Best of breed was right in 2015
There was a time when the advice was spot on: buy the best specialized tool for every job and connect everything via API. In 2015 the suites simply couldn’t do enough. Salesforce without add-on tools meant selling without sequencing, forecasting at Excel level, proposals in Word. Whoever built best of breed back then had a real edge.
Except 2015 was eleven years ago, and the advice is still being handed out as if nothing happened.
A lot happened. The suites caught up, partly built, partly bought: sequencing, meeting routing, scheduling, call recording, forecasting, quoting, ticketing. All native, all in editions many companies have licensed anyway. The feature gap to the point solution has shrunk from huge to small, for a team of 20 to 200 people usually to zero. What hasn’t shrunk: the price of separation.
Because every point solution costs three times. The license you see. The integration you only see when it breaks, and it breaks, with every API update, with every field name somebody changes. And the data break, the deal that has a different name in the sequencing tool than in the CRM, the call that never gets written back, costs quietly and permanently. Twelve tools means eleven integrations somebody has to maintain, and a data model stitched together across eleven seams. Nobody sends you a bill for that price. You pay it anyway.
Does that mean everything into the suite? No, and the exceptions can be named precisely, because there the separation is structural, not historical. Data products: no suite can invent contact and company data, you buy that. Cold email infrastructure runs deliberately separate from the main system for deliverability reasons, that’s a feature, not a weakness. Billing and eSignature are their own regulated worlds with their own logic. And the glue layer, everything that connects systems across boundaries and keeps data consistent, was never part of a suite and never will be.
The rest has become negotiable. The separate sequencing tool, the forecasting tool, the routing tool, the conversation intelligence tool: for the vast majority of midsize companies, souvenirs of a market situation that no longer exists. The suite can do it. It just can’t do it on its own, somebody has to configure it cleanly, and that’s where it fails, not on the feature list.
When did you last check your best-of-breed decisions against today’s state of the suite? If the answer is “when we bought,” you’re checking against 2015.
