At Paula, we are finding that there is a theme across successful businesses looking to scale their sales, marketing, and client service operations: their systems don’t talk to each other.

We are talking about established businesses seen as reputable players in their industries.

They built their operations to meet the needs of the moment, which is the right move when you get started.

But now they find themselves with a myriad of disjointed systems and more manual processes than even they realize.

Because they’ve achieved success this way, often this setup doesn’t come across as a problem.

But the research tells us that some teams spend up to 60% of their time on activities arising from having disparate systems, usually downloading, manipulating, and uploading data in different places.

And their ability to market in modern ways is seriously limited.

The issue is becoming harder to ignore, though.

As they look around and take notice of the way more digitally mature companies are doing business, often their own peers, the consequences of disconnection begin to become more apparent.

It usually starts with wanting to do things that are seemingly easy for everyone else but incredibly difficult for them.

It can be trying to answer questions like:

• What were our most significant revenue sources last year?
  
  

• Can you get me a list of the people who attended X webinar and then became clients?

  
  

• How many leads has marketing sent the sales team this quarter, and where are those at?

Or wanting to do things like personalize emails based on simple categories like prospect, client, and former client; be notified when prospects visit their website; or qualify leads before sending them to the sales team.

The thing is, in order to address these, your systems need to talk to each other. Full stop.

Wea are talking marketing, sales, product, and financial data—all connected to the same place.

And for that place not to be Excel.

We realize integrations sound daunting for a lot of people.

It’s a particularly hard pill to swallow for a lot of executives and business owners who aren’t involved in these kinds of decisions day-to-day.

Or got to where they are without engaging in complex technology projects.

Or have been burned before when undertaking such projects.

But the cost of inaction these days is incredibly high.

And the problem CAN be solved—we do it all the time.