Most Companies Are Wasting Their Stack

I started my presentation this year by playing an AI-generated song I made with exactly two credits. It was terrible, but it perfectly summed up the MarTech chaos we've all been living through: "Every vendor slapped AI on their name, promises of automation inside some more, but half of them were just the same old tools as before."

That's 2025 in a nutshell. Revolutionary claims everywhere, actual transformation? Not so much.

The Landscape: 15,000 Tools and Counting

The MarTech landscape hit about 15,000 solutions in 2025, a 9% increase from the previous year. What's interesting is that this was actually less growth than we saw from 2023 to 2024. We also witnessed one of the largest consolidation years, with 1,211 tools being removed, consolidated, or acquired.

Most of that growth? AI-powered solutions. Everything is marketing itself as AI-enabled, but here's the reality check: it doesn't really work differently in a lot of cases. It's just the same functionality with a chatbot slapped on top.

Four Adoption Patterns (And Why Three Are Disasters)

After working with dozens of companies this year, we're seeing four distinct adoption patterns. Understanding which one you fall into is critical because three of them lead straight to wasted budgets and frustrated teams.

The "Garden Hose" Approach

Turn on everything full blast. These clients want to do all the things at the same time and expect it to work perfectly and change their lives. What usually happens? A mess instead of growth. Teams don't use the tools, they forget about licenses they're still paying for, or we end up cleaning up the pieces. We've seen companies with multiple databases—they get sold another one even though they didn't need it in the first place. They'll have five subscriptions but really use maybe three to their fullest extent. Everything else is waste.

Keeping Up with the Joneses

My competitor has that tool, they said it's amazing on LinkedIn, so I need it too. This doesn't work because one business is very different from another business. Or a new marketing leader comes in and changes all the technology because it worked at their previous company—but they're operating at completely different scales. If you're buying an enterprise solution, you also need the resources to support that, which companies really struggle to understand. Small firms wanting super fancy reporting when Google Analytics would do just fine. Implementing a CRM because that's what the firms they aspire to be are using, but they don't actually need it right now.

The No-Interest Holdouts

They don't want to make changes, they don't want to add technology. Everything becomes manual, and processes are kept in the heads of employees or leadership—it's not passed along. There's this knowledge transfer gap happening where older leadership is retiring, but the knowledge isn't being transferred to younger teams because there aren't tools in place to transfer that knowledge. They're starting to fall behind, and it takes a lot more encouragement and persuasion to get them on board when we know they could really implement tools and move faster and grow.

The "You're the Experts, Tell Us What to Do"

These clients listen, they attend training sessions, they're fairly proactive in their feedback, we get executive buy-in. This is when it works really well. Where it doesn't work is when we give them all the information, the implementation process happens, but then they don't have time to manage it. They have false expectations about what they can actually handle. They don't assign an owner or champion of the tool to manage it, and it just sits there while they're paying monthly fees.

The truth is, most clients are a combination of these patterns. There's a little bit of everything. It's really hard to manage a tech stack effectively without someone in a dedicated role—and even sometimes with a person in that role—to fully concentrate on rollout and make sure it's working efficiently for the entire marketing team.

Tech Sprawl: The Tax You Didn't Budget For

Tech sprawl is definitely happening more, especially with AI tools. Companies are like, "Oh, I want this data enrichment tool because it has AI. Oh, this one looks a little bit better, let's try that. What about the thing in HubSpot? Can we do that?" We also see it in project management software—some companies will have two or sometimes three different ways they're managing projects across departments, but even within marketing, we'll see Trello, ClickUp, and Monday because they've tried so many different things and just kept bits of them.

The biggest problem is too many tools acquired for single-use tasks. An audit isn't happening in terms of where we can consolidate and save. The audit only comes in a panic: "We have to cut costs, what can we cut, we're cutting it now."

Tech sprawl creates clutter and fragmented reporting. Data cleanliness becomes impossible—it's coming in from all different sources, and it's really hard to pull proper reporting and get everyone on the same page when they're pulling data from all these different places.

The intention of these tools is always positive—they want to improve productivity in some way. But what ends up happening is it reduces productivity because either the team is task-switching too often to too many different tools, or they've completely checked out and they're not using the tool at all. They go right back to Google Sheets and Word Docs instead. We saw one client trying to automate their blog creation who ended up creating a new Word doc for every version of the article, so they had five different versions trying to figure out which one was latest.

There's also duplicate efforts from just a breakdown in communication. When a team becomes more siloed in their own little lanes and there isn't cross-communication of tools implemented, duplicate tasks start happening because they don't think to work collaboratively.

The bottom line: clients pay for roughly 100% of the product and use about 25 to 30% on average. My goal going forward is to really get them to use up to 80% of that product they already have, if it makes sense, instead of adding something new.

The Most Redundant Tools (Stop Paying for Duplicates)

Here's what we're seeing over and over:

Social schedulers

They have HubSpot, then they also use Later, or some other tool. Pick one and let's go with it.

Databases and CRMs

Some overlap is unavoidable—accounting firms need their practice management software for billing and invoicing, and some have HubSpot. But we have to establish what each is used for. Some organizations are almost nervous to decide "this is the role of one, this is the role of the other" and keeping it like that. They waffle back and forth.

Project management tools

We're all aware of this one.

