very rarely is that particularly well joined up, consumable in the same place. And I think that the issue that really comes out of that is characterized in two different ways. It's either taking a lot of human effort to fix it, or it just isn't fixed at all and all the contextual data is kind of lost. So.

In essence, that's what we're talking about, right? It's this kind of disconnected landscape that makes up what's happening in sales and marketing.

Colin (05:05.667)

Yeah, it's kind of paradoxical really, isn't it, that we've got this unprecedented availability of data, but actually it's harder than ever to actually leverage the information that you've got because we've got format differences and semantic inconsistencies and timing issues. And as I say, essentially we have this paradox where the potential value of the data is actually diminished by like a structure or

crucially, think, for this episode, compatibility. And the thing is, just doesn't need to be the case at all.

Chris (05:42.21)

No, doesn't need to be the case. It's not a massively difficult problem to fix as we'll come on to, albeit there are some barriers along the way in most organizations. But yeah, it is funny, isn't it? Because every single one of those 14,000 applications, they've all got mostly great people running them that are all trying to change the world for the better. They've all got a mission statement about changing how...

businesses, people consume information, get connected to companies. as you say, there's this sort of paradoxical relationship between the promise and the reality in that actually the more of these visionary systems you add, actually the worse in some ways things get because you've just got this sprawl of data that no one's really on top of.

But the opportunity is massive, I guess. You know, get that right text deck and you actually do connect it. Wow. You know, you can, you can really leverage some value there. I was looking for some, for some stats to share as we like to do in terms of like what, what's actually like the cost of this disconnection. There's a few different studies out there. Harvard Business Review, one of our go-tos, it seems when, kind of constructing the episodes. But

They did a study with 103 teams looking at kind of 42 individual business processes across a load of kind of key functions within the business. Mostly focused on enterprise, it had to be said there was some SMB stuff in the study, but it had this stat and it's a stat that I've seen in various flavors before that suggests that

Where you have significant disconnection of systems, teams can spend something like 60 % of their working day on activities that arise just from sort of stitching disconnected systems together, whether that's extracting information from multiple systems, manual data entry, whatever it might be, it takes a lot of time. We've seen... Sorry, go on.

Colin (07:57.071)

Yeah, I mean, I've seen a real life example, Chris, sorry to interrupt. I saw a real life example actually when I was working for an iPaaS vendor where we had a prospect that had essentially hired a data science team and I guess put a bit of infrastructure and procurement effort around that and some funding. But they were spending 80 % of their time as a bare minimum just on getting data sources to kind of agree.

and essentially fixing data, is potentially a much, let's say, quite far below their pay grade as data scientists. And that was 80 % at a bare minimum. So four days a week was spent doing that, but very often five days a week. And the question they asked us was, was there something that they could do to try and reverse that trend? And of course, as we'll come on to, there's quite an easy solution to that.

Chris (08:51.918)

there is. Yeah, and wow, 80%. I mean, the amount well, I know how much data scientists are paid. And that that was a significant cost. Geez. Wow. Yeah, that's gonna be burning through some of that VC cash at quite a rate isn't it? And it's, you know, I think that the problem is, is endemic because

Colin (09:03.739)

It's a startup as well, by the way, a funded startup.

Chris (09:19.7)

even where you have systems that are essentially connected, there's another stat which I can't actually remember precisely what it is. think it's essentially around context switching, know, how much...

cognitive effort there is to switch from using the CRM to using, I don't know, like a data tool, like Apollo or whatever, and just the amount of screen, the amount of tabs that the average person has open, and as they switch between different tasks in different systems, the cost of context switching is something like 15 minutes of reduced efficiency every time they switch between an application. Have you heard that stat before? Is it 15 minutes?

Colin (10:03.131)

I think it's something more like 21 minutes and in my case it's probably something more like 40 minutes. It's something that I struggle with quite a lot. it's always great to be able to kind of mitigate that. even so, there are still workflows that we, even at RevSpace, we sort of engage in that require that a bit of sort of tabbing and context switching.

Chris (10:08.834)

you

Colin (10:30.939)

Yeah, I'd say that the 20 minutes that I'm not sure really what that's actually based on and how sort of scientific that is. But certainly it's a significant impact and it's now endemic because you simply have to use various systems. And there's a kind of suboptimal sort of integrations and things that can mitigate that to some extent, but not quite to the extent I think that we're going to talk about in the episode.

Chris (10:56.814)

No, I mean, some of the stats in that sort of HPR article I mentioned were like in organizations where they had disconnected systems, something like, I've got a whole list of them on my screen here, something like 15 % reduction in order processing time, 16 % reduction in...

working capital due to delays on receiving payments, making vendor payments 20 % slower, like 8 % slower, new hire onboarding, you know, and so it goes on. I mean, it just if you start compounding some of these things, I mean, we're talking sounds and marketing some of those examples kind of sit outside that that space, but you can just start seeing that the economic impact of disconnection within the tech stack is absolutely colossal.

