Martech Stack Consolidation Without Performance Loss

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.

Martech stack consolidation is the process of reducing overlapping marketing tools, unifying data and workflows, and keeping the systems that support campaign performance.

Simplifying your tech stack is essential, ongoing maintenance for the business. 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.

Key takeaways

• Martech stack consolidation helps enterprise marketing teams reduce tool sprawl by keeping the platforms that support core campaign, data, and workflow needs.
• Performance is easier to protect when consolidation starts with an audit of current usage, integrations, data quality, and business impact.
• A unified marketing tech stack can reduce waste, improve visibility, and help marketing, sales, and customer success work from a shared view of the customer.
• The safest consolidation plans are phased, documented, and supported with training so teams can adopt new workflows without unnecessary disruption.

Why should you consolidate your marketing tech stack?

You should consolidate your marketing tech stack when disconnected tools are creating waste, slowing campaign execution, or making customer data harder to use. 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 your team is still defining what belongs in the stack before you consolidate, Tenon’s guide to building a martech stack provides useful background for that review.

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

Data silos and fragmentation

Disconnected tools fragment customer data and make marketing operations harder to manage. Many people think more technology equals better performance. But the reality of using multiple disconnected tools is often fragmentation in your marketing operations. This fragmentation makes it difficult to see the full picture, let alone act on it quickly.

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 systems make it harder to see campaign performance and understand the customer journey end to end. Your email metrics might be in one tool, social media engagement in another, while website conversions are somewhere else completely.

Without that comprehensive view, it’s hard to justify marketing spend or prove a clear ROI.

Disjointed customer interactions are another unfortunate outcome. When performance data is incomplete, teams may miss opportunities for personalization or send messages to the wrong customers.

Misalignment between teams

Separate tools create separate customer views across marketing, sales, and customer success. In an ideal world, these teams collaborate closely. 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

Tool switching slows work, increases the chance of errors, and hurts morale. 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, pinpointing the problem across multiple tools can take hours of guesswork.

What are the benefits of consolidating your marketing tech stack?

The benefits of consolidating your marketing tech stack include lower costs, faster execution, better scalability, and stronger alignment across customer-facing teams. Together, these improvements can transform both marketing operations and overall business performance.

Reduced costs

Removing underused or redundant tools can reduce spend without taking away the systems your team actually needs. 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. The Gartner SaaS platform benchmark can help teams frame the scale of SaaS sprawl during renewal planning. Even consolidating a few tools can lead to major cost savings.

Increased efficiency and productivity

A unified stack helps teams automate repetitive work and collaborate across departments. Too many tools and processes hinder productivity. 55% 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 disconnected records. 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

Consolidation creates a more scalable foundation for growth and change. 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

Centralized data gives teams a shared, current view of marketing and customer activity. 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 do you consolidate your marketing tech stack step by step?

You consolidate your marketing tech stack by auditing current tools, identifying overlap, confirming core needs, validating integrations, considering a unified solution, phasing out redundant tools, and training your team. 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

Start with a complete inventory so every decision is based on real usage, cost, and ownership data. 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.

Use a lightweight audit checklist to keep the review consistent across teams:

• Tool owner
• Supported process or campaign workflow
• Usage frequency
• Contract cost and renewal timing
• Connected systems and integrations
• Duplicate functionality
• Customer or campaign data stored
• Retirement risk

2. Identify overlap and redundancy

Compare similar tools to see where multiple platforms support the same function or workflow. 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.

A simple stay, consolidate, or remove framework can make these decisions easier to explain:

3. Determine your core martech needs

Define your essential marketing capabilities before choosing what stays in the stack. 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, such as 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

Validate integration requirements early so consolidation does not introduce new data gaps or workflow friction. 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

A unified solution can replace multiple standalone tools when it supports the core workflows, data, and collaboration your team needs. 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

Retire redundant tools in a planned sequence to protect data, active projects, and team adoption. 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

Train teams before and after launch so the consolidated stack becomes part of daily work, not another system to work around. 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.

How can Tenon help consolidate your tech stack and improve alignment?

Tenon helps enterprise marketing teams consolidate work and automation on ServiceNow so teams can improve visibility, collaboration, and execution without adding another disconnected system. 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, the features your team needs are all in one place.

Book a demo with Tenon to see how your team can consolidate marketing work and automation on ServiceNow.

Frequently asked questions

What is martech stack consolidation?

Martech stack consolidation is the process of reducing overlapping marketing tools, unifying data and workflows, and keeping the systems that support campaign performance. The goal is not to cut technology for its own sake. The goal is to make the stack easier to manage, easier to measure, and more useful for the teams that depend on it every day.

How do you decide which martech tools to keep, consolidate, or remove?

Decide what to keep, consolidate, or remove by looking at usage, redundancy, integration value, data quality, and business impact. A tool should usually stay when it supports a critical marketing function and connects well with the rest of your systems. A tool is a consolidation or removal candidate when it duplicates another platform, stores fragmented data, or creates more manual work than value.

How can an enterprise consolidate its martech stack without sacrificing performance?

An enterprise can consolidate its martech stack without sacrificing performance by moving in phases instead of forcing a single cutover. Start with an audit, identify redundant tools, confirm core marketing needs, and validate integrations before retiring anything. Then train teams on the new workflows so campaign execution, reporting, and collaboration continue with as little disruption as possible.