How to Consolidate Your Martech Stack Without Sacrificing Performance

If your martech stack is less of a strategic asset and more of a strategic headache, you’re not alone. 

Many enterprise marketing leaders are grappling with the consequences of a bloated martech stack. The once-straightforward marketing toolkit has become a tangled web of specialized technologies. These technologies promise greater capabilities and insights but deliver something quite different: redundant functionalities, steep costs, and frustrating data silos.  

Simplifying your tech tools is a key business housekeeping task. Fortunately, you don’t have to sacrifice marketing performance to trim the fat. A smaller martech stack can amplify your results while making everyone’s job easier. 

Why consolidate your marketing tech stack?

The answer to a sprawling tech stack is consolidation. While an inefficient martech stack drains resources, consolidation paves the way for agility. A consolidated marketing tech stack creates a more unified customer experience, enabling teams to work better together and increase ROI. 

If any of the following challenges sound familiar, it’s likely time to consolidate. 

Data silos and fragmentation 

Many people think more technology equals better performance. But the reality of using multiple disconnected tools is often fragmentation in your marketing operations. It’s like trying to put together a puzzle with mismatched pieces—you can’t see the full picture, let alone make sense of it all. 

When customer information is spread across platforms, inefficiencies are inevitable. These silo struggles are all signs of an oversized tech stack: 

• An updated email address in your CRM doesn’t reflect in your email marketing tool, so a customer doesn’t receive an important email and becomes (understandably) frustrated. 
• Your marketing team has to jump from one tool to another to complete a task, risking errors from manual data transfer between disparate software. 
• You have duplicate data clogging up your storage resources. 

Decreased visibility 

Scattered data also means less visibility into your marketing performance. Your email metrics might be in one tool, social media engagement in another, while website conversions are somewhere else completely. 

Without a comprehensive view, it’s hard to understand the full customer journey and impact of your campaigns. And how can you justify marketing spend without knowing the clear ROI? 

Disjointed customer interactions are another unfortunate outcome. Lack of visibility can lead to missed opportunities for personalization and even misfired messages targeting the wrong customers. 

Misalignment between teams 

In an ideal business world, marketing, sales, and customer success teams work hand in hand. But within most organizations, this vision is far from reality, and overloaded tech stacks are largely to blame. 

When each team uses its own set of tools, marketing, sales, and customer success all have different views of the customer, which leads to conflicting approaches and mixed messages. 

Marketing insights that could inform sales strategies never reach the sales team. Customer feedback from the client success team doesn’t make it back to marketing so the team can adjust their strategies. When critical information doesn’t flow smoothly, you’re bound to encounter friction and inefficiencies. 

Team difficulties and frustrations

You can’t ignore the human element of an unconsolidated tech stack. When people can’t perform their core job responsibilities, team morale suffers. In this work environment, valuable team members struggle to do simple tasks, and some may become so dissatisfied that they leave the organization. 

Constantly switching between tools is mentally exhausting. It steals away your team’s focus, decreases accuracy, and tanks productivity. As you add new tools to your tech stack, teams have to pause actual marketing activities to learn them. Then when issues arise, trying to pinpoint the problem among multiple tools can feel like finding a needle in a haystack.  

The benefits of consolidating your marketing tech stack 

The benefits of consolidation go far beyond tidying your digital toolbox. From cutting costs to creating more harmony between teams, martech stack consolidation can transform marketing operations and business performance. 

Reduced costs 

Cutting underutilized tools and subscriptions is an easy cost-reduction strategy. Forty percent of enterprise companies have purchased 10+ martech tools. Among those companies, 73% only use five or fewer tools every week. 

What tools are collecting dust instead of driving value in your organization? 

Companies can significantly reduce costs by streamlining their tech stacks. According to Gartner, organizations have an average of 125 different SaaS platforms that cost them $1,040 per employee every year. Even consolidating a few tools can lead to major cost savings. 

Increased efficiency and productivity 

Too many tools and processes hinders productivity. Fifty-five percent of marketers report feeling burnt out from overwhelming workloads and unclear processes. With the right marketing technology in place, teams can get more done and be more collaborative. 

A unified marketing tech stack allows for workflow automation across different departments. Employees can ditch repetitive tasks and focus on more strategic work, accelerating their project turnaround times. 

Integration between systems also allows teams to exchange data across departments, so there are no duplicate data entries or data silos. They can share and communicate across a centralized hub and get visibility into day-to-day workflows within the organization. This clarity fuels productivity. 

Improved scalability and future-proofing

Staying ahead of the latest marketing trends and technologies is a never-ending relay race. New platforms and solutions emerge daily as your organization experiences its own growth and transformation. This makes managing a complex tech stack incredibly challenging. Many marketing leaders feel like they’re just trying to keep up rather than optimizing their strategies. 

Consolidating data and workflows provides a foundation for scalable, sustainable marketing. As your business grows and your marketing operations become more complex, a unified tech stack simplifies the complexity. 

