Let me start off with a fact that I 100% know is true from experience:
Building a SaaS utility is brutal. Your product is never done, and your support never ends. I see this strange trend where big brands are wasting time, money and IT/engineering resources on building internal software tools that fall short of the mark.
In 2022, your structure and processes need to be seamless, streamlined, and sleek, with all components woven together and working in tandem. To have any hope of competing with other brands, you need a system built by a craftsperson who is an expert in progressive marketing and knows all the components and complexities. It is a truly monstrous project. If you are running a consumer brand, please, please, please focus on building a better product, not internal software. Trust me!
From my perspective (the world of trade marketing), the attempt comes in three versions:
This approach is what 99% of consumer brands do. It is unsustainable, creating system fatigue with your team that leads to weak adoption in the organization; messy, dirty data to organize and huge scalability issues for your department.
A few questions to ask yourself:
- Is all my data safe, connected, and under control?
- Can I organically search and pull abstract reports, or is my team pulling data from disconnected systems and building endless spreadsheets?
- Do I have any tools that only one person on my team is using?
- Is that tool and its function important? What happens if that person gets hit by a bus?
- What happens if one of your critical single solution platforms pivots or changes its focus?
- What if one of your single solutions gets hacked?
- Has anyone on your team uttered the words: "I did not get that email." "What spreadsheet?" or "I'm not sure where that data is."
- Is your team standing around paralyzed because they are afraid of change?
- Are they afraid of transparency and process for their work? Why?
If you’re not concerned at this point – shame on you!
A few questions to ask yourself:
- Is building a custom marketing solution inside SAP or Salesforce easy to do?
- What is the cost of an SAP/Salesforce engineering team?
- How long will this take, and what opportunities will I miss in that time?
- Who will be the process expert from your team that guides the feature build?
- Are they an expert in the marketing department who 100% understands the entire landscape of the issues?
- Can you pull your expert out of their day-to-day to focus on this for an extended period?
- Is your marketing expert (above) also a process expert, a UI expert, and a data engineer?
- Who will run education, adoption, and actual operational support day-to-day?
- Who oversees tech support and bug fixes?
- When the marketing landscape changes and your system's functionality breaks, who will fix it? Will it happen the same day or in six months, or (more than likely) never get done and your system will be abandoned?
Yikes!
Consider all the above-mentioned questions, minus the technical knowledge base and expertise that the large CRM and ERP companies bring to the table. In addition to these, ask yourself:
- Once the utility is "finished" (haha), can you continue to support its maintenance, bug fixes, and feature advancements?
- From experience I know it takes just as many engineers to build as it does to maintain and service the product. Do you have the capability to do this for the length of the tool?
- Running a software company is super complex (I know, and my hairline shows it), the layers of true expertise involved are staggering. Does your company have that type of staff sitting around doing nothing, or do you have to build a team?
- Are you ready to keep up with the industry's best? A tool in place is excellent, but as the industry standards shift, your in-house team needs to do a bunch of engineering to keep up.
- How are you going to ensure that your data is secure? Can you keep up with the very fast-paced world of security?
- Are you prepared to have your competitors using state-of-the-art SaaS platforms with all the newest features while you sit on a homemade tool that you can't afford to evolve?
- Will your team be left behind?
OMG, this plan very rarely works.
As a leader, it is up to you to ask these questions and make the right decision. If you’re going to invest in new software: get what you really need. You need defined automated process, organized operational data, and cross-functional collaboration with smooth pipelines. Don’t build a hodge-podge structure or Frankenstein one together. Having the carefully crafted solution in place will allow you and your team to focus on doing what you do best: marketing.
