Last quarter, I watched a marketing team spend $180,000 on an attribution platform they’d been lobbying for all year. The demos were impressive. The business case was approved. The contract was signed. Three months later, they still couldn’t get reliable data from it. No one had mapped which systems needed to connect to it, who owned the data quality issues in their CRM or what their IT team’s integration capacity actually looked like that quarter.
The tool wasn’t the problem. The buying process was. This happens in organizations of all sizes. There are more tools on the market than any team could possibly evaluate, let alone use well. And yet, year after year, companies invest heavily in martech but struggle to demonstrate meaningful impact.
Most companies treat martech procurement as a transaction instead of a strategic operating decision. The result is predictable: overlapping platforms, underused licenses, fragile integrations and a stack that looks impressive on a slide but breaks under operational pressure.
The core mistake: Treating procurement like shopping
In many organizations, martech buying still looks like this: Team A has a problem. They search for a tool. They sit through a few demos. They compare feature lists. They make a case for the budget. They buy. Then they figure out how to make it work.
That approach feels fast and pragmatic, and it almost always creates long-term drag. Why? Because it optimizes for speed and features rather than strategic fit, operational impact, data implications and long-term cost of ownership.
The teams I work with who get martech right don’t think of their stack as a collection of tools. They think of it as an operating system for how marketing actually works. Every purchasing decision either strengthens or fragments that system.
When you buy tools as you would when shopping, you end up with a stack that reflects individual tactical needs rather than a coherent operating model. That’s when the real costs begin to accumulate.
The hidden costs that actually add up to millions
Most business cases only include license fees. That’s the smallest part of the bill. Here’s what almost always gets ignored in the buying process:
- Implementation and integration work that can run two to three times the annual license cost.
- Ongoing maintenance and admin time that typically requires at least one full-time equivalent across a stack of ten tools.
- Training and enablement expenses that most teams underestimate by half.
- Process changes and the internal friction they create.
- Data reconciliation and reporting workarounds that become permanent.
- The cost of tools that are bought and barely used.
I recently audited the martech stack of a mid-sized B2B company with about $200 million in revenue. On paper, annual license costs totaled roughly $850,000. Once we accounted for implementation, ongoing integration and maintenance, MOps time diverted from strategy, training and the fully loaded cost of six largely unused tools, the real annual spend exceeded $2.1 million — a 2.5x multiplier no one had planned for.
The unused and underused tools alone represented $340,000 in wasted spend. Not because the tools were bad, but because they were purchased without a clear operational plan for adoption. According to Gartner, marketers utilize just 49% of their martech stack capabilities, meaning even in well-run marketing organizations, more than half of tool features never get touched.
Multiply this pattern across a few years and the cumulative cost easily reaches millions. More importantly, the operational costs of a fragmented, poorly integrated stack create drag that’s even harder to quantify — slower campaign execution, unreliable reporting and teams spending time fighting their tools instead of doing marketing.
Dig deeper: Why most martech RFPs fail and how to get vendor selection right
Why it’s so hard to stop making this mistake
I see the same root causes across companies of all sizes.
FOMO-driven buying. Someone sees a competitor using a tool or hears about it in a peer group or watches a compelling demo. Suddenly, the conversation is about “we need this” rather than “what problem are we solving?” The urgency feels real, but it’s based on external pressure rather than internal operational clarity.
Siloed decision-making. Different teams buy tools for their own workflows: demand gen gets a webinar platform, lifecycle gets a nurture engine, content gets a calendar tool, RevOps gets yet another dashboard. Each decision makes sense locally. Collectively, they create fragmentation. Nobody is considering how these pieces work together as a system, so integration becomes an afterthought that becomes a permanent problem.
The lack of a clear link between tools and outcomes. This is the most fundamental issue. If a buying decision isn’t explicitly tied to a business outcome such as revenue impact, speed to market, cost reduction or data quality improvement, it becomes a feature comparison exercise rather than a strategic investment decision. Teams end up buying based on what sounds impressive in a demo rather than what will actually move the business forward.
This is how stacks quietly become expensive, brittle and hard to change.
What good martech procurement actually looks like
The teams I’ve seen get this right flip the model entirely. They don’t start with tools. They start with outcomes and operating models. Here’s the framework that works in practice.
Start with the business problem, not the product
Before anyone looks at vendors, get very explicit about what’s broken today.
- What is slow, manual, unreliable or impossible?
- What operational changes would result if this problem is solved?
- What decisions become faster or better?
If you can’t describe the operational impact in plain language, you’re not ready to buy software. The best procurement conversations I’ve seen start with statements like:
- “We’re losing deals because it takes us four days to respond to demo requests and we need to get that down to four hours.”
- “Our campaign ROI reporting is based on spreadsheets that three people manually update and we can’t trust the numbers.”
That level of clarity makes it possible to evaluate whether a tool will actually solve the problem.
Define success before you evaluate vendors
Every serious evaluation should start with a short list of success criteria. What will be measurably better 90 days after go-live?