It centralizes your data so you can work with greater efficiency and gives you the agility to navigate changing markets. If you need to pivot, you can add new technologies without disrupting your entire marketing ecosystem. 

Better alignment between marketing, sales, and front office

A centralized martech system is the next best thing to everyone in your organization sharing a brain. They can access the marketing data they need without navigating the silos of individual departments or tools. 

From content creation and social media to marketing and sales, teams have real-time access to the most reliable, up-to-date information. This high-quality data is non-negotiable: It empowers everyone in your organization to make informed decisions and experiment with new strategies that drive revenue. 

How to consolidate your marketing tech stack step by step

If consolidating your marketing tech stack feels like a Herculean task, stick with us. Below, we’ve outlined some steps to help make the process more manageable. 

1. Assess your current martech stack 

Before the real consolidation work begins, you need a clear picture of your existing tools. Start by listing every marketing tool your organization uses. Don’t forget to account for every team and department and include even free or low-cost tools. 

Next, find out how frequently teams use each tool and learn what tasks or processes they support. This is a good opportunity to gather feedback from users about their experiences, including any pain points and areas for improvement. 

2. Identify overlap and redundancy 

One of the best ways to spot redundancies is to conduct a feature comparison. Create a matrix that compares the features of similar tools, highlighting any areas where multiple tools offer the same capabilities. Examine how data moves between the tools. 

You’ll also want to dig into existing automation processes. If there are duplicate or similar workflows you could consolidate, make note of them. 

3. Determine your core martech needs 

Make a list of your company’s overall business goals and marketing strategies. Which marketing activities directly support these objectives? From this list, what core marketing functions are essential for reaching your goals (e.g., lead generation)? You’ll want to rank these functions based on their impact on your business. 

Now evaluate your existing martech tools against your prioritized functions. Identify any gaps where your current technology falls short. Be sure to factor in features you might need to support the future growth of your business. 

For example, what type of customer data collection and segmentation does your current customer relationship management (CRM) solution support? Will it continue driving your success if you expand into new markets? 

4. Evaluate integration capabilities

In a G2 survey, 51% of marketers said integration challenges have held them back from adopting new technologies. This is why it’s important to identify whether your chosen tools can work together early on in the consolidation process. You’ll want to highlight integration hurdles before making any major decisions. 

Here are a few questions to consider:

• Do the tools offer robust APIs that allow for easy data exchange and integration with other platforms? 
• Do they have pre-built integrations with other popular martech solutions? 
• Are data formats and structures compatible between tools? 
• Do the tools support real-time data sharing? 
• What data security measures are in place to ensure compliance with data protection regulations? 
• Do the tools allow for custom integrations if needed? 

5. Consider implementing a unified solution 

Simplicity is powerful. A comprehensive marketing solution can replace multiple standalone tools, giving you a 360-degree view of your marketing efforts. 

With it, you can eliminate data silos, empowering teams across your organization to work toward the same goals. A unified solution also makes it easier to calculate the ROI of your marketing efforts by housing everything in one location. 

As you’re considering a single solution for your needs, think about the future as well—choose one that can scale with you. Prioritize the solution that can make your team’s jobs easier and keep your data safe. 

Tenon, built on the ServiceNow platform, checks all of these boxes. It offers a single solution for marketing teams to execute campaigns, projects, and marketing work while improving visibility and collaboration. 

6. Phase out redundant tools 

Planning is critical in this step. Determine what data will be migrated and where you’ll store it. To avoid losing important information, you’ll want to ensure data compatibility between systems. 

Next, choose a retirement date that aligns with contract end dates. But don’t forget to consider project completion dates—the last thing you want to do is implement a new tool in the middle of a major project. 

If possible, retire your tools in phases so you have time to test and make adjustments with minimal disruption. We recommend breaking the process into separate tasks, including data cleanup, system configuration, testing, and training. 

You’ll also need to identify all stakeholders who may use the tool, including employees, agency partners, and external customers. Provide sufficient notice about the change, and be transparent about the reasons you’re retiring the tool. 

7. Train your team on the new tech stack

It’s time to set your teams up for success. Proper training and support will ensure successful adoption. Create a user-centric training program that’s simple, ongoing, and easily accessible. This will help employees get used to the new tool. 

Give them opportunities to join practice sessions, where they can see how the tools apply to their work and get more confident using them. But don’t stop after the initial onboarding session. 

Provide regular training sessions and online resources so employees can stay ahead of the latest updates. Celebrate the successes along the way—even a small win can boost morale and encourage continued use. 

Consolidate your tech stack and drive better alignment with Tenon

Tech stack consolidation takes careful planning and consideration, but the efficiency gains and cost savings will justify your efforts. A consolidated tech stack can bring teams together for powerful collaboration while simplifying workflows across the board.

Tenon helps teams tame the chaos of managing marketing work and marketing automation. With Tenon, all the features your team needs are all in one place. 

Book a demo today to see it for yourself.

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