Take two cars for example: a Fiat and a Ferrari. Both have the same basic components that build an engine but have stark differences in final output. The key separation? Engine design. 

For your business, the “components” are the software tools used to solve business use cases. The “engine” is the overall technology stack that you currently have as the backbone for growth of your business. And when this engine is made of mismatched or disconnected parts, it starts to stall. A reality of many businesses today. 

This comes with a hidden fee that folks at Hubspot taught me - the Cobble Tax. 

What is the Cobble Tax? 

The cost — in time, productivity & missed opportunities — of piecing together disparate tools. 

It is what businesses end up paying when the various platforms do not talk to each other. For example when: 

• Marketing teams use MailChimp for email marketing, collect leads there and export them manually to a different system, say Pipedrive. 
• Teams run ads on various social media platforms each with their own analytics. And then spend hours tying it back to unique customer behavior. 
• Sales manages contacts in Salesforce, while marketing uses a separate customer database in another platform. 
• Support teams use, say, Jira to log customer tickets while never being able to see the full customer journey from lead to loyal advocate. 

Each of these tools may be great at solving individual problems. But collectively? They create silos, data inefficiencies and massive coordination headaches. 

During my time at Hubspot, more than 80% of businesses would come to me seeking Hubspot to solve a point solution. But when probed further about their business they'd soon realize that the real problem is the cobbled up technology stack. 

What's the impact of Cobble Tax? 

#1: Fragmented Data = Flawed Decisions

When customer data is scattered, nobody has a truly 360° view of a customer. For example, marketing wouldn’t know which channels are truly driving conversions. Sales won’t know which campaigns brought them qualified leads. Leadership would find it difficult to trust granular level numbers - decision making would mostly be educated guesswork. 

#2: Manual Work = Wasted Time

I remember a discovery call with a SaaS company CEO - she said that every time I need a detailed report on the lifecycle journey of my customers, my team needs 3-4 days to compute it. And even after that, it has gaps. Reconciliation of data from various systems is manual labor that not only adds zero value, but can actually cause damage - for example, errors while copy pasting. All this wasted time - wonder how many opportunities are missed. 

#3: Missed Opportunities = Slower Growth

Without a single source of truth, businesses are flying blind. You may miss customer trends or cross-sell signals. Because of inconsistent messaging across different tools, you may not be able to personalize outreach. Campaigns underperform because of a broken feedback loop. Growth stalls and costs rise. 

#4: Tool Overload = Rising Costs

Each software comes with its own subscription, support plan, integrations, training, etc. What may start off as a nice and cheap solution may soon become a bloated tech stack with a hefty price tag - both financially and operationally. 

How to avoid Cobble Tax?

As businesses scale, they tend to add more and more tools to their stack. Add a live chat here or an SEO tool there. Now we need a survey tool. Things like this bloat up the system and before you know it, you’re juggling 10+ systems, data is out of sync, integrations are more patchwork than solid and overall complexity starts rising. 

And untangling this later is more expensive and painstaking - imagine trying to untangle a pair of wires versus a room full of 12,000 wires all of the same color. The more entrenched the cobbled system, the more disruptive and expensive it is to untangle. 

Businesses need to make an early decision to implement a single source of truth. There are a few softwares out there that can give you this, but the best-in-class is Hubspot. With Hubspot you, get:

• Unified CRM - One place for all contact data, updated automatically
• Integrated tools - all marketing, sales, support use cases can be solved centrally
• Better insights - real time business analytics to make decision making easier
• Time-saving automation - AI based use cases to eliminate manual labor
• Scalability - grows with your business growth

Conclusion

If you are using too many disjointed tools, you’re not just in silos — you are at a competitive disadvantage. The Cobble Tax may be silent, but it is costing you every day. And the solution is never more tools — it’s smarter tools that work together. 

Ready to stop patching and start scaling? Come to talk us, at Vera Verto Consulting