The Martech Stack Is Broken: How Teams Are Rationalizing Tools and Finding Real ROI

The average enterprise marketing team now manages 91 tools. A new study reveals that less than a third are actively used, and the consolidation movement is creating clear winners among platform players.

How Tool Sprawl Became the Default Setting

Between 2015 and 2022, the number of martech solutions on the market grew from around 2,000 to nearly 10,000. Vendors competed aggressively for budget with free trials, low monthly entry prices, and promises of best-in-class performance at every narrow task. Marketing teams, under pressure to demonstrate velocity and innovation, said yes to all of it. Point solutions proliferated: one tool for webinars, another for intent data, a third for landing pages, a fourth for competitive intelligence, and so on.

The buying decisions were also structurally fragmented. Individual contributors and team leads often had direct purchasing authority for tools under a certain spend threshold. Without centralised oversight, stacks grew organically, guided by individual preferences and vendor incentives rather than architectural thinking. By the time most organisations attempted a proper audit, they discovered platforms no one remembered buying, subscriptions attached to the email addresses of employees who had left years earlier, and critical workflows split across three tools that each handled one piece of a process that a single platform could have managed.

The result is a tax that compounds annually. Every tool requires onboarding, training, maintenance, and renewal negotiation. Every integration between platforms introduces a failure point. And every new hire faces a learning curve that spans dozens of systems before they can operate at full capacity.

The Real Cost: Financial and Cognitive

The financial waste is significant but measurable. Gartner's most recent marketing technology survey found that organisations utilise only 33 percent of their martech stack's capabilities, a figure that has barely moved in four years despite repeated promises to rationalise. When you map that utilisation rate against median enterprise martech spend, which now sits at roughly 26 percent of total marketing budget, the arithmetic is sobering: most companies are wasting the equivalent of 17 cents of every marketing dollar on technology that sits idle.

The cognitive cost is harder to quantify but arguably more damaging. Context-switching between tools fragments attention and erodes the deep-work capacity that strategic marketing requires. When analysts are toggling between eight dashboards to construct a single report, they're spending intellectual energy on data plumbing rather than interpretation. When campaign managers need to update creative assets across four disconnected platforms, the likelihood of version errors and inconsistent messaging rises with every additional step.

There's also an organisational trust problem. When marketing leaders present attribution data to finance, the credibility of that data depends on the cleanliness of the underlying infrastructure. Fragmented stacks produce fragmented data, and fragmented data invites the kind of "which number is correct" debates that slow down budget decisions and erode confidence in the marketing function itself.

What Rationalisation Actually Looks Like

Companies that have successfully reduced their stacks describe a process that takes 12 to 18 months and requires executive sponsorship to survive the internal resistance that inevitably emerges. The first phase is inventory: a comprehensive audit of every active subscription, the team or individual who owns it, the use case it was purchased to address, and the actual usage data pulled from vendor portals or IT access logs. Most organisations discover in this phase that 20 to 30 percent of their tools can be decommissioned immediately, either because the use case no longer exists or because another tool in the stack already handles it.

The second phase is consolidation mapping. This involves identifying which platform categories can absorb the functions of point solutions. Modern marketing automation platforms, for example, now offer native landing page builders, A/B testing engines, and basic analytics, rendering three separate tools redundant for teams that aren't operating at extreme scale. The same logic applies across categories: CDP vendors have absorbed audience segmentation tools, CMS platforms have incorporated personalisation engines, and enterprise SEO suites now bundle competitive intelligence features.

The third phase is the hardest: migration and sunset. This is where most rationalisation projects stall. Individual teams become protective of their preferred tools, often citing workflow disruption as the reason but more often motivated by familiarity. Change management, not technical architecture, is the primary risk factor in a successful rationalisation programme.

Which Categories Are Consolidating, and Who Is Winning

The consolidation trend is not uniform across categories. Marketing automation, CRM, and CDP are the three areas experiencing the most aggressive platform expansion. Salesforce, HubSpot, and Adobe have each made significant moves to absorb adjacent categories, offering native integrations and bundled pricing that make the total-cost-of-ownership argument against point solutions increasingly compelling.

HubSpot's expansion into content management, operations data, and commerce reflects a deliberate strategy to become the system of record for mid-market B2B teams, removing the need for five or six separate tools. Salesforce's acquisition history, spanning data management, B2B commerce, and AI-driven analytics, positions it as the enterprise default for organisations already embedded in its ecosystem. Adobe Experience Cloud continues to compete in the upper enterprise segment by offering depth of capability that pure-play SaaS vendors cannot yet match.

Among point solution vendors, the ones surviving consolidation pressure share a common trait: they operate in categories where depth genuinely matters more than integration. Advanced SEO analytics, enterprise-grade video hosting, and specialised account-based engagement platforms have maintained strong retention because the feature gap between them and the consolidated platform alternatives remains large. The vendors losing ground are those whose core functionality has become table stakes, now offered natively by the larger platforms at no additional cost.

A Framework for Auditing Your Own Stack

The teams executing rationalisation most efficiently are using a structured scoring model rather than subjective conversations. Each tool in the stack is evaluated across four dimensions: active usage rate, measured as the percentage of licensed seats with meaningful activity in the past 90 days; business criticality, defined as the impact on revenue-generating workflows if the tool were removed tomorrow; replaceability, assessed by mapping the tool's core functions against capabilities already present in other licensed platforms; and integration health, measured by the number of active data connections and the frequency of integration failures in the past quarter.

Tools that score low on usage and high on replaceability are immediate candidates for decommissioning. Tools that score low on usage but high on criticality often indicate an adoption problem rather than a tool problem, and the right intervention is enablement rather than elimination. Tools that score high on all dimensions are the core of your future stack and should be the focus of deeper vendor partnership negotiations.

One discipline that separates successful rationalisation programmes from failed ones is establishing a formal intake process for new tool requests going forward. Without a governance gate, the stack will grow back to its previous size within two years. The teams that maintain a rationalised stack treat every new tool request as a procurement proposal requiring evidence that no existing platform can address the use case. It's an unglamorous process, but it's the only structural mechanism that prevents the cycle of sprawl from restarting.