I’ve been known to make up some words. One of the made up words I love most is complexicate. It’s just the combination of complicate and complex, but I love it because it draws attention to a very real business problem that impacts many SaaS scalability. I often railed against complexicating things — especially in sales, marketing, and customer success. Why? Because most complexity is unnecessary. And undue complication makes things harder and slower. Since slower often translates into less agility, less growth, and less efficiency — complexication was and is my sworn enemy.

Preserving SaaS Agility

Growing SaaS companies thrive on agility. We need it to make rapid experimentation plausible. We must have it to cycle through iterative feedback loops. It’s part and parcel of pricing and packaging testing. It’s how we adjust to evolving markets. The list goes on and on, but suffice to say a growing SaaS without fundamental agility is growing slower than it could be.

Complexication is Non-Productive Effort

My latest wake up call on complexication came from a couple of recent clients who work extremely hard for meager results. A significant percentage of their effort is being absorbed into non-productive, overly complex and complicated processes, procedures, and workflows. The meetings overhead from their complexication absorbs another huge chunk of time and energy. In fact, if I were to draw the slice of a pie chart of their effort that actually went to direct growth efforts, it would be a very, very, very small slice.

I see complexication a lot in sales and marketing. Perhaps this is because those teams often weave together myriad technological tools to ostensibly help them market and sell more. Or maybe it’s because sales and marketing can have a lot of moving parts. Regardless of the underlying cause, complexication seems to run rampant in sales and marketing. I feel like we need to remind ourselves of the basics in sales and marketing before we commit to page-long lead workflows; hours of meetings on lead statuses; and full-scale studies on integration feasibility. The basics are to find and attract the right people; know where they came from; move them through the funnel; convert them to customers; and keep them happy. It’s too easy to forget that sometimes.

Back in my ion days, my daily marketing standup included not only the marketing team, but also our sales & marketing operations person, and a representative from the customer success side of the house. We had a toe in sales and one in success every day. Complexication sometimes reared its ugly head in those standups. I think I said “that sounds like an overly complexicated solution” at least once a week. Invariably, the next day’s solution to the same problem was simpler, more agile, and less cumbersome. The point is that complexicated solutions are easier to come by.