When Buying More Tools Only Makes Your (GTM) Problems Worse

Most companies don’t have a tooling problem; they have a workflow problem. Yet they keep buying tools anyway.

When Nina Pascucci, Sr Director of Sales Operations, joined MongoDB, she walked into what she called “tool mania.”

In particular, she was tasked with improving the workflow for the Customer Success team. They were using multiple SaaS tools, including Gainsight, Salesforce, Tableau, and Terret. There were also custom, internal tools purpose-built for the CSMs.

Yet despite all of the insight these tools were supposed to provide, the CSMs were frustrated. They were opening five or more tabs to answer a single customer question. The “call to action” system fired off so many alerts and created so much alert fatigue that people had basically stopped looking at it. The result was tool sprawl that made simple tasks harder, not easier.

How tool sprawl happens

Tool sprawl is a common pattern at fast-growing organizations, and it’s a pattern that new AI vendors and vibe-coded apps will only accelerate.

The first step in Nina’s process to untangle these systems was interviewing CSMs about their day-to-day workflows. No single tool had the full picture. A CSM trying to understand a customer had to stitch it together across systems: checking health scores in Gainsight, pulling account history from Salesforce, looking at usage trends in Tableau, and cross-referencing signals in the internal tools.

How did this happen? Different stakeholders were responsible for different metrics. For example, the product management team wanted to understand feature adoption. The finance and sales operations team wanted to understand the forecast. The CSM leadership wanted to understand onboarding and measure customer health.

The result was that each of those teams had introduced tools in isolation, creating a Frankenstein of systems. Nobody had deliberately designed this arrangement. It had evolved naturally as the company grew and different teams made different tooling decisions to track their own metrics. (And for the record, I am 100% sure that I personally contributed to this tool sprawl!)

“The systems reflected our internal org chart, instead of the end users’ needs,” Nina explained.

It’s not that anyone made bad decisions. Every team made reasonable decisions for their own needs. The problem is that “reasonable for my team” and “coherent for the end user” are two different things.

Buy-in has to go bottom-up

To kick things off, Nina’s team ran a cross-functional workshop before making any major decisions. Day one was tool walkthroughs and a SWOT analysis. Day two was alignment on the actual problem statement. She brought together people from different orgs who had never been in the same room talking about the same problems.

This exercise was eye-opening for all the different groups that had rolled out tools to the CSMs. They could now see and understand the tool fatigue the CSMs were experiencing, and were motivated to address the end-to-end process instead of their individual needs.

When it came time to start designing the systems, Nina’s took a bottom-up approach to getting buy-in. The end users had the biggest pains as a result of the tool sprawl. Redesigning the process from their perspective helped Nina identify and recommend parts of the workflows that could be removed or simplified. By the time she met with the executives, she was reporting a decision that’s already been validated.

The goal was a coherent workflow (not just “fewer tools”)

It is tempting to start with the solution: let’s consolidate systems. Some of Nina’s stakeholders suggested a “lift and shift” of functionality from Gainsight into Salesforce to reduce the number of screens needed. A lift-and-shift would successfully reduce the number of tools, but it would have replicated many of the old problems in a new environment.

Instead, Nina mapped what the onboarding process was supposed to accomplish. She identified which of the 15 steps in the existing checklist were necessary versus administrative overhead that had accumulated over time. And with lots of back and forth between the CSMs and their management, she was able to cut that process to five steps.

She knew the team wanted fewer tools, so she investigated whether the new onboarding workflow could be implemented in Salesforce. Her team ultimately de-commissions Gainsight and rolled out the streamlined process directly in Salesforce. But she didn’t enter the project with a goal of eliminating a particular tool. She entered the project trying to understand the process and which metrics were critical to track.

What happens when you get the process right first

The onboarding improvements were one of many major changes Nina’s team implemented.

She also rebuilt the call-to-action system that was firing too many false positives, not by buying a new tool, but by fixing the underlying data science model triggering those calls-to-action. She was able to reduce from 30 CTA types to 8.

She redesigned the forecasting process so that using Terret was the natural thing to do, not the extra thing. Terret adoption went from 20% to over 80%.

Nina piloted each of these changes before full deployment, reporting back to the CSM management on feedback and issues at each step.

The lesson: it’s the fool, not the tool

With so many new AI tools on the market, it’s tempting to keep bolting on new systems. But AI doesn’t fix broken workflows. It just helps you execute them faster. Teams that skip the hard work of talking to end users and mapping the end-to-end process will find themselves in the same place they started.

Hey, these challenges will keep us ops people employed… at least, for now 🙃