And when you kind of look at why this is happening, kind what the impact is, you know, there are a load of...

again, stats out there from different studies and we won't try and reel off all of them, but I don't know, a few choice ones. 41 % of employees in SMB organizations still manually transfer data between systems. 73 % of customers report feeling frustrated when their experience isn't consistent across departments, you know, looking at you sales and marketing.

Chris (12:31.35)

one here that I actually don't believe, but I thought I would share just because it's probably at least heuristic, which is businesses with well-integrated systems or a 73 % higher average order value than those with poor integration. I mean, that sounds like rubbish to me, but frankly, it was seven points, it would still be quite significant in certainly in most cases.

Colin (12:48.015)

Ha

Colin (12:52.539)

We take the general point even if we are perhaps slightly suspicious of the framing and the statistic, right?

Chris (12:59.436)

Yes, I mean, I think that is actually an overarching point that the more you look for stats, the more you realize that none of them add up. You've just got to basically see that if there is a trend of around a group of figures, that little cluster probably says that the problem is either very significant, quite significant, moderately significant. And I think that the problem is pretty significant when it comes to kind of disconnection in the tech stack.

Colin (13:28.891)

Yeah, think this episode, sorry Chris, I was just going to say this episode in particular was one where the research was so dense with often like slightly suspicious and certainly contradictory stats, except if you can then draw the bigger picture is quite clear whether even if the framing of individual data points and the actual statistics are slightly suspicious, like I saw one like organizations lose 30 % of revenue.

Chris (13:29.378)

They're all.

Colin (13:59.067)

due to inefficiencies caused by disconnected systems. And I wonder what lies behind that statistic and how they arrived at it. Or employees spend an average of 20 % of their time searching for information or handling repetitive tasks. I think we could go on and go on. We could probably do an episode of just reading out a bunch of stats. Yeah.

Chris (14:15.159)

Yes.

You could just go on and on and on, you, with it? Yes, wouldn't be a very good episode, but yeah, there are certainly enough out there to fill a podcast at least. And I think if we really boil it down into what is the problem for sales and marketing teams, and that I think comes down.

to really the topic of what you might loosely term data-driven decision making. In complex B2B sales, which is what we spend most of our time talking about being a part of in some way, shape or form, data across the decision-making unit, across the account is really, really critical in understanding intent.

it's really, really critical in understanding the kind of the state of the deal, the buyer journey. And it's something that for me is such a clear value accelerator. I'm going to hit you with another stat. Businesses from, this is a Gartner one, so at least they've done a fair bit of asking people about it. But

Businesses that use data-driven decision-making are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain them, and 19 times as likely to be profitable. And do know what? I actually get that. Take the figures out of it. The point is, if you have a really strong understanding of what has happened in the marketing funnel, what content they've consumed, what of your digital properties they've touched,

Chris (15:54.7)

what maybe intent they have outside of your kind of estate. If you, once they are in a deal cycle, you know, we've got great notes that have come in through an integration with an AI tool from conversations from sellers. You know, we've summarized those, we've built actions out of them, we've put them into CRM.

You know, we have gone through a qualification framework using kind of integration. have enriched our data from leads as they've come in. So when that you get an initial outreach from an SDR, they've got lots of context about not just, you know, what the revenue is and where the head office is and all the basic stuff, but actually, you know, have they recently.

Colin (16:38.189)

someone's job title was two years ago the last time the CRM was updated.

Chris (16:42.91)

Exactly, but now you can quite easily plug in funding rounds, new hires at a senior level, loads and loads of data points, and all of this stuff can be, through integration and automation to some degree, be surfaced wherever you need it to be surfaced. And you just think, well, a sales process that's got all of that kind of data baked into it, I mean, it's pretty obvious, right, that you're going to have higher acquisition?

of customers, it's pretty obvious that you're going to be better at retaining customers because you're going to know more about them, be able to make predictions about what's going on with them, you're going to be able to nurture them and build kind of customer journey automation more effectively. And if you're acquiring more and you're retaining more,

then you're probably going to be more profitable. it all is a sort of virtuous circle that kind of makes logical sense even if you strip away the specific percentages given to each benefit. But I think the bottom line here is that if you have a disconnected tech stack, then

it's going to cost time, it's going to cost money, it's potentially going to cost reputation, it's going to hurt prospect and customer experience and that in itself is going to cost time and money. it is all bad if you are disconnected and it's only really getting worse, I think is the general trend line. Colin, I think we've both seen that

in the last couple of years, there probably has been a bit of a rowing back on expenditure on just acquiring more and more SAS tools. So I think that that probably does suggest that we might have reached the peak of text to text sprawl, and we're kind of rowing back the other way a bit.

