We talk to a lot of B2B tech companies. And there’s a conversation that comes up constantly, usually somewhere around the $20M ARR mark, that goes something like this:
“We’re spending north of $10,000 a month on software. And nothing talks to each other.”
The stack made sense when they built it: marketing automation, outbound prospecting, , a quoting tool, a helpdesk, something for billing, and some version of Zapier holding it all together plugged into a CRM for some record management. Somewhere along the way it stopped making sense, and nobody noticed until the invoices got painful and people complained that nothing worked
The year one stack makes sense
When you’re sub-$5M ARR, you’re optimizing for flexibility and speed. You need to move fast, try things, and not get locked into anything expensive. So, you do what everyone does:
- HubSpot for CRM because it’s free to start and easy to use
- A quoting tool bolted on when the sales team gets serious
- A cute ticketing app when support tickets start piling up
- Something for billing and renewals when the spreadsheet breaks
The tools are cheap, or free, or “good enough for now.” Your team is small enough that the lack of integration between them isn’t a crisis, someone just copies the data across manually.
What happens by year five
The team is 40 people. You’re at $8–12M ARR. And that stack you built for flexibility has become your most expensive fixed cost.
Per-seat licensing means every new hire adds $200–400/month in software costs before they’ve done a single thing. The quoting tool doesn’t talk to the CRM. Finance is reconciling renewals in a spreadsheet because the billing system can’t pull from CRM data. Your services team is in a completely separate PSA that nobody in sales has access to, so account managers have no idea what’s happening in delivery. Support tickets live in Zendesk; the customer record lives in HubSpot. Nobody has a full view of anything.
Gartner estimates that 30% of global SaaS spend is “toxic”, and Zylo’s 2024 SaaS Management Index, which analyzed over $34 billion in real SaaS spend, found that companies waste an average of $18 million per year on unused or underutilised licences — with only 49% of provisioned licences actually in active use.
But the more significant cost is what happens (or doesn’t) to your data with a fragmented stack, with 60–73% of a company’s data going unused for analytics. Not hard to imagine when the answer to “where are we with this account?” involves opening four tabs, reconciling manually, and hoping nothing got missed. At $20M in Revenue, you are running the business on a ‘guide by wire’ basis. You aren’t connected to every conversation or decision. You need metrics that are trustworthy.
What the migration looks like
The companies that make the switch from fragmented point solutions to a consolidated platform almost always say the same things in hindsight.
First: they waited too long. The integration debt made the migration harder than it needed to be, and by the time they pulled the trigger, a year or two of data was scattered across systems.
Second: the cost savings were real but not the main reason they did it. The main reason was visibility. For the first time, someone could ask “how is this account doing?” and get a real answer — support history, project delivery status, billing, renewal date, last activity — in one place, without opening four tabs.
Third: implementation was where previous attempts had failed. They’d tried to consolidate before, usually onto something larger and more expensive, and the project stalled because the SI fees on top of the licensing made the numbers impossible.
How TekStack approaches this
We faced all of these problems to we built TekStack to give service-based companies all the tools and metrics we never had in our 50 combined years of scaling businesses.
CRM, PSA, help desk, billing, and marketing automation on one platform, one database, built on Microsoft. No integration layer to maintain. No per-seat cost explosion as you hire. No separate implementation partner charging you to connect things that should have been connected from day one.
The unified data model is also why agentic AI actually works on TekStack in a way it can’t on a fragmented stack. An agent that can only see your CRM data can only reason about CRM data. An agent that can see your entire customer record — deals, projects, invoices, tickets, marketing history — can actually do something useful with it.
One platform. One price. Implementation, support, and managed services included from day one. No surprises.
TekStack is a B2B operations platform built on Microsoft 365. CRM, PSA, Help Desk, Revenue Management, and AI agents — in one place. See how it works →
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