The renewal invoice arrives for a tool nobody in the room can describe. Someone thinks the events team bought it. Someone else thinks it was the agency. It renews anyway, because cancelling feels riskier than paying.
Multiply that by every tool in the stack and you have the most expensive habit in modern marketing: buying capability and never using it.
This is a martech stack audit done in the open: five passes, tool by tool, ending in one decision for each tool: keep, fix, merge or cut.
The numbers behind the habit
In August 2023, Gartner reported that marketing leaders were using just 33% of their martech stack’s capabilities, down from 42% in 2022 and 58% in 2020. Two years of decline in a row, from a survey of 405 marketing leaders. The stack kept growing; the use of it kept shrinking.
How much of the martech stack is in use
Share of martech capabilities marketing leaders say they use
The same pattern shows up across all software. Zylo, which tracks more than 40 million software licences, reported in January 2025 that companies spend an average of $4,830 per employee on SaaS, up 21.9% in a year. It put the average waste on unused licences at about $21 million a year.
Those are averages across very different companies, so treat them as a direction, not a forecast for yours. The direction is clear enough.
What it looks like when a company acts
In June 2023, Mi3 reported that Lendlease, the Australian property group, had moved its CRM and marketing cloud from Salesforce to HubSpot, its digital experience platform from Sitecore to Optimizely, and most content creation from Adobe to Canva. The earlier Salesforce implementation was reportedly more than $15 million. Insiders said the company would have faced several million more in project costs had it stayed the course.
A Lendlease spokesperson said the platform migration had delivered substantial cost savings without losing features or functionality.
The lesson is not that one vendor is better than another. It is that a stack built for every possible need ends up serving none of them well, and nobody notices until someone adds up the bill.
How to audit a martech stack: five passes
In this episode we audit a marketing stack on screen. Five passes, and every tool gets a decision by the end.
- Find everything. List every tool, with its annual cost, its owner and its renewal date. Check the card statements, not just the procurement list; that is where the forgotten tools live.
- Measure real use. For each tool, how many people used it in the last week, against how many seats you pay for? Anything under half used goes on the shortlist.
- Map it to the funnel. Which step of the revenue engine does each tool serve: attract, convert, close, keep or grow? Two tools on the same step is a question. Three is an answer.
- Follow the data. Does each tool send its data to the CRM, or does it keep it to itself? A tool whose data goes nowhere cannot prove it works.
- Decide. Every tool leaves the audit with one of four labels: keep, fix (the tool is right, but nobody was trained), merge into another tool, or cut before the next renewal.
The rule we use
A tool earns its place by doing a job on the funnel, being used by the people who need it, and putting its data where the rest of the business can see it. Miss two of the three, and it goes.
Cutting is the easy part. The value is in the second label, fix: most stacks are not too big; they are under-adopted. The money is already spent. The return is waiting on training, ownership and a clear job for each tool.
What is your stack really costing you? The Revenue Engine Health Check scores margin and efficiency, including how much of your stack is used every week, alongside four other areas. Five minutes, free.