The CFO conversation is happening right now at companies everywhere. "We're spending $2.1 million on SaaS tools. Which ones do we actually need?"
This consolidation cycle has been building since 2023 and it's not slowing down. The average company ran 130 SaaS applications in 2024, up from 80 five years earlier.1 Finance teams are tired of the sprawl. And most SaaS companies have no idea which side of the cut list they're on.
The tools that survive these reviews aren't the most feature-rich or the most innovative. They're the ones where at least one person in the company opens them before 9am, every day, to do their actual job. Everything else is at risk.
Key Takeaways
- 46% of SaaS licenses go unused at any given time (Productiv, 2024)2
- The first tools cut in consolidation reviews are those with low daily active usage
- 67% of SaaS churn correlates with low product adoption, not missing features (Gainsight, 2024)3
- Tools survive consolidation by owning a daily workflow, not by having more features
- Workflow-specific apps built by customers at UpKeep hit 90.8% daily engagement4
How CFOs Actually Decide What to Cut #
Budget review committees don't evaluate software features. They look at two things: cost and usage. 46% of SaaS licenses go unused at any given time.2 When a CFO sees that number on a dashboard, the question becomes which tools are in that 46%.
The decision framework is simpler than most product teams assume. If employees open the tool every day as part of their core job, it survives. If employees open it occasionally to check something, it gets reviewed. If nobody can name the last time they used it, it gets cancelled.
The lesson here isn't to make your product stickier through gamification or engagement tricks. Those don't work in B2B. The lesson is to understand exactly which workflows your product owns in your customers' day-to-day work.
Why Low Adoption Puts You in the Danger Zone #
Adoption numbers in B2B SaaS are worse than most product teams want to acknowledge. The average SaaS product sees roughly 30% of its features regularly used by any given customer.5 The other 70% exists in the product but not in the workflow.
That adoption gap is a consolidation vulnerability. Your product might handle 40 distinct things, but if your customer's team uses 4 of them daily and the other 36 feel like overhead, a cost-optimization cycle surfaces that reality fast.
The problem isn't the features you built. It's that features built for the average customer rarely match the daily reality of any specific customer. A roofing company using UpKeep needs different daily workflows than a hospital facilities team using the same platform. One product can't serve both the same way, and when it doesn't serve either well enough to become indispensable, both become optional.
Gainsight's research found that 67% of SaaS churn correlates with low product adoption.3 Low adoption doesn't just precede churn. It precedes the consolidation review that triggers the cancellation decision.
The Two Categories Every SaaS Falls Into #
At consolidation review time, every tool in a company's stack falls into one of two groups: core workflows and supporting tools.
Core workflow tools are the ones employees use before checking email in the morning. They're embedded in the job, not the job's context. Payroll software, the CRM reps close deals in, the field service platform technicians log work orders on. These don't get cut. They'd require a multi-month migration project with significant operational risk to replace.
Supporting tools are the ones that make core tools better: analytics overlays, reporting add-ons, dashboards that aggregate data from multiple sources. They add value, but they're not load-bearing. When a CFO needs to cut 15% of the SaaS budget, these go first.
Most SaaS products sit in the second category and don't know it. Their customers say they love the product in QBRs. But when budget pressure hits, "we love it" doesn't survive against "we don't open it every day."
What Moves You From Optional to Indispensable #
The difference between surviving and getting cut in a consolidation cycle comes down to one question: does your product own a daily workflow for the specific person using it?
Not a weekly workflow. Not an "I use it when I need it" workflow. A daily, role-specific workflow that the user would feel the absence of immediately if it disappeared.
This is where the standard product advice falls short. Better onboarding, cleaner UI, more features: none of these create daily workflow ownership if the product still requires users to bend their work around what you built.
Daily workflow ownership comes from workflow fit. The product has to match how a specific persona at a specific type of company actually does their job, not how the average user in your customer segment theoretically does theirs.
The gap between those two things is where consolidation vulnerability lives.
How Workflow Fit Changes Adoption Numbers #
The adoption data from workflow-specific deployments is substantially different from what product teams see with standard feature releases.
When UpKeep gave maintenance teams the ability to build their own workflow apps inside the platform, roofing companies built job margin calculators that fit their specific bidding process. Hospital facilities teams built inspection workflows that matched their compliance requirements. Fleet operators built maintenance schedulers that factored in their specific routes and parts availability.
These apps weren't UpKeep's generic features. They were tools built around how each specific team actually worked. The result: 90.8% of users adopted at least one custom workflow app within the first quarter. 89% were still using those apps 30 days later.4
That kind of adoption doesn't get cut in a consolidation review. It becomes the reason the platform survives one.
What to Do Before the Next Budget Review #
Three audits to run on your own product before your customers run them for you.
Audit your daily active usage by persona. Overall DAU numbers mask a lot. Separate usage by role and company type. If executive dashboards have 80% adoption but field technician features have 12%, you know where the vulnerability is. The CFO's office cuts line items, but field technicians decide whether to advocate for keeping a tool.
Map the workarounds. Find every spreadsheet, manual process, or external tool your customers are running alongside your platform. Each one represents a workflow your product doesn't own. Every workflow you don't own is a reason for another tool to exist in the stack, and in consolidation, two tools that partially overlap become one tool that wins or one that loses.
Talk to the people who don't use your product. Your power users will tell you what they love. The 60% of licensed seats with low activity will tell you what doesn't fit. Most product teams don't talk to those users because the conversations are uncomfortable. Those conversations are where consolidation risk actually lives.
Build Workflow Apps Your Customers Open Every Day
Gigacatalyst lets your customers build their own workflow-specific apps inside your platform. Per-customer fit at scale, without engineering.
Footnotes #
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Okta. "Businesses at Work 2024." Annual SaaS usage report, 2024. ↩
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Productiv. "The State of SaaS: License Utilization Report." 2024. ↩ ↩2
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Gainsight. "Why Customers Churn: The Adoption Connection." 2024. ↩ ↩2
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Gigacatalyst production data from UpKeep deployment. 946 users, 670+ microapps, 2025. ↩ ↩2
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Pendo. "The State of Product Experience." Feature adoption benchmarks, 2024. ↩