Chris (18:37.332)

As things grow, mean, ultimately, if you don't fix the problem, the problem is only going to get worse. Things will become more disjointed data will accumulate in more places, you know, the problem will compound.

Colin (18:46.651)

Technical debt accumulates as well. Sorry to go back into stats, but I saw a Gartner one, think by next year, something like 40 % of IT budgets are going to be allocated to addressing technical debt. This is quite an interesting parallel with national debt and how much we are currently spending compared to GDP on debt repayments. I know it's a different kind of debt.

Chris (18:51.98)

Yes.

Colin (19:13.147)

That's actually quite shocking that basically because we haven't as an industry sort of moved forward with modernization and I guess paying down that sort of technical debt, we're now at the point where we have a lot less sort of fat in the budget to do that. And so this is a of a vicious circle essentially that we're creating for ourselves.

Chris (19:13.41)

Yes.

Colin (19:40.507)

And already that bill is just enormous. Another status of the $85 billion is spent annually on just fixing and maintaining outdated technology.

Chris (19:53.57)

Yeah, that outdated tech piece is so prevalent because so much technology that we have kind of embedded into the organization is fundamentally really, really sticky. You know, the thought of changing it is just too painful. And I think this is another thing that kind of drives disconnection is that very often that kind of legacy tech isn't that easy to integrate into a bigger sort of tech stack, into a broader sort of set of processes.

and it tends to be quite IT centric. I think we could do a whole episode as I'm sure we will at some point in of citizen development, citizen automation, decentralization of IT kind of spending. It's a really, really interesting topic to me at least in terms of how you kind of unlock some of that technical debt.

Colin (20:43.731)

yeah.

Chris (20:45.215)

But actually you can't if you've got a legacy stack and the bigger the organisation are the more legacy stuff that you tend to have in the stack, it just tends to follow. And I guess the interesting question is like, why is this happening?

You know, how do we get ourselves into this point of like having all of this legacy tech, having these many tens, if not hundreds of applications and not having them really stitched together, or even when the benefits are so obvious. And I think that it's a probably it's a charge your glasses moment, as you like to say, Colin, because it's it's misalignment, it's operational silos, you know, it's all the old, the old favorites for the growth system podcast.

And whilst I think the problem probably looks different depending on organisation size and maturity,

essentially in the sales and marketing space, a lot of tech spending is still relatively decentralized. And what I mean by decentralized is it tends to be the sales team that makes this, that makes the sort of procurement decision about what CRM they want to buy. It's the marketing team that, that buys the sort of marketing automation tool and sort of line of business teams drive their own tech spending. And if they have options,

team, sales ops, marketing ops etc. They do tend to be that, they tend to be of department, sort of department centric, and what that actually means is there's nobody there in IT or anywhere else architecting the tech stack.

Chris (22:24.59)

So they tend to be sort of incremental, they tend to be sort of evolutionary text acts, you know, we'll buy one thing and then like we perceive to have a problem over here, so we're going to fix that problem by buying another bit of tech and another and another and another and they all sort of get very loosely stitched together. And I mean that to be honest, this is a bugbear of mine full stop that

There is a massive financial impact on organizations from that sort of tech stack creep through to due to kind of low utilization, like feature overlap. mean, feature overlap is nuts. The amount of tools that fundamentally do the same thing in organizations is crazy. mean, classic one we see is like organizations that have got both Salesforce and HubSpot.

Colin (23:14.675)

The Salesforce and HubSpot and this kind of comes back to what you're saying about the sort of line of business heads having control over their own sort of subset of the tech stack and you kind of already know what's going on there and why would you do that and why would you give yourselves that headache? I don't know, maybe some listeners could tell us why. Maybe there's perfectly good reason, but I think we could probably have at least an enterprise architecture discussion to.

Chris (23:35.992)

Yeah.

Chris (23:39.416)

Yeah.

Colin (23:43.557)

to refute some of the arguments.

Chris (23:45.984)

absolutely. I mean.

There's nothing wrong with Salesforce and Salesforce is a really good fit for some organizations. But fundamentally, if you're spending, you know, 30, 40, 50 grand a year on Salesforce and another 20 grand a year on HubSpot or HubSpot fundamentally is a CRM. And based on the utilization of Salesforce in most organizations, like strip away the fact that someone wants to build something really complicated, they claim to not be able to unpick. So you look at what actually is being used. It's almost certain that the majority of organizations

where they have HubSpot and Salesforce could just use HubSpot rather and strip away that. And probably have a happier, more productive team in the process just based on UI simplicity. But that is a whole different thing. The point is there is no architecture. There's no kind of centralization. And those problems that have been perceived to be solved by just buying more tech just compounds the issue.

