When the Answer Is to Stop Trying to Connect Everything

by Meghan Brenner

If you've ever tried to get two software platforms to share data in a way that neither of them was designed for, you know what the next few paragraphs are about.

I'm the COO of JB Sales, a B2B sales training company. We use two platforms that both touch our members: UScreen for our membership portal and pre-recorded training content, and Kit for our newsletter and subscriber base. They're both doing their jobs. The problem started when I tried to make them do each other's jobs too.

Here's the background.

We recently started a project to segment our Kit subscriber base by role. Individual contributor, sales manager, or VP/executive. The reason matters: what we offer each of those roles is different. We've added advisory services targeting the VP and executive level, and getting our segmentation right in Kit is how we make sure the right message reaches the right person.

At the same time, we were looking at how we onboard corporate group accounts into UScreen. When a company signs up, we don't just hand them a link. We give them personalized instructions, recommendations on where to start, and guidance tailored to their team's focus. It's a good process. But we weren't capturing each user's role during that process, which meant the data we needed for Kit segmentation wasn't being collected anywhere useful.

So I started asking: can we capture role data inside UScreen and pass it back to Kit?

The short answer is no. Not in the way I needed.

UScreen's group subscription functionality runs on a custom self-registration link. It tracks user counts, access terms, and usage analytics, all of which are non-negotiable for managing corporate accounts. The moment you try to route registration through Kit first and then hand the user off to UScreen, you break that functionality.

I worked through two alternatives.

The first option was to build a custom Kit landing page for each client. They'd fill in their information including their role, and the confirmation email would include the UScreen self-registration link. Clean from a data capture perspective. But it means the user enters their name and email in Kit and then enters it again in UScreen right afterward. Not a dealbreaker, but not a smooth first experience for a paying client.

The second option was to leave the UScreen onboarding process as it is, add three custom questions to the UScreen signup form to capture role, and then manually import that data into Kit afterward. More work on our end. Less friction for the client.

Neither felt right. And that's usually a sign that the framing of the problem is off.

So I stopped trying to make the platforms connect and started asking a simpler question: what is each project actually trying to accomplish?

The Kit segmentation project exists to serve subscribers better and get the right offers in front of the right people. It's a top-of-funnel and nurture play. The UScreen onboarding project exists to give clients a better experience when they join.

Here's what the conversation with John surfaced: UScreen users are already clients. They've bought. The segmentation framework we were building in Kit was designed for people who hadn't become clients yet. Applying that same logic to people already inside the product was conflating two different stages of the customer relationship and expecting one technical solution to handle both.

We still want to capture role data for UScreen members, especially as we push out messaging around advisory services. But it doesn't need to be part of the same workflow, and it doesn't need to happen in real time.

We decided to keep the two projects separate. Each one gets to be what it actually is.

The lesson I keep coming back to is this: when you're running multiple projects at the same time, it's easy to start treating them as one problem because they share some data or overlap in some way. The clearest path forward is usually to pull them apart, define what success looks like for each one independently, and then decide if and when it makes sense to connect them.

Sometimes the integration you're looking for isn't a technical one.

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Meghan Brenner is COO at JB Sales and founder of The Operator's Notebook.