Analytics and reporting

Legacy tools that carry over. We've seen clients with multiple analytics platforms when Google Analytics would be sufficient for their size.

LLMs

The marketing team has gone rogue and gotten ChatGPT subscriptions while they're trying to activate Copilot licenses across the organization. There's a bunch of duplicity, and that's an IP nightmare.

Time tracking

Teams doing time tracking in their project management tool and then also doing it separately in another system. It just doesn't make sense.

The Three Most Underutilized Tools

HubSpot: I'm going to continue to say HubSpot because we see a lot of smaller companies who have been convinced that HubSpot is for them, and it's really just an expensive contact database. They use it just for emailing, or they're only using a small portion when they have a pro-type subscription instead of really just needing the basics to start with. Not using all the functionality—we're seeing not a lot of automation or personalization implemented where they have a lot of data they can use to start segmenting. HubSpot is often only for marketing and separate from sales where it's not integrated, and we know there are ways to have one-way sync or control how data flows to be able to better report.

Google Workspace and Office Copilot: Companies are starting to test it out, get a little understanding, but there's a lot of automation that can happen within these tools to work more effectively and have more productivity throughout the whole team by utilizing Google Apps Scripts and Copilot. There's just a lot there that we've only kind of tapped into.

AI: It seems odd to say AI is underutilized, but where it's being underutilized is the lack of understanding of the capabilities. We're talking with clients about building custom GPTs to answer questions for leadership so they don't have to wait for a team to report back. But they're thinking, "Well, it just produces content, that's all it's really good for." We can go in and say, "Here's all the ways you could use it, and this is how you can solve the problems you're telling us you have in a really streamlined, efficient way that actually doesn't cost a lot to implement."

The best example of underutilization is project management tools—they're actually really robust, especially platforms like Asana and Monday. You can do a lot of really cool stuff in there with task automation and dependency variables that are just built-in features. But teams are asking about using AI for things that are literally native functionality in the tool they already pay for.

The capabilities within HubSpot, Monday, all of these tools—these companies are implementing AI features, and maybe they're not the best, but it's definitely a great stepping stone to test out the AI within the tool you already have before adding another tool that does the same thing. You don't need to add another tool, you can just utilize all the innovations happening within the platforms you're already using.

How to Fix This: The Audit-First Approach

A lot of the issues stem from the fact that there's no clear ownership in marketing teams. No one within companies is up to speed on what's new in their tools, no one is driving adoption, no one is keeping things consistent. That's hard to do from the outside, but research shows that 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail due to poor change management and lack of user adoption.

Here's how we're approaching this going forward:

Start every engagement with an audit—understand what they have versus what they use. Document everything so we have it on record. Look at tools, templates, and make sure everything is clean.

Do annual audits for current clients—things get dirty throughout the year. Things need to be maintained. We often talk to clients about database maintenance and maintaining their tools, but it doesn't happen or they don't know how to do it.

Right-size recommendations—understand what their needs are, what they have the capacity to manage, and recommend based on that. Not what their competitor has, not what the enterprise-level company uses, but what actually fits their current reality.

Require tool ownership—we're pushing to have an owner of the tool within the organization going forward. Without a champion, adoption fails every time.

Build adoption into engagements—not only build the tool but support them post-launch. Start the process early and have the team involved in the build, or at least understanding the why. Get buy-in, identify a champion, have post-launch sessions to ask questions, create documentation, and do post-launch check-ins.

Make adoption a team KPI—this probably won't fit for every organization, but it's important to have accountability for using these tools. It encourages the team to use it, be more collaborative in talking about where they're at and where they have questions, and feel more ownership.

The data assessment piece is critical too. We've done this with CRM platforms and consistently find pushback about who's going to clean the data. It's costly for us to do it, and it's important that the client does it because they know their data best. But it has to be a collaborative audit to really understand what's happening and provide the best recommendations that will show how effective our work is in the future.

Stop Buying Tools, Start Using What You Have

Look, this is kind of like telling your kids "we have food at home" when they want to go out. But the reality is, in 2025, we saw companies acting like kids in a candy store—"we need that, we need that"—because things are being released so fast. Tools are being updated so quickly that a lot of times we don't even hear about new features, and we have to do research to know what's been added.

For 2026, here's the shift: we're moving from acquisition to optimization. Instead of "what new tool do we need," it's "how do we use what we already have better."

That means:

• Prioritizing data and platform readiness from the beginning
• Supporting through the build and adoption phases
• Determining the right tools for the client (not the shiniest ones)
• Integration and training built into every engagement
• Measuring adoption as a KPI

When we do this right, we're saving companies thousands in licensing fees while actually improving productivity. That procurement angle matters—during audits, we look at how much money we save in licenses, because that's massive savings that will buy a ton of time in our engagements. We've already paid for ourselves.

The more AI-driven work we do, the more we have to be involved in the technology conversation. We literally won't be able to do the work otherwise. It's critical.

Get Your Tech Stack Under Control

The reality is most companies are paying for 100% and using 25-30% of their marketing technology. That's not a strategy, that's just expensive chaos.

Ready to audit your MarTech stack and actually use what you're paying for? Winsome's technology consulting services help you eliminate redundancy, increase adoption, and turn your tech investments into actual productivity gains. Let's talk about what's sitting unused in your stack.