Colin (24:23.643)

most use cases most of the time, yeah.

Chris (24:47.63)

So that sort of decentralization of purchasing is also creating the kind of disconnection issue because one of the things that whilst sort of spending on those kinds of systems, sales enablement, CRM, marketing automation, email, whatever,

Something that is, I think, typically perceived as being in the realm of IT is spending on automation tools. So, know, iPads tools, for instance, they tend to be thought of as IT solutions that sit outside the sort of departmental line of business budgets. And therefore, no one buys them because IT hasn't really got a budget for that either.

or no one actually even knows it's a thing and no one's asking for it. Whatever the root cause is, reality is that automation typically is managed within point solutions.

Colin (25:53.881)

Yes, a vendor centric integration and automation where you're sort of bound by the functionality in HubSpot, for example, which obviously has some great functionality around that, but it is also quite limiting. And then what you can do is effectively constrained by the vendor rather than you having that kind of extra, considerably extra level of control.

Chris (26:02.528)

Yeah, exactly.

Chris (26:19.358)

Exactly that. It's not about knocking the automation capability of point solutions like HubSpot. It's simply the fact of recognizing that they are point solutions and the purpose of automation within a tool like HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever dot mailer is, is that thing anymore? Anyway, in a point solution is that the automation is there to help you automate processes and data that sit inside the point solution.

Colin (26:38.427)

Is it still a thing?

Chris (26:48.14)

And they will have they have an ecosystem obviously, and they will do a point to point integration into something else. But the whole philosophy of the kind of automation tool is to automate processes in the tool to make the use of the tool better, more useful, more sticky, whatever. It's not there to transcend the tech stack is there to put things into itself. And that's a big problem if you're the

Colin (27:11.195)

That's a good way to

Chris (27:14.508)

end up with some sort of daisy chain effect of point systems being stitched together and we see that surprisingly, well maybe not surprisingly often, we just see that very often. know, point A to point B to point C, things are moving along, things are being lost along the way.

you know, whoever's responsible for each step in the chain isn't actually zooming out and looking at the full system. They're just thinking, well, I need first name and last name and email address in my system. So that's all I'll grab from the last system. Even if the last system might have had, you know, tons of contextual data that would be really, really interesting further down the chain. We oversimplify, but I think the point is this decentralized approach to

automation and to IT spending and the sort of departmental silos that problems get fixed within means that there is no one out there in most organizations that have an organization wide view of the customer and the sort of the data that's passing through the org and that's really why this is happening. I think we

We talked about this in our sort set and forget processes episode, but when we look at the opportunities for automation and I think the reason that we showed a stat that was something like, was it 80 % of automation opportunities go unidentified in most businesses? And that's why, isn't it? Like no one's looking at this, it's no one's remit to transcend the org.

And that ultimately is why we have this disconnection issue that is causing all of these many problems that we've just put some dubious stats to.

Colin (29:02.875)

I think if we, especially as we speak to people in, I think what you're talking about there is in that world of sort of that lean and mean startup SaaS world. And I guess some, or at least small and medium sized organizations. I think when we get into the larger organizations, typically there is at least one, hopefully several enterprise architects that maybe do have that sort of overarching.

view of the whole system as a system. In fact, we should get an enterprise architect on to talk about this indeed. And actually, as soon as you do speak to an EEA about this, the solution becomes quite clear. Maybe that's a good sort of segue to us unpacking the solution. Sorry, go on.

Chris (29:41.083)

I'm sure we can pull that from somewhere.

Chris (29:52.428)

Yeah.

Chris (29:56.77)

Well, yeah, yes, we should definitely go on and do some unpacking of the solution. But I don't know if that's true. I know that EAs are there to do exactly that and big organizations have them and they are fantastic people. And I love seeing them diagram stuff out. I mean, it's just one of my favorite things, which is probably says a lot about me. actually, they only work.

Colin (30:21.349)

give you a whiteboard and EA and an old fashioned and you're happy.

Chris (30:26.69)

be there. But actually, they do what they're briefed on. They get pulled into a project. If someone's defined a project and they've attached an EA to it, an EA will do what an EA does. But actually, in the day to day of sales and marketing, how often do we actually see an organization that actually has EA's leveraging them at that level within the growth team? I don't see that often enough.

Colin (30:56.569)

I think I certainly haven't seen it. I've seen it. I haven't seen it often enough. And look, to be honest, I've actually been in the room with the whole team of all the senior enterprise architects and their boss from a very major enterprise account and with a very senior expert and sort of sales CTO from a senior integration platform vendor. And we kind of explained, we could have spelled that out.

