A lot of growing companies spend $50,000 or more every year on enterprise integration tools like MuleSoft, Boomi, or Workato. The goal is straightforward: you want your sales software, your warehouse database, and your billing system to talk to each other so your team does not have to spend all day copying and pasting data.

On paper, these platforms make it sound like everything connects in a few clicks. But buying the software is not the same thing as making your systems work together in real life.

We saw a company run into this problem with a $500,000 deal. Their sales team checked their CRM, saw that 500 units were listed as available, and closed the contract with a major client. But because the integration between the sales software and the warehouse only updated once every night at midnight, nobody realized those units had already been sold online two days earlier. When the shipping team went to pack the boxes, the shelves were empty.…