The conversation about breaking down silos inside large organisations has been running for decades. It tends to blame culture. Or leadership. Or the wrong incentive structures.

Rarely does it blame the invoice.

If a sales intelligence platform costs several hundred dollars per seat per year, a 5,000-person company cannot give everyone access.

Most won’t try. So the insights captured in those tools stay with whoever holds the license, and the rest of the organisation makes decisions without them.

Gatekeeping gets built into the contract

Seat-based licensing does something no org chart mandates but every company experiences: it turns insight into currency.

When access to sales call recordings sits behind a per-seat license, the sales leader controls what the product team hears. When customer success conversations live in a tool only the CS team can open, the voice of customer programme becomes whatever that team chooses to share. The data exists. The insights are real. The license determines who gets to see them, and when.

“What happens is you kind of get these departmental managers that sort of gatekeep access to their data,” said Benjamin Humphrey, CEO of Dovetail Software. “The sales team doesn’t really want to share their calls. The customer success team doesn’t want to share their calls.”

Rational behaviour within a system that makes information scarce by design produces exactly this outcome. At several hundred dollars per user per year, giving a 5,000-person company access to a single tool would cost millions annually. No CFO signs off on that. So access gets rationed, and rationed access becomes a bargaining position.

Quantitative data already cracked this

Quantitative data went through the same problem a decade ago. The solution was not cultural. It was architectural.

Before platforms like Mixpanel and data warehouses like Snowflake, usage data sat with data teams, who packaged it and distributed it on their own schedule. Product managers waited. Marketers estimated. Decisions lagged.

Then the data got democratised. Dashboards became self-service. A product manager could log in, pull the numbers they needed, and move.

“It’s the same sort of thing happening in the world of qualitative data,” Humphrey observes. The question is whether customer intelligence, voice of customer data, sales call transcripts, support conversations, and app reviews can flow through an organisation with the same friction-free access that analytics data now does.

The licensing model sitting underneath those tools determines the answer. Per-seat pricing on specialised platforms means organisations will always under-provision access, because the economics force them to. Usage-based pricing changes the calculation. There is no longer a decision to make about who gets a seat. Everyone can access the data when they need it, and the cost reflects actual consumption rather than anticipated headcount.

Dovetail Software made that shift deliberately, moving from user-based to usage-based pricing to remove the access barrier. The logic mirrors the analytics parallel exactly: if a PM can log in and look at the data, the gatekeeper problem disappears.

Customer centricity has an access problem

Customer centricity gets treated as a values question. The organisations that actually achieve it tend to have solved an information access problem first.

A product manager making a decision without hearing what the sales team is learning about enterprise objections is not lacking curiosity. They are under-informed. The same applies to a marketing team building a campaign without access to themes emerging from customer success calls, or a CX team running voice of customer programmes that product never reads because the findings sit in a tool product does not have a license for.

“Equipping the product team with access to all of these insights across marketing, sales, customer success, support,” Humphrey said, “allows a PM to be so much more effective in their job.”

The blocker, in most organisations, is access

The value of knowing what customers think does not live with the team that captured the data. It compounds when it reaches every team that needs to act on it. Pricing that limits access limits that compounding.

The silo problem inside most large organisations will outlast every culture initiative and leadership mandate that doesn’t address the underlying economics. It ends when the software holding customer knowledge stops charging by the head.

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