Chris (30:56.686)

I'll you Paris.

Colin (31:25.763)

out the value as much as you possibly could. mean, in way more detail than we probably will do here. And yet we have this. And we're talking to a team that just built like 500 new SAP integrations in the most time consuming and slow way possible. And yet they still didn't see the value. And I think that's the case of them being kind of locked into sort of doing what they're actually tasked with and nobody even in that organization.

invested in what was on paper quite an impressive EA team supporting what you said and kind of going against what I said. I've certainly come across situations like that and I guess it's always a relief when you have the other kind of conversation where somebody is actually looking at this and has very quickly realised or probably gone in realising that this is going to be a problem and that there is a way to fix this.

Chris (32:09.838)

I'm

Colin (32:22.363)

And I guess that's part of the message of the episode today is actually, I guess it's a good segue to discuss what is the size of the prize if we can fix this. And guess, spoiler alert, there is a very clear way to fix this particular set of problems.

Chris (32:41.164)

Yeah, certainly from our perspective, the solution is really clear and know, spoiler alert, actually centralizing automation with things like iPads tools is absolutely the way to do that for most organizations. Now, just having a tool in many ways, as we sort of alluded to the

the sort of just buying more software to fix problems fallacy that we mentioned a second ago, just buying an iPads tool ain't gonna fix your problems. But utilized well and with an architecture approach, a sort of systems thinking approach, it has the capacity to deliver significant benefits. I think that...

Again, we could cite many, many stats that tell you how wonderful it is. The world can be once you have stitched everything together in a way that makes sense. I think actually sparing you the stats, if we can just suggest that life will be better by many double or triple digit percentages. That actually, okay, well, it's sort of like, well, why? What is the solution? And

Colin (33:49.178)

Hahaha.

Chris (33:58.614)

I think it's something that we've talked about before, but it's about a sort of mindset, you know, a way of viewing the world and it comes from ultimately taking a systems view of the problem. It comes back from going back to sort of first principles when we think about architecture, about building.

the future state of what that tech stack looks like. you know, integration isn't enough. And I think that's that's the really key thing. Integration and automation often it seems get used almost as interchangeable terms. And, and they're really, really not. And I think that you can't have one without the other. Certainly not, you know, in the API world, but

But ultimately, integration, sort of point-to-point connection of system A to system B to move data payload, you know, X, Y, and Z. That's great. You know, that is a great way of...

change of taking a manual process, manual data entry, and I nearly said automating it, I guess you do mean automating it, and that's probably why those phrases get used interchangeably. It's no longer a human being doing the task. But actually, that synchronization of applications, that of syncing of data, that is the very most basic level of what is possible.

and taking a more nuanced and more processed mindset approach, a sort of orchestration mindset approach to the problem is really where the true kind of benefits lie. I mean, absolutely, stop.

Colin (35:56.539)

The possibilities multiply, right? Like I guess you could say that there are sort of even just with the sort of integration or sometimes goes off like simple automation, but just enabling that sort of data to flow seamlessly around your tech stack. I guess the deeper you get into this sort of automation journey, are certain, to take it back to sort of systems thinking view, there's a sort of.

Chris (36:00.408)

Thank you.

Colin (36:25.167)

there are emergent properties of integrated and automated systems. In other words, companies can uncover patterns and insights and crucially opportunities to drive innovation and to some extent efficiency and strategic decision making and I guess just making better decisions quicker. We talked about customer journey early.

I mean, I've seen some fantastic use cases of just reimagining, in a B2C case actually, but is the best one I've seen, but just of completely reimagining a customer journey in a way that just wouldn't have been possible without that sort of integrated tech stack as a foundation for it.

Chris (37:13.019)

Exactly that. mean...

don't think we've ever, other than the little bit we say at the end, really sort of blown our own trumpet in terms of what we do as an organization, a kind of rev space group. But ultimately, the value accelerator comes not from buying the automation tool, it comes from actually starting with process design. It comes from that re-imagining of what is possible now that you have those tools in place. And ultimately, I think that's the value that I know that we add.

If you take a process that you've always had, let's take a really, really simple one, like a lead from the website and going to the sales team.

