The average exec walks into the boardroom knowing nearly two-thirds of last year’s martech budget never translated into revenue. Unused licenses from tech stacks, poorly integrated point solutions, and orphaned data pipelines have turned once-promising platforms into silent profit leaks. With marketing budgets expected to remain at roughly 7.7% of company revenue through 2025, every expenditure must clearly demonstrate its value or be eliminated.
Eliminate Fragmentation to Regain Control of Your Stack
During a company’s high-growth years, a separate tool is typically adopted for every new need: one for social listening, another for lead scoring, and on, and on, and on. For most, this leads to a messy, uncontrolled, and underutilized collection of software, often called stack sprawl.
The utilization of their organization’s overall MarTech stack’s capability dropped to just 33%.
Gartner
This means the typical enterprise pays for triple the software it actually uses. This fragmentation doesn’t just waste money. Worse, it drags down momentum. Teams lose days moving data between systems, troubleshooting integrations, or even waiting for IT to map yet another custom field.
Reclaiming that lost time and cash starts with a ruthless inventory. Catalog every tool, its owner, and the business outcome it’s supposed to drive. Anything without a champion or a clear metric goes on the sunset list. Most high-performing organizations impose governance (common naming standards, shared APIs, and integration guardrails) so the remaining platforms operate like a single, composed architecture instead of a fleet of one-offs.
Use CDPs to Connect Data-Driven Customer Insights
Fragmentation’s most expensive side effect is data entropy. Without a single source of truth, marketers build strategies on partial views and stale spreadsheets. A Customer Data Platform (CDP), for example, addresses this issue by ingesting information from every channel. It then cleanses, matches, and stitches everything into one persistent customer record that all systems and teams can refer to.
One benefit of this approach is sharper targeting. When identity resolution ties a prospect’s anonymous browsing to their purchase history, segmentation shifts from guesses to guarantees. Another is that it helps scale personalization. Dynamic content engines no longer search across six sources for data; they now pull a ready-made profile and render an offer in real-time. As privacy regulations tighten and third-party cookies fade, brands with first-party customer data are always positioned to own any conversation, while competitors still negotiate for rented attention.
Automate and Consolidate to Free Up Space for Innovation
Tool count alone doesn’t kill ROI—it’s the manual labor required to operate them. Even a streamlined stack underdelivers if your team is still constantly flipping between applications and manually transferring data. AI-driven automation can be a viable solution to this issue. Build systems that can autonomously handle tasks such as routing leads, predicting customer churn, and scheduling campaigns without constant oversight.
GenAI investments are delivering ROI through improved time efficiency (49%), improved cost efficiency (40%) and improving capacity to produce more content and/or handle more business (27%).
Gartner
Automated workflows run 24/7, work faster than we can, and eliminate human errors.
Vendor consolidation multiplies those gains. Bundling overlapping features into integrated suites cuts license fees and training overhead while improving cross-team collaboration. Fewer contracts also strengthen negotiating power by shifting three standalone analytics tools into a single platform, which often slashes renewal pricing by double digits and frees up budget for experimentation. Think generative-AI content tests or zero-party data pilots, but without asking finance for more money.
Cut Waste, Fund Growth
Budgets will stay tight in 2025, and I view it more as a filter instead of a crisis. When capital is scarce, unfocused spending dies first. This helps CMOs pinpoint every hidden cost in the stack, cut the dead weight, and redirect those dollars to growth bets that actually move the needle. Think of it as trading cluttered utility drawers for a well-sharpened toolkit: fewer pieces, all indispensable.
It can be as easy as purging redundant contracts and shelving nice-to-have pilots that never left the sandbox. The cash you’ll save will convert into room for strategic plays, like testing an AI-driven retention model, launching a new self-service channel, or even hiring a data scientist. Meanwhile, a unified customer graph and automated workflows speed up campaign cycles and free your team to focus on creativity.
In other words, protecting a marketing budget under scrutiny is just one level of success. The actual achievement for a disciplined, marketing-focused executive is elevating their MarTech stack from a line-item expense to the most efficient and impactful asset for generating revenue.
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