The martech utilisation gap keeps widening

The marketing technology landscape now contains more than 15,000 commercial tools, according to chiefmartec’s 2025 landscape, up from around 150 when the company began tracking in 2011. That growth has outpaced most organisations’ ability to make full use of what they already own.

Gartner’s tracking of martech utilisation puts capability use at 33 per cent on average, down from 58 per cent in 2020, and its current assessment of the state of play is blunt: the sector is in what it calls a ‘quiet crisis’, with only 49 per cent of tools actively used and 15 per cent of organisations qualifying as high performers on return on investment.

For engineering, science and technology companies, the martech complexity problem carries an additional dimension. Technical organisations tend to approach marketing technology with the same rigour applied to any other engineering decision, evaluating capability thoroughly before purchasing. The result is often a well-researched stack of tools with excellent individual capabilities that do not integrate effectively with each other, or with the company’s CRM.

McKinsey’s research puts a figure on the blockage: 47 per cent of martech decision-makers cite stack complexity and system integration challenges as the main barrier to getting value from their tools. The core enablers most organisations lack, McKinsey found, are cross-channel integration and data governance. A third gap, identified separately, is the ability to measure business impact from the investment.

Channel-specific measurement tools tend to be well established already. Most organisations have not built the connective layer that turns that channel data into a single view of commercial outcomes.

Gartner’s finding that utilisation has dropped despite continued investment points to a specific dynamic in martech purchasing decisions; tools get bought individually, to solve the problem in front of a team at the time. Each one then adds its own data to a reporting environment that is already difficult to understand.

The utilisation gap has a direct measurement consequence that marketing managers will recognise. Marketing data is often in multiple tools with different definitions of the same metrics, so a lead in one system is not the same object as a lead in another. Most teams end up building a coherent view of pipeline contribution by hand; a manual, time-consuming task few can sustain reliably.

The tools themselves generally work as advertised. The ‘quiet crisis’ Gartner defined is a collection of functional individual tools that, added together, still fail to produce the commercial measurement clarity that justified the investment in the first place.

For science, engineering and technology companies, long sales cycles and multiple buying stakeholders around a complex technical product make that measurement gap commercially significant. The hardest activities to measure, earned media, event presence, expert content and technical publication placements, are also the first to be cut when the consolidated marketing report cannot show their contribution.

Ironically, they are truly speaking the most impactful activities of all over time; and that impact is something only a human can truly evaluate, because it doesn’t who up in the numbers.

The organisations getting the most value from their martech investment are consistently the ones who start with commercial outcomes in mind, not tool capability.

In practice, that starts with an audit rather than a purchase: mapping every tool currently in the stack against the commercial outcome it is meant to serve, and treating anything that cannot be tied to pipeline, revenue or retention as a candidate for consolidation or removal.

Remember, these are tools, not tactics. So, unlike the impact of networking at a trade show, which is human, difficult to measure and long term, a tool in your martech stack should be easy to measure and evaluate.

Most marketing teams that do this exercise honestly find at least a third of their stack falls into that category — tools kept out of habit, or because switching felt riskier than staying.

The purchasing question that matters going forward is what commercial outcome a tool solves, and what data it needs to connect to in order to show that. That second half is usually the one organisations skip.

A tool that generates good channel-level data but cannot pass a common lead definition, a common attribution model or a common customer ID into the rest of the stack adds reporting volume without adding clarity.

Gartner’s guidance on the current crisis identifies cross-channel integration and data governance as the investments most likely to recover value from existing tools before new ones are added. Concretely, that means agreeing a single definition of a lead across every tool that touches them and giving one system, usually the CRM, the job of holding that definition, rather than treating each platform’s own dashboard as a source of truth.

For companies running a six-tool stack across paid, email, events and content, that connective work typically does more for reporting clarity than adding a seventh tool ever would.

For most marketing teams, that reframe points towards a smaller, better-connected stack: fewer tools, each justified by a specific commercial outcome, wired into a shared data layer that can actually answer the board’s question, ‘what did this spend deliver?’

Concorde was retired in 2003, a remarkable aircraft that never made commercial sense running at half capacity. Most martech stacks are in a similar position, technically impressive and expensive to maintain at a level of use that does not justify the outlay.

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