It’s been a busy week with some major personal stuff, which I’m not ready to write about–but will update here soon. Thankfully this was already drafted so we’re able to keep on schedule. Turns out my parents were right about getting homework done early! Hope you all have a great weekend! Onto the post…

Your B2B growth stack is out of control.

You didn't do it on purpose. Neither did anyone else on your team.

Every tool had a reasonable justification at the time.

The intent data platform, because you needed better signal. The sales engagement tool, because the old one didn't have the right reporting. The conversation intelligence software, because the VP of Sales wanted to coach from call recordings.

The outreach tool because your emails weren’t getting delivered.

The LinkedIn outreach tool because maybe that would be better than email.

And on and on. Each purchase made sense alone.

Together, they built a growth function that spends more time managing tools than using them. Data conflicts across systems. Onboarding a new rep takes three weeks just to get access to everything.

Of course you might have bought all of these tools from one vendor–say, Hubspot. That doesn’t mean they’re being used, or driving any results.

And the people who were supposed to be doing growth work are instead spending hours every week on "work about the work," as my cofounder Julian calls it: integration maintenance, data reconciliation, tool-specific training that may or may not ever lead to a new customer.

Not growth. Not new sales. Work about the work.

Claude Code came along. In theory you could stitch everything together with it. But is that even a good idea?

The stack that was supposed to make growth faster has, for many, made it slower. The slowdown happened gradually — one tool at a time, one integration at a time. Most teams don’t even realize how much its slowing them down. But how did we get here?

How Stacks Grow Without Anyone Deciding They Should

If this sounds familiar, you're far from alone. Growth stacks don't get bloated because of one bad strategic call. They get bloated because of how people and companies actually work.

Adding a tool has a clear owner and a clear process. A champion pushes for it, usually the person who wants to use it. Cost benefit analysis is done. Costs are usually straightforward (well, they were until AI credits and tokens were invented–we don’t do those at Skyp because we don’t believe in surprising our customers).

Benefits are usually straightforward to quantify. Who doesn’t love a vibecoded ROI calculator?

All of this means adding a tool is easy.

Removing one is the opposite. Unless the company's in financial crisis and the CFO cracks down, cutting an underperforming tool has no clear owner and no clear process. Costs are front-loaded. Benefits are diffuse.

On a human level, canceling a tool means disruption for whoever uses it, a migration nobody wants to own, and the risk of getting blamed if something breaks after. So tools stay long after most of the team has quietly stopped using them.

Compound three to five years of adding without removing and you get bloat.

The Real Cost of Stack Bloat

Direct spend is the obvious cost. It's usually bigger than growth leaders realize and worth adding up. The worst offender might be your CRM–their salespeople are usually phenomenal, and probably talked your team into a bundle that included a bunch of tools they either never needed or never found the time to actually set up or use.

But direct spend is rarely the biggest cost. It’s the hidden costs that get you.

First there’s the cognitive load. Run twelve tools and you have twelve onboarding tracks, twelve potential points of failure when the pipeline breaks, twelve things to check for conflicts when you launch a new thing. Lean teams can’t run lots of tools–so if you want to run a lean team, but you have lots of tools, beware.

The second hidden cost is fragmentation. Prospect data in one tool, engagement data in another, intent data in a third, and the CRM usually a little out of date on everything. More sources with more integration friction produces worse decisions than fewer, reliable ones.

Both combine to crush your productivity. Slower execution, more meetings, more tasks that add little to no business value–like data reconciliation–and less time spent with prospects and customers. All the tools you have can even prevent new tools from being successful, because nobody has the time to devote to learning how to use them to make them successful.

How to Find What's Actually Working

Shift the focus from usage to results. Ask what each tool produced, or what it will produce in the coming 3-6 months, based on how you’re planning on using it. If it’s an execution tool, what deals did it touch or what other impact can you attribute to it? If it’s a decision tool, which decisions could not have been made without it, or would have been made wrong?

If nothing comes to mind, it's out. If something else in the stack already does the same job reasonably well, it's out.

Vote off the island

Give your team the space to vote tools off the island. I have yet to meet one person who likes Unify GTM. Every one complains about how hard it is to set up, how much time it takes to maintain (every day!), and how it’s constantly upselling them with the need for more add ons or credits. Deliverability–what we think is the sine qua non of an outreach tool–is terrible.

So why don’t people stop using it? Two words: Annual contract.

But monetary cost is only half the equation. It's fine to admit a tool is ruining your team's day-to-day and abandon it. Don't beat yourself up over the waste. Don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy. Better to deal with it head-on.

You'll often find the real problem isn't the wrong tools — it's too many of them. Every time I find a promising new GTM tool, I want to try it. So I sign up. But between everything else going on, I rarely invest the time to set it up right, and I never realize the value. When I put things down and focus on fewer tools, that's when I get an honest read on what actually works.

Cut ruthlessly now, and you can always go back and renew later. What you can't get back is the year your team spent managing tools instead of using them.