Matt Hummel, Chief Marketing Officer, Pipeline 360
At first glance, the marketing technology industry appears to be booming. The number of discrete tools on the market topped 15,300 this year by one estimate. However, the story behind the story is somewhat more troubling. In fact, martechis in “quiet crisis,” according to Gartner. The industry analyst claims that just a third of corporate martech stack are actually being used today, with just one in 10 CMOs reporting a significant increase in usage over the past year.
This echoes our own research, which reveals general dissatisfaction with technology, and growing fatigue with martech complexity and sprawl. Yet the rate of tech innovation remains impressive, and tools can add value by automating repetitive tasks, creating personalised content at scale and improving data-driven decision making.
To reap the benefits without suffering the downsides, leading marketers increasingly want delivered insights and “done-for-you” services rather than additional tools.
Technology has always had an important place in B2B marketing, dating back to the days of relatively unsophisticated tools for sending bulk emails or tracking website traffic. Today, automation can help firms reduce human error and free up marketing talent for high-value tasks. And it can analyze data to surface insight from across the customer journey—helping teams to optimize campaign performance.
AI takes this a stage further, with potential applications in content personalization, email optimization, predictive analytics, chatbots, lead scoring, sales forecasting and even dynamic pricing, among other things.
Yet despite its undoubted potential, martech also frustrates. Over half (57%) of global marketers we interviewed say they’re dissatisfied with their tech stacks. And in the US, 28% cite tech issues as a top three challenge, more than any other region. In APAC, the figure is just 17%. That could be why technology is a low priority for our respondents. Just over a quarter (27%) planned to put money behind it in 2025, putting it in eighth place on the list behind investments in social media, content, digital marketing and other initiatives.
Why is martech failing those it was designed to help? The most obvious answer is sprawl. The average go-to-market stack now contains an estimated 23+ tools. Many of these tools may not share data, leading to duplication, gaps, inconsistencies and poor decision making. They may also overwhelm staff with too much data, making it difficult to find the information they need to make the right calls.
Then there is the cost. More tools means more licensing spend, and more training needed for staff. Where there simply aren’t the in-house IT and marketing skills available to integrate and use these tools, they remain under-utilized, as per Gartner’s observation. The cost of lost productivity and software spend may be starting to bite. Some 29% of US marketers cited resource constraints as a top three challenge in our study. The cost could be much greater if data stored in these tools is not properly protected, and ends up inviting regulatory scrutiny.
So how do B2B marketers respond? A useful first step would be to audit current tooling to identify unused or underutilized products, and consider consolidating any that don’t help improve personalization initiatives. Integration work between core platforms should be completed before even considering adding new vendors into the mix. If the organization still feels a need to invest in new tech, it must be proven to solve specific business challenges to stand any chance of operational success.
Rather than buy software, a growing number of high-performing marketers are gravitating towards services. Some 81% told us they agree that marketing teams value delivered insights and pre-packaged services over adding new tools. This is where offerings like Demand as a Service (DaaS) come in. It’s designed specifically to absolve the customer from hands-on management, and instead allows them to outsource their entire demand generation capability, end to end.
Just as the average business doesn’t think twice today about using SaaS over on-premises software, we think the future of marketing lies with tools like DaaS. Some 72% of high-performing B2B marketers we polled say they’re satisfied with their tech, versus just 12% of low performers. To join them, it may be worth considering swapping those under-performing tools, to an outcomes-as-a-service solution.
