Stop Paying Four Vendors to Tell You What Already Happened

II have spent most of my career on the buying side of this. I ran HR, I built a company that sold into HR, and I have sat in the renewal meeting where somebody slides a number across the table and everyone nods because nobody wants to be the person who reopens it.

So let me do the thing nobody does in that meeting. Let me add it up.

Take a company of five hundred. An engagement platform across everybody. Notetaker licenses for about a third of the company, because that is roughly how far it spreads once people start expensing it. Revenue intelligence for the customer-facing teams. That is three line items, three contracts, three renewals, and three admins who each know one system.

That is $146,000 a year.

Now here is the part that should stop you. Every one of those tools reports on something that is already over. The survey closed in July. The transcript is of a call that ended. The revenue intelligence dashboard is telling you about a deal cycle you cannot go back and change. You are spending six figures a year on a very expensive rearview mirror, and you are buying three of them.

I want to walk both sides of this, because the People side and the Revenue side of the house are each being sold the same problem in a different language, and neither one knows the other is paying for it.

Start with the survey, because it is the one I know best and the one I am least gentle about.

You field it in the summer. It closes, it goes to the vendor, and the vendor cuts the data. You get a deck, and legal and comms look at the deck, and somebody builds an action plan template out of it. Managers get the results in the fall, if they get them at all.

Gallup has the number on that last part. Only 8% of employees strongly agree that their employer takes action on survey results. Eight out of a hundred, and I have watched people hear that figure and assume they misheard it as eight out of ten.

And it is worse than doing nothing, which is the part people get wrong. Gallup ranked workgroups by how well they followed through after a survey, and the two ends of that ranking went in opposite directions. The top quarter raised their engagement scores by an average of 10%. The bottom quarter watched theirs fall by 3%. Asking your people a question and then not answering it does not leave you where you started. It puts you behind where you started.

I understand why it happens. I have been the person who had the deck and did not have the room, the budget or the political cover to do anything with it. Nobody in HR is sitting on survey results out of laziness. The lag is structural. By the time the data is clean enough to show a manager, the thing the manager could have fixed has moved.

So we are paying for an instrument that measures the weather from last quarter and then blaming managers ...

Now the other half of the building, where the same problem wears a suit.

Revenue intelligence runs about $1,600 per seat per year at list, and that is before the platform fee sitting underneath it. Vendr, which sees actual signed contracts rather than list prices, puts the median annual Gong contract at $55,040 across more than a thousand purchases.

Because it costs that, you buy it for the people who close. Sales gets it. Sometimes a few CS leads get it if somebody fought for the licenses.

Look at who that leaves out. Support, who talks to your customers more than sales does and hears the churn coming first. Implementation, who is in the room when the relationship is either made or lost without anyone writing it down. Product, who would give anything for an unfiltered hour of customer calls. Every manager in the company running one-to-ones, which is the highest-leverage recurring meeting in any organization and the one with the least instrumentation on it.

The per-seat model decided who in your company is allowed to learn from a conversation. That was a pricing decision, and it turned into an org design decision, and nobody in the room ever framed it that way.

And you are still getting it after the fact. The call is over. The deal is where it is. You are reviewing tape.

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about the jobs report, and the argument I made there is the same argument I am making here, so I am going to reuse it.

Everything is late. Not broken, not decoupled, late. The measurement is late, and so the response is later, and so the fix arrives after the moment it would have worked.

Look at what you are buying:

The survey tells you in October about July. The notetaker tells you at 3:05 what was said at 3:00, in a document that goes into a folder. Revenue intelligence tells you this quarter about last quarter’s pipeline. The performance review tells you in January about a pattern that started in March.

Four purchases. Four data models that do not speak to each other. And every one of them pointed backwards, all lagging and late indicators.

The reason nothing changes is not that your people lack information. It is that the information shows up after the only moment it could have been used, which is the next conversation. Behavior does not move in a dashboard. It moves in the room, with a person, the next time they have the same kind of meeting.

If I were sitting in the CHRO seat again with $146,000 and this problem, here is what I would want to buy.

One layer over every conversation the company has, inside and out. Not a transcript and not a summary. What happened, what moved, and what to do differently in the next one, while there is still a next one to change.

I would want engagement read from the conversations that are already happening, instead of from a form I have to talk people into filling out. It is all sitting there already. Every one-to-one in your company tells you something about how much trust there is in that relationship, and nobody is reading any of it.

I would want it priced so that everybody gets it. The manager running one-to-ones, the support rep on an escalation, the CS lead on a renewal, the seller on a first call. If the pricing forces you to pick who gets to improve, the pricing is the product decision.

And I would want one contract, one admin and one renewal, because the four-vendor stack has a cost nobody puts in the business case, which is the human being who spends their week reconciling four systems that were never designed to agree. I have become an Excel pivot table guru for this exact reason, and I would like to retire from this.

I am not going to tell you what your number is. I do not know your headcount, how far your notetaker licenses have spread, or how many seats of revenue intelligence you are carrying.

You do, or you can find out in about four minutes.

We built a calculator for it. Move the slider to your headcount, uncheck whatever you do not have, and it shows you what you are paying now against one platform for everyone. At five hundred people with all three, the difference is about $50,000 a year and two fewer vendors to manage.

The savings are the smaller half of the argument. The bigger half is that you would stop paying four companies to tell you what already happened, and start finding out while you can still do something about it.

Run your own numbers. If they come back and the stack is worth it, keep it. At least you will have looked.

Calculate your stack →