That cost, it’s the time, inefficiency, and missed opportunity buried inside a marketing technology stack that nobody fully understands.
Most businesses that have grown to at least $5m in revenue have built their stack reactively. A new hire joined and brought their preferred tool. An agency recommended a platform as part of their onboarding. The founder bought something at a conference because it solved a specific problem. Each decision, at the time, was reasonable. Nobody set out to build something complicated.
But five years on, you’ve got a CRM that doesn’t talk cleanly to the email platform. The email platform produces reports that don’t match the analytics tool. Simple changes take three conversations and two weeks to implement. And the team has developed workarounds so embedded that nobody remembers why they were built in the first place.
The real cost isn’t the subscriptions
Although those add up, it’s the friction. Every time someone needs to pull a report, run a campaign, or make a change to a customer journey, they’re navigating a system that was built by accumulation rather than by design.
Marketing Week reported in February 2026 that Gartner’s latest survey shows marketers are only using 49% of their stack. Half of all capability sitting idle. And that’s actually an improvement on 2023, when utilisation sat at just 33%. So businesses are carrying full costs for partial use, while the unused features create the impression of a sophisticated operation.
The average company is running twelve to eighteen marketing tools. Most of their team understands maybe half of them.
So how did it get this way?
The stack grew reactively. A new hire brought a tool. An agency introduced another. The founder bought something at a conference. No one stepped back to simplify.
And because each individual tool solved a real problem at the time it was bought, nobody ever had a compelling reason to remove it. So it stayed. And the next tool arrived alongside it.
The solution isn’t always more.
When I do a stack audit with a client, we’re typically looking at twelve to eighteen tools. In almost every case, we consolidate to five or six without losing any meaningful functionality. What we gain is clarity. One source of data. Faster execution. A team that actually knows how to use the tools they have.
The stack isn’t the strategy. The strategy is what the stack is supposed to serve. When those two things get confused, complexity becomes the bottleneck to growth.
If you’ve never done a clean audit of what your marketing tools are actually costing you - in money, time, and team attention - it’s worth an afternoon. The number is usually surprising.
If you want a framework for how to approach that audit, hit reply. I’m happy to share what I look at.
