A recent survey conducted by SALESmanago asked marketers from the UK, Poland and Italy a simple question: ‘How do you feel about your current martech stack?’ In response, 6 in 10 said that they ‘love’ it, while 92% feel overstacked with too many tools. Just about all respondents (99%) said they are planning to simplify their stack this year.
The top reasons behind their positive feelings in the survey were the ability to carry out better reporting and the ease of onboarding. This points to the simple expectations that marketers want platforms that deliver value quickly and provide clear visibility into the outcomes they are generating.
But that also means 40% of marketers don’t have love for their tech stack. That is not surprising given that many martech environments have grown organically over long periods of time, often combining point solutions from more than 15,000 tools now on the market.
They are rarely designed as cohesive systems, usually evolving as teams adopt specialised tools to solve immediate problems, gradually creating fragmented environments. The result is a martech stack that becomes complex, brittle and difficult to manage.
An additional challenge is the rapid pace of martech innovation and the difficulty of implementing and fully utilising new capabilities to deliver the desired business outcomes and customer experiences. Marketing teams must do this while managing budget constraints, demonstrating business value, and providing data and insights to stakeholders across the organisation.
With this scenario, it can be hard to love your martech stack, so what is a marketer to do?
Simplicity is key
Simpler systems are easier to manage and ultimately deliver more value. It is therefore no surprise that nearly every marketer surveyed plans to simplify their martech stack this year. But what is driving this desire?
Many teams use a multitude of tools to monitor and collect customer data, including website behaviour, communication engagement, transactions, and customer service touchpoints. There is no shortage of customer data. The challenge lies in integrating it, creating a unified customer profile, uncovering actionable insights and making it accessible for AI.
For many organisations, these tasks sit somewhere on a spectrum between “challenging” and “not going to happen… at least anytime soon.”
The answer isn’t integrating all of your platforms. More integrations increase latency, add additional points of failure, can create data conflicts, and slow activation. Instead, the starting point should be based on the business outcome you want to achieve.
What customer behaviour do you want to influence - increasing revenue, improving retention, or strengthening loyalty?
Answering these questions can define and prioritise the important data integrations necessary and enable quicker development of a truly valuable and actionable customer database aligned with your business goals.
The result will allow you to understand the most important data sources in your martech stack based on your business goals and provide a foundation for growth. This also creates a solid data foundation for AI, a robust source for metrics and analytics, enables faster marketing execution, and simpler governance.
Consequently, the stack integration will be simpler, business value will be easily measured, and marketing velocity increases. Metrics and insights become more visible across the organisation, helping marketers get more value from their stacks.
Gaining a deeper understanding of your martech stack
But what about the other tools in your stack?
Understanding the data required to support your current business goals should be part of a broader audit of your martech environment. This audit should examine each solution’s capabilities, adoption levels and overall contribution to business outcomes.
The results of this audit will provide marketers with a clearer understanding of their stack and enable more strategic decisions around training, process improvement and optimisation. This includes aligning capabilities across platforms, determining which system is best suited for each function, identifying where AI can deliver the greatest value, and highlighting opportunities for tool consolidation.
What a healthy relationship with your martech gives you
With a simplified stack and customer data unified across the organisation, marketing teams are better positioned to build a healthier and more productive relationship with their martech.
From this foundation, marketers can incrementally introduce additional data sources to support new business outcomes and associated use cases. The data generated through marketing activities also becomes valuable across the organisation.
The benefits extend far beyond marketing. Customer data generated through marketing activities can provide sales teams with behavioural insights to support more relevant conversations, enable customer service teams to better understand customer context, and give product teams visibility into prospect and customer interest in specific capabilities. When this happens, marketing becomes a strategic data partner across the organisation.
Tech that loves you back
The strong feelings many marketers express toward their martech show that the right technology can significantly improve processes and campaigns - but only when it enables them to be better marketers.
Overcomplicated, fragmented stacks make it harder for teams to collect and activate customer data, deliver meaningful and measurable business outcomes, and unlock the full benefits of AI.
Simplification is essential. This can be achieved by integrating fewer tools, making better use of the capabilities within existing platforms, or extending those platforms without introducing additional systems that require new integrations, training and cost.
When martech is simplified and aligned to real outcomes, marketers get something rare: technology that actually helps them be better marketers.
And that may be the simplest way to start loving your martech stack again.
About the Author
Michael McNeal is VP of Product at SALESmanago, where he helps shape the company’s AI-driven marketing and customer engagement strategy for eCommerce brands worldwide. With more than 25 years of experience across product, marketing and digital commerce, Michael has worked with global organisations including Microsoft, Toyota and Expedia, alongside leading retail and eCommerce brands.
He specialises in helping businesses turn customer data into actionable growth strategies, with a particular focus on personalisation, AI and customer experience. At SALESmanago, Michael leads product innovation focused on enabling scalable, data-driven growth for modern digital commerce businesses.