Six tools, one customer, nobody's fault.
Best-of-breed made sense when each tool was clearly better than any suite. The tie-breaker now is the handover: every seam between two systems is a place where the order line, the complaint or the follow-up goes missing.
A distributor we worked with last year ran six tools. A CRM for pipeline, a helpdesk for complaints, a spreadsheet for dispatch, accounting software for invoices, a hiring tool, and WhatsApp holding it all together. Every one of them was, on its own, a defensible choice.
The customer's experience of that stack was being asked to resend a purchase order to a company that had already shipped against it.
Nothing was broken. Everything was in a different system.
Seams are where work is lost
Best-of-breed assumes the cost of a seam is roughly zero — that an integration makes two systems behave like one. In practice a seam costs you three things: a sync that can be stale, a field that exists in both places and disagrees, and an owner nobody assigned for the moment work crosses over.
When something falls through a seam, no vendor is at fault. Each system did its job. The customer becomes the integration layer, which is exactly the job you were trying to avoid hiring for.
What changed the maths
Two things. Suites got good enough that the feature gap stopped being decisive for most mid-sized teams — the marginal helpdesk feature you lose matters less than the ticket that is finally attached to an order line. And AI raised the price of fragmentation: an agent can only be as useful as the record it can see, and a record spread across six systems is not one record.
Count your seams
Before your next renewal, draw one customer’s journey from enquiry to invoice to complaint and mark every point where data moves between systems. That number, not your feature checklist, is what your team spends its week on.
You do not have to consolidate everything — accounting can stay where it is. But sales, service and the people who deliver the work belong on the same record, because those are the three handovers your customer actually feels.