You’re in a meeting. Someone flags a problem: Leads aren’t converting, customers are churning, projects are taking twice as long as they should. Within minutes, someone has opened a new tab and started Googling solutions.
That’s ok, success leaves clues.
But you aren’t met with solutions, you’re met with products.
“I saw a demo for a conversion optimisation platform that looks good.” “There’s this AI tool that analyses sales calls.” “What about this CRM?”
And just like that, you’re £1,500 a month deeper into your tech stack.
Perhaps it feels like progress. You’ve:
identified a problem
found a tool that promises to solve it
And buying something is tangible action
The sales demo looks slick, the features sound perfect, and frankly, it’s easier than the alternative: actually figuring out what’s broken and doing the uncomfortable work to fix it.
But here’s what happens next. You bolt the new tool onto a system that’s already not working. The underlying problem doesn’t go away — it just gets temporarily obscured by the novelty of implementing something new. Three to six months later, you’re back in the same meeting, talking about the same issues, and maybe someone’s already got another demo booked.
This isn’t to say “all tools are bad”. It’s about not buying tools before you’ve done the work to understand what’s actually broken.
When your website problem isn’t a tool problem
Let’s say your website isn’t converting. So you start looking at conversion rate tools — heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing platforms, those clever pop-ups that promise to capture abandoning visitors.
But hang on. Does your website actually speak to the people you’re trying to reach? Or is it full of vague value propositions and features lists that could apply to any business in your sector?
And where’s that traffic even coming from? Because if you’re driving volume through paid ads or SEO for keywords that attract the wrong people, no amount of conversion rate optimisation is going to turn them into customers. They’re just not a fit. You’re about to optimise the wrong thing.
Traffic volume is a vanity metric if it’s the wrong traffic. Conversion rate tools can tell you where people are dropping off, but they can scarcely tell you why your messaging doesn’t resonate or why your targeting is bringing in people who were never going to buy. That requires actually looking at who your buyers are, what they care about, and whether your site speaks to that. It requires honesty about whether your traffic strategy is working or just generating numbers that look good in a report.
You can’t tool your way out of that. You have to fix the fundamentals first. And if you’re paying an external agency to get the traffic to the site, by all means make this their problem.
When “scalability” means the opposite of what you’re doing
A company with a stated goal of scalability, that should be pretty recognisable. Growth, efficiency, doing more with the same resources — all the things that make sense when you’re trying to build something that doesn’t have revenue and headcount hand-cuffed to each other.
Zoom in on one person in your customer delivery team, whatever you may call it. You find them managing fifteen projects. Simultaneously. Each one with its own charter, scope tracker, stakeholder comms plan, status reports. Proper project management methodology, all the right artefacts and governance.
But here’s the thing: what if these projects have glaring similarities? Not fifteen new frontiers requiring bespoke treatment. Variations on the same theme, with repeatable patterns that should be templated, systemised, automated, and made self-serve.
If your goal is scalability, why would you treat everything like a one-off project? Why is one person manually managing work that could be standardised? The answer isn’t better project management tools or more sophisticated tracking. It’s to stop doing project management entirely and start building processes that don’t need someone holding their hand.
But that’s harder. It requires stepping back and asking whether the way you’ve always done things actually aligns with where you’re trying to go. It means admitting that all those charters and plans and governance structures might be solving the wrong problem. And it definitely means having uncomfortable conversations about why the business operates one way while claiming to want something completely different.
When sales tools can’t fix a sales problem
Right, this one ties a few things together. Let’s say your sales team is looking at AI meeting co-pilots — the ones that listen to calls, analyse conversations, give tips on objection handling and closing techniques. Sounds useful, right?
But what if one of your major problems is that sales people are miss-selling? Making up their own packages, shoe-horning in customers who aren’t a good fit, promising things that aren’t actually possible — all quietly encouraged by top-down pressure to hit numbers and earn commission.
An AI assistant might give you solid feedback on isolated conversations. It might tell you that someone didn’t handle an objection well or missed a closing opportunity. But it doesn’t understand the full context. It can’t tell you that the sale itself was a problem, that the client was never going to succeed because what they were sold doesn’t exist.
And that creates a knock-on effect. Your customer delivery teams are looking at churn. They want to understand customers better, improve retention, reduce drop-off. So they start shopping for a new CRM — something that captures better data, tracks the customer lifecycle more effectively, gives them visibility into warning signs.
Except the biggest reason for churn is that the sales person promised the world and it was never possible to deliver. A new CRM isn’t going to solve that. Maybe you’re not recording these reasons properly in the first place. Maybe you’re not being honest about the warning signs. Maybe you can’t solve the friction between sales and delivery because the incentive structure rewards the wrong behavior and the bad-actors know it but won’t address it.
Or maybe, more innocently, this is just the way you’ve always done it and no one perceives the real problem. That’s fine — you’re right up close to it, and you’re probably numb to it because it’s an age-old story. But you need to actually consider these things before you throw a few grand a month and a headache of a migration to another tool that won’t fix the systemic issue.
Tie what you’re measuring to your actual goals. Properly drill into it. Ask whether the metrics you’re chasing actually matter, or whether you’re just tracking things because they’re easy to track. Ask whether the shiny thing is going to solve the problem, or just give you a nice new dashboard and yet another set of login credentials.
The pattern you’re stuck in
What ties all of this together is that buying tools feels like solving problems, even if you’re really just treating symptoms. Over and over again.
Your website doesn’t convert because your messaging is vague and your traffic strategy brings the wrong people. Your projects don’t scale because you’re treating repeatable work as bespoke. Your customers churn because sales sold them something impossible, and no CRM is going to capture that honestly if the incentive structure rewards the lie.
The cost isn’t just the monthly subscriptions stacking up (though, those add up fast). It’s the bloat. Every new tool adds complexity — more logins, more integrations, more things to maintain. Your team spends time adjusting to new software instead of fixing actual issues. And pick-any-point-in-the-future later, you’re in the same place you started, with more stuff yet somehow less resources, and a dwindling appetite to actually solve anything.
Before you sign that contract
If you’re currently talking to a salesperson about your next tech purchase, give me fifteen minutes and I’ll tell you exactly what they’re going to say next. How their off-the-shelf product just so happens to be the perfect solution to your highly specific, nuanced problem. How other companies just like yours have seen incredible results. How the implementation is straightforward and the ROI is obvious. This time next year, Rodney…
They’re not lying, necessarily. They genuinely believe their tool can help. But they’re solving for their commission, not your systemic issues. And the questions they’re not supposed to ask — What’s actually broken here? Why is it broken? What have you already tried? What are the incentives at play? Those are the questions that matter.
You don’t need more tools. You need discipline. The kind that makes you stop before you start shopping and ask: What’s the real problem? Not the pain — the actual, underlying thing that’s broken.
Tie your measurements to your actual goals and be honest about whether you’re chasing metrics that matter or just metrics that are easy. Look at whether your processes align with your stated objectives or whether you’re just doing things the way you’ve always done them. Maybe you’re in for uncomfortable conversations. Lean in, it’s just business.
If you don’t do that work, the next subscription won’t save you. Your business will end up a few grand a month poorer, waiting for the contracts to end, searching for the next thing that promises to finally fix everything. Maybe that’s why you’re here.