If that lead came in and you had an old WordPress site, say we're talking really, you know, not that WordPress is in the dark ages, but a process that was in the dark ages of the form, you know, the form solution that you have embedded emailed that to a person. And then that person has got to manually enter that form into maybe into CRM. They've got to then go notify some people in the sales team that that lead needs to be addressed. You know, that that lead is then going to be captured on some sort of a spreadsheet.

to report on our lead volume for the month. You know, that was the reality of many organisations for a long time and I fear it's probably the reality of a great many organisations even now. In that scenario, the tempting thing to do would be to say, okay, where are the human processes? Well,

Chris (38:49.282)

we're putting the lead from the email inbox and we're entering into the CRM. So let's integrate the lead, you know, the form tool with CRM and let's create that automatically. Great. You know, let's then notify the people that we want to allocate that lead to automatically and let's automatically put that into a report. There is nothing wrong with that, but all you're really doing there...

is taking a legacy process and making it, you know, twice as good, five times as good maybe. Well, there is significantly more opportunity. I mean, I think of something that we've built very recently. Well, okay, well, that leads come in from the website and you've filled in, they filled in three or four fields. Well, great.

Well, what if instead of taking that lead and just lobbing it straight at the sales team automatically, what if we applied a qualification framework to that? So to do that, we're going need to know some things about the lead. So what if we took that three or four form fields, we enriched those and made them 20 or 30 data points. We ran a process to analyze whether that lead was a good ICP fit based on what we knew about it. If it was,

then we escalated it to the sales team because we now know some stuff about it, we escalate it to the person that knows that industry best from wherever the leaders come from. Rather than just dumping that into CRM and putting something in their inbox, why don't we surface that with all of that enrichment information into Slack or Teams so they can immediately read it on their phone or on their desktop or the place where they actually spend most of their day. What if they rather...

Colin (40:31.481)

Yeah, and hopefully work towards that single pane of glass experience for the rep as well to try and mitigate that or avoid that context switching problem that you were talking about. Sorry, I've probably by interrupting you have caused you that context switching dip.

Chris (40:43.072)

Exactly.

Chris (40:48.476)

Yeah, context switching in action. But yeah, the point is I could bang on about how great processes we build are, but actually just by saying...

What problem are we trying to solve? Well, we are trying to generate revenue by responding to good fit leads as quickly as possible and actually only leveraging sales team time on the ones that are a good fit and are likely to buy. Well, that's what we want to do. So why don't we actually start with that as the first principle of automation? And instead of saying, okay, well, we're just going to bang it into CRM trigger an email to someone and put it into a report. Let's actually reimagine that process. Let's enrich the

Let's do the filtration. Let's, know, surface it in Slack. Let's give the seller the chance as to whether they want to turn that into an SQL and accept or a sales accepted lead or whatever. Let's take, as you say, that single pane of glass view and let's not make them context switch across a few systems trying to find out what they did and what form it was that they filled in and so on. Hopefully get the point, you know, that that is an opportunity for reimagination of what can be done. And I think that's

really where we move from integration to true automation is by having that mindset of how do we make things better. And as you say, if you start thinking about that text, you think,

Actually, rather than just integrating the website and the CRM system, why don't we think about a single plane of glass? Where does everyone live? Well, they live in teams or they live in Slack, depending on your org. Why don't we surface everything in there? You know, that's a big opportunity.

Colin (42:32.56)

Yes, indeed. I've seen it sort of implemented to various degrees of competence and success. Again, not naming any names as usual.

Chris (42:32.587)

So

Chris (42:44.155)

So, you know, where does systems thinking come into play? You know, it's the growth system. And, and actually, I think it comes back to that mindset thing, because B2B tech stacks are complex ecosystems, they're kind of interconnected networks, where, I guess the efficiency of the whole system

is only as good as the Wicked Link. I guess if we were to draw a parallel to a biological system like the human body, the health of one organ within that system has the capacity to take down the rest of the system, the interaction of entities within the system, the pieces of technology within the tech stack.

is really the efficacy of that tech stack is only really as good as your ability to stitch together the data and keep everything flowing around. And having that mindset of seeing the tech stack as an ecosystem where the sort of the blood flowing through it is customer data. You know, having that mindset of how we then start architecting to deliver growth, it's all about removing kind of constraints and kind of ensuring that everything is stitched together.

And as we said earlier, know, spoiler alert, the mechanism for doing that is with a tool like an iPaaS. So whether that's a sort of SME focused tool like Zapier or a proper, you know, feature rich, dare I say enterprise grade tool like Wakato, one that we...

Colin (44:29.228)

You dear, you dear see enterprise create me when it comes to work out who I think nowadays.

Chris (44:36.334)

Well, absolutely. I think it absolutely is enterprise grade. I also just think it actually is not just for enterprise. know, it's a tool that can be useful in all of all sizes because it has just got so much capability. So that, I think, is a technology solution. That's the E.

