Your Marketing Stack Is Bigger Than Your Team Can Use

Introduction

Research from Gartner analyst Jordan Turner found that only 42% of marketing technology was used to its full potential in 2022 — down from 58% in 2020. That's a real, measurable decline in ROI on tools CMOs are already paying for. The ten steps below, grounded in that research, are what actually closes the gap between owning martech and getting value from it.

Step 1: Audit Your Tech Stack

Start with a full inventory of what's actually in the stack. Most martech stacks accumulate redundant tools over time — two platforms doing the same job because nobody canceled the old one. Cutting that overlap directly reduces cost and makes the tools that remain easier to actually use well.

Step 2: Build a Real Data Framework

A data framework that actually supports the marketing strategy — covering acquisition, organization, storage, analysis, and delivery in one coherent system — is what turns scattered data into decisions. Without it, teams end up with data everywhere and insight nowhere.

Step 3: Define Roles and Responsibilities

A RACI matrix — who's Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed — sounds like corporate overhead until a new martech tool gets implemented without anyone clearly owning it. Clear ownership keeps a rollout from stalling, and looping in finance and IT early keeps the project from hitting budget or infrastructure walls late.

Step 4: Measure Against a Real Baseline

Track specific metrics — marketing-qualified leads, click-through rates — against a baseline set before the new tool or process went live. Without that baseline, "it's working" is a feeling, not a measurement. With it, you can actually tell whether a new tool moved the number or just added activity.

Step 5: Integrate Marketing Automation With CRM

Marketing automation and CRM systems that don't talk to each other force sales and marketing to work from different pictures of the same customer. Connecting them keeps data flowing in one direction instead of two teams maintaining separate, drifting versions of the truth.

Step 6: Invest in Ongoing Training

Underused martech is often just undertrained staff. A tool nobody was properly trained on gets used at a fraction of its capability, or gets quietly avoided. Ongoing training — not a single onboarding session — is what keeps a team's actual skill level in step with what the stack can do.

Step 7: Use Scorecards to Track Campaigns

A scorecard that tracks campaign performance against specific, predetermined objectives turns "how's the campaign going" from a gut check into a data-driven answer — and makes it obvious, fast, where a campaign is underperforming and needs attention.

Step 8: Apply Agile Principles

Marketing teams that work iteratively — testing, learning, adjusting in short cycles instead of committing to a quarter-long plan upfront — adapt faster to what's actually working. That responsiveness is what gets more real use out of a martech stack than a rigid annual plan ever will.

Step 9: Build a Culture of Experimentation

Teams that are allowed to try something and have it not work out tend to actually explore what their tools can do. Teams that get penalized for a failed experiment stick to the minimum safe usage of whatever they were trained on — which is exactly how a stack ends up underutilized.

Step 10: Keep Re-Evaluating

Martech optimization isn't a project with an end date. Regular audits — checking whether existing tools still fit current needs, and adjusting the roadmap as the business changes — are what keep a stack from drifting back into the underutilization that started this whole conversation.

Conclusion

The gap between what a martech stack can do and what it actually does isn't usually a tooling problem — it's a process problem: unclear ownership, missing training, no baseline to measure against. These ten steps target that gap directly. Applied consistently, they're what turns a 42%-utilized stack into one that's actually earning its budget.

Tyrone Showers