Rant: My VP signed off on a 6-figure MarTech stack and nobody asked the sales team what they actually needed

Last month we rolled out a $150k analytics platform that our CMO saw at a conference in San Francisco. Three weeks in and the sales team is still logging leads in a shared Google Sheet because the new tool doesn't talk to Salesforce the way they promised. I spent two days in a room with four vendors who all said their system was the gold standard for enterprise attribution. Meanwhile my colleague in demand gen keeps asking me where her pipeline reports are. The kicker is that the old system had a weird workaround but at least the data was clean. Has anyone else dealt with a big budget rollout that blew up because nobody bothered to walk through the actual day to day workflows first?

3 comments

3 Comments

emmaj331mo ago

Nobody bothered to walk through the actual day to day workflows" is the exact problem, always test the tool with your real data before buying.

daniel5931mo ago

Yeah man, I've seen that exact mess play out way too many times.

milestaylor1mo ago

Spent 3 years at a company that bought a 50k CRM without anyone checking if it could handle our weird client tagging system. The sales demo looked great but the real workflow was a nightmare of manual workarounds. It reminds me of how people buy bulk spices at the store without checking if their family actually eats that stuff, then wonder why they're throwing away expired cumin. Or folks who buy a fancy espresso machine but never factor in the 10 minutes of daily cleaning it needs. The tool itself isn't the problem, it's always the gap between what the brochure promises and what the 3pm on a Tuesday reality looks like.