That's the way that we kind of take the automation out of the tech stack. We kind of take automation away from the point solutions and we have something that transcends.

the entire tech stack. I guess people are familiar with AP, they're not familiar with Wacato or any of its competitors, but it's ultimately, it's a cloud-based tool. It's a kind of API centric tool, things like Wacato aren't all about APIs. And it's there to sort of seamlessly...

integrate data, share data, connect systems, but bring that data into the centre. And I think that's the really interesting thing is that you were talking about a load of data scientists spending 80 % of their time essentially just cleaning up data and sort of normalising it well.

By bringing that data into the center, by having a common view of it, by creating a database in the middle, it not actually a tool like Snowflake or whatever, that's something that we connect to, it gives us the ability to bridge the gap between all of those systems through a single tool and then start building processes.

Chris (46:15.412)

in a centralized way that kind of reimagined the way that data can be used. And the benefit of having that all in the center are sort of many and various, but having a single tool that you need to learn

to do all of that I think can't be underestimated. The ability to kind of handle errors can't be underestimated. That's something that most point solutions don't do very well. the automation doesn't work, you don't typically find out about it until it's too late.

and it gives the ability to kind of scale processes. They effectively self-document, you know, if you follow a good practice within the system. the point is that it transcends every system, it plogs every system into it, and then you can start saying, okay, let's...

stop composing solutions. We talked about, you know, EAs, and I don't want to make this too much of a sort of EA centric podcast and disappear down a rabbit hole of talking about kind of more complex IT concepts, but I will try and refrain. But I think composable architecture is something that is unlocked by having a tool like a

Colin (47:20.623)

You would love that Chris, don't I?

Chris (47:33.942)

and iPads. that's really important when we talk about sales and marketing teams to kind of bring it right back into the thing that we're supposed to be talking about, which is if you then start saying, well, sales and marketing has a single team, they have a view of the customer that has many touch points in it.

we could start building that customer journey in an automation tool by saying, okay, well, what data are they touching? Where does it need to go? How does it need to be enriched? And the sort of taking a composable view of the world almost allows us to build one big system out of many sort of point solutions.

And that's quite exciting because it gives you the ability to take a completely customer centric view of the world and build something that's really adaptable and really flexible, but also can be consumed in one of the tools in the system. So whether you want to make

HubSpot or Salesforce, the sort of center of the universe and pulling information from all things and surface them in different ways. You you could do that. You could do that through Slack or Teams as we discussed. But you essentially turn all of the point solutions in your tech stack into entities in a bigger system. We talk about this kind of entity relationships, the interconnections between entities. That's what the iPads will drive. And that enables you to genuinely build

a system in the context that we talk about systems on the growth system, you know, that is the non-human system that we alluded to in the intro. And that's really exciting. It probably doesn't sound it, but trust me, it is because it gives you the ability to do stuff you couldn't do before. It gives you the ability to unlock those.

Chris (49:27.938)

better conversion rates, that better view of the data, that better customer experience because everything comes through into the right place. But also, we constantly are told these days that AI is the solution to all problems. That's probably not true. the thing with the emergence of AI is that much like we talked about kind of vendor centric automation, AI is also becoming really vendor centric. It's there to

apply AI to data using a black box for the data that's in the point solution. Microsoft bang on about their co-pilot, HubSpot have Breeze, so it goes on. Having an iPad allows you to actually own your own AI destiny, and I think that's a really kind of under-talked-about benefit.

whether you want to just connect your own LLM or just actually engineer your own prompts, create some GPTs and bring those into the system, it allows you to make AI or an LLM a node in the system that's accessible to every other system in the tech stack.

And that's something that I think gives you some really, really exciting opportunities to really use AI in a way that's actually genuinely user-centric, that's genuinely effective and works within the context of the sort of processes within your system. And I think we're increasingly seeing that, we?

Colin (50:59.195)

Yeah, we're increasingly seeing that. And I think that's a real game changer in terms of sort of bringing back some control, which I think has been sort of slipping away from organizations as we sort of all dip our toes to various levels into this mostly vendor centric AI. I don't think we've got time to talk about it today, but I think.

we saw some really interesting stuff actually from Workato around enabling the agentic enterprise they talked about, but essentially using an iPaaS tool to really rapidly build and manage powerful, an orchestrate sort of powerful AI agents, which of course they can then communicate in the background with each other, which I think is a real game changer and probably something you wouldn't otherwise be able to even dip your toe in. Now, if you think about

reimagining your organization with that in mind, that's a really big difference from probably the tech stack that most companies have right now, plus chat beat, chat beat, GPT, know, but I guess this is a different ball game.

