Your MarTech Stack Is a Sales Tool Pretending to Be a Marketing Tool

By Gaetano Romeo, Head of Global Digital Marketing, EasyVista

I recently ran an internal audit of one of our outreach tools. It had been sitting in the stack for a while, technically active, technically “in use,” and technically owned by marketing on the invoice. When I actually looked at who was logging in and what it was doing, the picture was different: it had quietly become a sales sequencing tool, adopted and driven almost entirely by the sales team, while marketing kept paying for it and reporting it as a marketing technology line item.

That single audit turned into a bigger question I now think most B2B SaaS marketing leaders should be asking about their own stack: how much of what’s labeled “MarTech” on your budget sheet is actually SalesTech wearing a marketing badge, and what is that confusion costing you?

The Utilization Numbers Are Worse Than Most Teams Admit

Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey found that organizations are actively using just 49% of their martech investment, a number that has declined for two consecutive years. Some benchmarks put the real utilization figure even lower, closer to 33% of purchased capability. The Digital Bloom’s 2025-2026 martech mapping research found 32% of organizations openly admit they’re not using the full capabilities of their current stack, up from 28% the year before.

This isn’t a rounding error. On a company spending meaningfully on marketing technology, Gartner-derived benchmarks suggest underutilization alone can waste several million dollars a year in dormant capability, capability you paid for and never activated. Zylo’s SaaS Management Index puts a similar number on the broader enterprise SaaS problem: at least 50% of licenses sit underutilized or unused across many organizations.

Why So Much of the Waste Is Actually a Category Error

Here’s what the audit taught me, and what I think most utilization reports miss. Underutilization isn’t only about tools nobody uses. A meaningful chunk of it is tools that ARE being used, heavily, just not by the team that owns the budget line.

Sales sequencing platforms, cold outreach tools, and even some CRM add-ons routinely get purchased under a “marketing enablement” umbrella and then get fully adopted by sales, who use them for exactly what they’re built for: cadences, cold outreach, pipeline follow-up. Marketing keeps reporting the spend and the seat count as martech ROI. Sales keeps using the tool without ever appearing in that ROI conversation. Everyone’s utilization dashboard looks fine on paper. Nobody’s dashboard reflects who’s actually accountable for the outcome the tool produces.

This matters because the fix for “genuinely unused tool” and the fix for “tool used by the wrong team, reported in the wrong budget” are completely different. One is a cancellation decision. The other is an ownership and reporting decision, and getting that distinction wrong is exactly how stacks stay bloated year after year.

The Consolidation Payoff Is Real, but Only If You Fix Ownership First

Companies that operate with five or fewer core marketing tools report 23% higher marketing-attributed pipeline per headcount than those running ten or more, according to Forrester data cited in NAV43’s 2026 stack audit research. One B2B SaaS case cited in the same research consolidated from 14 tools down to 6 and saw attribution clarity improve within 90 days, to the point where the CFO stopped questioning marketing spend altogether.

But consolidation alone doesn’t solve the ownership problem I found in my own audit. You can cut a stack from 14 tools to 6 and still end up with a sales-run tool sitting on the marketing P&L, just with fewer other tools around it to hide the mismatch. The real fix has to happen before the consolidation spreadsheet gets built: every tool in the stack needs a single accountable owner, based on who’s actually driving daily usage, not who originally signed the contract.

What I’d Actually Recommend Doing With This

A few things I’ve changed in how I now think about our own stack audits, and that I’d recommend to any B2B SaaS marketing leader running one:

• Run a login and activity audit before a spend audit. Cost tells you what you’re paying. Usage tells you who actually owns the tool in practice, and those two answers are often different people.
• Apply an “active use” threshold, not a binary used or unused label. If less than half of licensed seats have logged in within 30 days, treat the tool as underutilized regardless of who nominally owns it.
• Reclassify tools by actual function, not by the department that expensed them. A sequencing tool driven entirely by sales activity belongs in a sales enablement conversation, even if marketing’s card is on file.
• Resist the instinct to just add more tools to fix a reporting gap. The martech landscape has grown roughly 100x since 2011 to over 15,000 solutions, and more tools have consistently correlated with worse attribution clarity, not better.

The Real Cost Isn’t the Subscription

The subscription fee for an underused tool is annoying but survivable. The real cost is what it does to your credibility as a marketing leader. When 69% of marketing leaders report that low martech utilization negatively affected their budget the following year, and 67% say it undermined their department’s organizational credibility, the tool sprawl problem stops being an operational nuisance and starts being a strategic liability.

If you’ve never run the login-level audit I ran, I’d start there before your next renewal cycle. You might be surprised how much of your “marketing technology” line item is actually funding someone else’s workflow.

[🤖 Co-created with the assistance of AI / Written in alignment with EU AI Act transparency guidelines]