Stack rationalisation is not downsizing. It’s a MarTech ROI rescue.

Every few years, a Marketing Ops team looks at its technology stack and has the same realisation you get when you open the “misc” kitchen drawer.

Nothing in there is individually a bad idea. It’s just… a lot. Half of it does the same job. Some of it hasn’t been used since the last merger. One item is only kept because a former colleague swore it was “mission critical”, and nobody’s brave enough to ask what it actually does.

That’s your MarTech stack.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: Most stacks don’t fail because the tools are bad. They fail because the stack stopped being designed and started being collected.

The result is predictable. Costs creep up. Adoption fragments. Data gets weird. Reporting becomes interpretive dance. The team spends more time keeping systems alive than using them to create pipeline.

Then someone says, “We need to rationalise the stack,” and everyone hears, “We’re about to take your toys away.”

But that’s not what rationalisation should be. Done properly, it’s not a finance-led haircut. It’s a performance rescue. It’s how you turn “we have loads of tools” into “we get value from what we pay for”.

It’s also one of the fastest ways to regain executive trust, because nothing screams “adult supervision” like knowing what you own, why you own it, and what it’s delivering.

The ROI myth that keeps stacks bloated

MarTech ROI is usually treated like a scoreboard. We bought tool X. Tool X has dashboard Y. Therefore we can report ROI. But “reporting ROI” and “having ROI” are not the same thing.

Most MarTech spend is justified with a story, not evidence. A story about efficiency. A story about personalisation. A story about scale. A story about being “data-driven”. Great stories, honestly. Very fundable.

Then reality arrives.

The tool requires clean data you don’t have. It needs an integration nobody scoped. It assumes a process you’ve never standardised. It gets deployed halfway, then the team gets busy, then six months pass, then renewal comes around and you renew because the alternative is admitting you don’t know what you’re doing.

That is not a tool problem. That is an operating model problem.

And the longer it goes on, the harder it gets to unwind, because the stack becomes political. People attach their identity to platforms. Procurement decisions become legacy monuments. Usage becomes impossible to measure because “using it” might mean anything from logging in once a quarter to running mission-critical workflows.

So the stack grows. Overlaps multiply. ROI gets fuzzier. Everyone gets used to it. Until a CFO asks a very fair question:

“What are we paying for, and what are we getting back?”

If you can’t answer that crisply, you don’t have a stack. You have a subscription museum.

Rationalisation isn’t removing tools. It’s restoring design.

A rationalised stack is not the smallest possible number of tools. It’s the fewest tools required to reliably execute your strategy. That’s a huge difference. Because the goal is not austerity. The goal is performance. It’s speed, consistency, measurable outcomes, and reduced dependency on heroics.

When stacks are bloated, teams start compensating with workarounds and manual effort. They build fragile automations. They export spreadsheets. They invent processes to deal with tool limitations instead of choosing tools that fit the process.

Rationalisation reverses that. It gets you back to intentional design:

• What do we actually need to do to win?

• What capabilities matter most to deliver that?

• What is the simplest architecture that supports those capabilities?

• Where are we paying twice for the same outcome?

• Where do we have “features” but not “adoption”?

• Where does the data fall apart?

This is why stack rationalisation is not primarily a procurement exercise. It’s a strategy and operations exercise that happens to result in procurement changes.

The hidden cost: Operational drag

Most teams underestimate how expensive complexity is, because it doesn’t show up as a single line item.

Complexity costs you in:

Time: Training, troubleshooting, triage, and all the “small” tasks that become constant.

Speed: Every new campaign takes longer because the workflow touches more systems and more handoffs.

Risk: Data privacy, consent, access control, and governance failures become more likely as systems multiply.

Insight: Reporting degrades because definitions split across tools and no one trusts the numbers.

Morale: Nothing kills motivation like working inside a stack that feels unreliable.

If you want a simple definition of “MarTech debt”, it’s the gap between the stack you have and the stack your team can actually operate confidently. Paying off that debt is where ROI rescue starts.

Why most rationalisation attempts fail

Plenty of teams try to rationalise. Many even reduce vendor count. And then, weirdly, not much improves. That happens when rationalisation is done as a cleanup rather than a redesign.

Common failure patterns:

It becomes a cost-only exercise. If the main goal is to cut spend, the team will keep anything that looks defensible and ditch anything that looks optional, regardless of whether the “optional” tool is the one actually driving outcomes.

It ignores workflows. Tools get evaluated in isolation, not based on the end-to-end journey they support. You can’t rationalise your stack if you can’t describe your core workflows.

It confuses usage with value. A heavily used tool might still be a net negative if it drives manual work, fragmented data, or duplicated processes.

It avoids hard questions. Teams keep tools because “someone uses it”, but nobody can define the value, the owner, the success metrics, or the alternative.

It forgets change management. Removing tools is easy. Removing habits is hard. If you don’t redesign workflows and retrain the team, the old problems will reappear inside the “new” stack.

If you want stack rationalisation to stick, it has to be tied to operational clarity and measurable outcomes.

The ROI rescue approach: stop measuring tools, start measuring capabilities

A better way to think about MarTech ROI is this:

You don’t buy tools. You buy capabilities. Tools are just one way to deliver those capabilities.

So instead of asking, “What does this platform do?”, ask “What capability does this enable, and how will we prove it?”

Capabilities might include:

• Reliable lifecycle email execution.

• Accurate attribution you trust enough to bet budget on.

• Lead management that doesn’t create sales distrust.

• Consent and preference management that reduces risk.

• Personalisation that actually moves conversion rates.

• Reporting that doesn’t require a therapist.

Once you frame it this way, rationalisation becomes clearer. Overlap is not “two tools do similar things”. Overlap is “we’re paying twice for the same capability”.