Chris (52:06.798)

Yes, absolutely. And take control of that use of JAT GPT by kind of doing or by baking the use cases into the system. And actually, because it's relatively easy to do, relatively, you don't need to build up technical debt to do it, coming back to the point you were making earlier, because you can devolve that kind of automation expertise into the teams.

and allow them to kind of start owning their own destiny with kind of process design. And, you know, we wouldn't advocate that happening in an uncontrolled way, but there is certainly the capability to build centers of excellence, know, to build governance into those processes that allow you to accelerate teams without burdening IT. And I think that's really, really exciting as well. So I guess the bottom line in terms of, you know, how we

reconnect the tech stack, how we benefit from all of those lovely stats that we've been talking about in terms of making the organization more profitable, better customer experience. Well, it's about owning.

the integration and automation capability of the organization as a standalone tool and function and taking a kind of systems thinking view of the problem of unifying data and orchestrating processes. you talked about immersion value earlier. I think that that is ultimately what we're talking about here is kind of creating immersion value by making a genuine system in the sense that we talk about systems through a reimagination of the way that you kind of craft your customer and prospect journeys.

and enhance the experience of interacting with your organization. And iPaaS is the tool that can unlock you doing that. So I think that's something that's an exciting opportunity that many organizations are only really starting to harness and one that we are passionate about and deliver solutions in every day. So should we do some summing up?

Chris (54:16.812)

What are your most interesting outtakes from the episode?

Colin (54:23.355)

I really like the analogy with the sort of human body and all the organs and various parts of the body having to be able to communicate seamlessly and effectively you would consider your body, your body is considered to be ill if that's not happening and maybe we need to shift our mindset in business to see the, I guess, the tech stack fragmentation and I guess kind of unintegrated, unautomated tech stacks that the most or at least suboptimally integrated and automated

tech stacks that we see in most organizations are actually a sign of ill health. So that's kind of part about the mentality shift from a more, I guess that's a little bit negative as well, thinking about, we've been talking a lot about iPads in particular as a feature rich sort of workato for example, we mentioned a lot. I think we should think about that not as like an IT project.

or something to get another piece of tech to add in there. going back to that analogy, that sort of biological analogy, if you like, we can really think about iPaaS, that's integration platform as a service for those who don't know, because we keep using the term throughout. You can think about that as a catalyst in the B2B ecosystem. So by providing that unified platform that allows you to treat the whole tech stack as a system,

essentially you're dramatically reducing friction and really enhancing visibility and real time responsiveness and there's real transformative potential there. Not just transformative, but you can transform quicker, much, much quicker as well. You could liken that to say the role of, for example, like enzymes in biological systems, so facilitating reactions or changes, let's say, that would otherwise be too slow.

or economically, or guess in the case of enzymes, energetically unfavorable. So I won't labor too far the biological analogies. But yeah, think there are probably areas that we haven't explored in this. think we maybe need to go back and draw some episode boundaries around specific areas of this. I think there's quite a lot to dive into. I think in general, we're just shifting our

Colin (56:46.853)

perspective or automation from viewing it as like a quick fix for an isolated task or like I need my sales force to talk to my net suite, for example. Embrace this as a strategic framework for actually reimagining the entire sort of ecosystem of workflows across the organization. And that essentially is a solution to a lot of all the kind of negative patterns and situations that organize for you.

organizations find themselves in nowadays and what drives all those stats we were talking about at the start of the show. I'll leave it there.

Chris (57:23.842)

Yeah, I think there's some great ones there. In fact, actually probably not a lot left for me to add. Other than probably to say, start with process, not start with automation. Start by reimagining the way that things could be done. You know, take an architecture view of the world, take that sort of orchestration mindset of how can we make things better? Like, what do we want to build? And then

Colin (57:28.936)

sorry.

Chris (57:53.538)

that can be built, you know, if you apply an iPads style tool to the problem, rather than trying to then build that in your point solutions, it transforms what's possible. And by starting with that mindset of what's possible, what do we actually want here? The acceleration of value is going to be so much more significant. So I think we'd probably leave it there, as that an hour has disappeared remarkably quickly.

Colin (58:17.551)

Yes, as usual, like this is what it's like when we talk about iPaaS folks. I think we're probably going, as I say, we're probably going to have to break up the topic of some of the topics around iPaaS and maybe focus on kind of smaller episode boundaries in future on this topic because we really can talk about it. But as you say, Chris, we're nearly at the end of the hour. It's been really interesting this and I feel like we could run and run. All that's left to say.

Chris (58:23.212)

Yeah.

Colin (58:47.491)

is, so thanks for listening. Don't forget to follow and rate the podcast. It really helps us to bring the content to wider audience and we'd really, really appreciate a moment of your time to tell us what you think. The growth system is brought to you by Revspace and we are an applied growth consultancy that connects B2B organizations with the future of growth. So we offer consultancy, education and applied delivery services.

Thanks very much for listening and speak to you again next week. Bye bye.

Chris (59:18.744)

Bye.