- For an attribution tool, that might be “marketing can see channel contribution by segment within 24 hours instead of waiting for finance to run reports.”
- For a content calendar, it might be “campaign launch cycles shortened from three weeks to ten days.”
- For a lead scoring tool, it might be “sales follow-up time on qualified leads drops from 18 hours to under four.”
You also need to define the technical and operational requirements:
- What systems must this connect to?
- What data must it share or consume?
- What existing process does it simplify or replace?
- What team capacity do we have for implementation and ongoing management?
This shifts the conversation from “which tool has more features?” to “which option actually fits how we work and delivers the outcome we need?”
Favor pilots with clear exit conditions
I agree with the argument that pilots, not lengthy RFP processes, are often the best way to evaluate martech. But pilots need discipline. They must have clear goals, success criteria and exit conditions. Otherwise, pilots just become another way tools sneak into the stack without real accountability.
A disciplined pilot has a defined timeline (usually 30-60 days), specific success metrics, a limited scope so you’re not trying to test everything at once and a predetermined decision framework for whether to proceed, negotiate or walk away. The point isn’t to fall in love with the tool. The point is to determine whether it actually meets the operational need you identified at the start.
Dig deeper: Why pilots, not RFPs, define the future of martech selection
Build governance into the process, not after the fact
The teams that avoid expensive procurement mistakes involve multiple functions early:
- MOps to evaluate operational fit.
- IT and data teams to assess integration complexity and data implications.
- Security to review compliance and risk.
- Finance, legal, and/or procurement to understand total cost of ownership and contract terms.
This doesn’t slow things down when done right. It prevents expensive problems from surfacing six months later, when you realize the tool can’t connect to your data warehouse, violates a compliance requirement you weren’t aware of or has hidden costs that undermine the business case.
In practice, this often takes the form of a standing review committee that meets monthly or quarterly. Any tool purchase above a defined threshold (typically $25,000 annually) undergoes a standardized evaluation scorecard covering strategic fit, technical integration, cost analysis and risk assessment. The committee doesn’t exist to say no. It exists to ensure the right questions are asked before money is spent.
How to audit your martech procurement decisions
If you want to evaluate whether your procurement approach is creating value or drag, start by asking the following questions. If you don’t have clear answers, you’re likely buying tools reactively rather than strategically.
- Do you have a formal tool approval process or can individual teams introduce tools without cross-functional review?
- Can you name the approvers of your last three martech purchases and the business outcomes they were intended to deliver?
- Are those outcomes being measured?
- How many tools in your current stack have usage below 50% of your team?
- When was the last time you retired a tool and what was the process for making that decision?
- How often do integration problems surface after a tool is already purchased?
Dig deeper: Is your martech evaluation process still stuck in a pre-AI world?
Your martech stack is an operating system for your marketing team. Every new tool should answer three questions clearly.
What process does this improve or replace?
If you’re buying a content calendar tool, the answer might be “replaces the shared spreadsheet where three people manually update launch dates and half the team never looks at it.” If you’re buying a lead scoring tool, it should be “replaces the manual process where SDRs guess at lead quality based on job titles.” If you can’t be that specific about the process change, you’re not ready to buy.
What data does it depend on and what data does it create?
Every tool sits in a data ecosystem. If it needs clean account data to function, but your CRM data quality is poor, the tool will fail regardless of its features. If it creates scoring data your sales team can’t access within their workflow, it won’t be used. Map the data flows before you buy, not after.
What complexity does it remove, and what complexity does it add?
The right tool should make operations simpler overall, even if it adds a new system to manage. If a tool requires three new integrations, two new admin roles and ongoing data reconciliation to function, the complexity it adds might outweigh the complexity it removes.
Leadership takeaways — and the real call to action
Procurement is a strategic capability that determines whether your stack creates leverage or creates drag. Most stack problems are buying-process problems in disguise. The tool that seems like the answer often isn’t addressing the root cause, and buying it without operational clarity just adds another layer of complexity.
Speed without discipline creates expensive, long-term drag. Moving fast on a purchase might feel urgent, but it usually means you’ll spend the next six months dealing with integration problems, adoption challenges and budget overruns that could have been avoided.
Tools should serve operating models, not the other way around. The moment you start changing how your team works to accommodate what a tool can do rather than what your team needs to do, you’ve lost the plot. If you want better martech outcomes, don’t start by auditing your tools. Start by auditing your procurement process.
Look at who can introduce new tools into the stack without review, what criteria are actually used to approve them (not what you say the criteria are, but what actually drives decisions), how often tools are reviewed, consolidated or retired, and whether business outcomes are tracked after purchase.
Organizations that get this right don’t necessarily have smaller stacks. They have stacks that make sense. Every tool has a clear operational purpose. The data flows work. The team actually uses what’s been purchased. The costs are understood and justified.
And that, far more than any individual platform, is what creates leverage in MOps.
Dig deeper: How to tell if you have too many tools in your stack
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