And gaps become obvious too. Sometimes teams have ten tools yet still can’t do one critical thing consistently because the foundations are missing: Data, governance, process ownership.

That’s why the ROI rescue is not simply consolidation. It’s capability alignment.

Step one: Name the outcomes you’re trying to buy

Before you touch vendors, get specific about what the business expects MOPS to deliver, and what MOPS expects the stack to make easier.

Not vague outcomes like “better engagement”, Concrete outcomes like: Reduce campaign launch time from ten days to five. Increase lead-to-meeting conversion rate by 15 percent. Improve lifecycle email contribution to pipeline by X. Increase MQL to SQL acceptance by Y. Reduce manual list pulls and CSV-based processes by Z.

If you can’t define outcomes, the stack will keep being evaluated based on opinion and politics. The fastest way to kill a rationalisation project is to make it about which tools people like.

Step two: Map the workflows that create value

You don’t need a massive process library. You need the handful of workflows where performance lives. For most B2B teams, that’s usually Lead capture to routing, lifecycle email and nurture, campaign execution and measurement, attribution and reporting, data enrichment and deduplication, consent and preference management and integration between CRM, MAP, and analytics.

Map those workflows at a human level, not at a vendor feature level. Who does what, when, with what inputs, and where the system should automate vs where humans need control. This is where you’ll find the truth.

The truth is usually that the stack is not too big. It’s too inconsistent. It allows different parts of the org to operate different versions of “the process”, which creates downstream chaos.

Rationalisation should standardise workflows, not just reduce logos on a slide.

Step three: Assign ownership, or accept you’re buying waste

Tools without owners become toys, then become liabilities. Every core system and every core workflow needs an accountable owner. Not a committee. A named person.

Ownership means:

• Defining standards.

• Managing changes.

• Measuring performance.

• Training users.

• Deciding what gets built and what gets blocked.

If nobody owns it, you’re not buying a platform. You’re buying entropy. This is also where ROI becomes measurable. You can’t prove ROI on something nobody is responsible for improving.

Step four: Create a “keep, kill, consolidate, fix foundations” decision model

This is where teams expect a dramatic tool-culling session. Sometimes you will cut tools. Often you should. But more often, the biggest ROI is in “fix foundations”.

Because you can consolidate your stack beautifully and still get terrible results if:

• Data is inconsistent.

• Lifecycle definitions are unclear.

• UTM governance is non-existent.

• CRM hygiene is a fantasy.

• Sales stages and lead statuses mean different things to different people.

• Consent tracking is messy.

Rationalisation should result in decisions across four buckets:

Keep: tools that directly support priority capabilities and are adopted properly.

Kill: tools that are unused, redundant, or never delivered the promised capability.

Consolidate: overlap where one tool can reasonably replace another without wrecking workflows.

Fix foundations: areas where the tool is fine, but the operating model is broken.

That last bucket is where ROI rescue often lives. Because you can save money by cutting a tool. You can make money by making the stack work.

Step five: Measure a few things that actually matter

ROI is not platform cost divided by vibes. Pick metrics that connect stack performance to business performance and operational efficiency.

Examples that tend to expose the truth quickly include time-to-launch for campaigns, percentage of leads routed correctly within SLA, sales acceptance rate of leads, percentage of lifecycle emails using approved templates and tracking, duplicate rate in CRM, percentage of records with required fields.

And then other things such as report reliability: Do teams trust the dashboards enough to use them in decisions? And support load: How many hours per week are spent troubleshooting basic execution issues?

These metrics do two important things. They prove value when things improve. And they make it painfully obvious when a tool is not the problem.

The part nobody likes: Rationalisation changes power

This is why it’s hard.

A rationalised stack usually means fewer exceptions, more standards and clearer governance - less “I do it my way”. That feels restrictive if you’re used to improvising. But it’s the difference between creativity and chaos.

High-performing teams don’t move faster because they have more tools. They move faster because they have fewer decisions to remake every week. Standards create speed. Governance creates confidence. Clarity creates adoption.

And adoption is the thing that turns software into ROI.

What “good” looks like when you’ve rescued ROI

A rationalised stack doesn’t look exciting. It looks boring in the best way.

Campaigns launch reliably. Reporting is trusted. Integrations are stable. Lead routing works without daily drama. New hires can learn the system without needing a private tour from the one person who understands it. You spend less time arguing about tools and more time improving outcomes. And the CFO stops asking awkward questions because you’ve already answered them.

That’s the real goal. Not fewer vendors for the sake of it, but a stack that behaves like infrastructure, not a science project.

The kicker: Rationalisation is an AI readiness project in disguise

Most organisations are desperate to “use AI” and confused about why it isn’t magically working. Here’s why.

AI can’t save a broken operating model. It will only automate the chaos faster. If your data is inconsistent, AI will generate inconsistent outputs. If your processes are unclear, AI will amplify the ambiguity. If nobody owns the system, AI will become another orphan tool.

Stack rationalisation, done properly, is one of the best AI readiness moves you can make. Because it forces you to create the conditions where automation can be trusted: Clean data, standard workflows, and clear accountability.

You don’t become AI-ready by buying an AI feature - You become AI-ready by becoming operationally serious.

A final thought: If your stack can’t be explained, it can’t be defended

If you can’t describe, in plain language, what each major tool is for, who owns it, what capability it supports, and how you measure its success, you’re not managing a stack.

You’re hosting one.

Stack rationalisation is not about being smaller. It’s about being deliberate. And MarTech ROI rescue is not about proving your spend was justified. It’s about ensuring your spend becomes productive.

If you want a simple rule to start with, use this:

If a tool doesn’t reduce time, reduce risk, or increase revenue, it’s either mismanaged or unnecessary.

Either way, it’s on the list.

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