Most teams cannot say how many tools they run. The exercise is worth doing, and the total is the least interesting thing it produces.
Ask a marketing leader how many tools their team runs and you will usually get an estimate, delivered with a slight hesitation that suggests they know it is wrong. It generally is, and the error runs in one direction.
The widely cited industry landscape of marketing technology products has grown from a few hundred in its early editions to many thousands, and the fragmentation of that market is reflected in individual stacks. Tools accumulate through routes that never touch a central inventory: a trial that became a subscription, a product bought by an agency and inherited, something a departing employee expensed.
Counting properly
There are three sources, and you need all three because each misses something the others catch.
Start with finance. Pull every recurring payment and card transaction attributable to marketing over the last twelve months, not just those with a software cost code. This catches the tools nobody remembers and misses anything free or paid through another department.
Then take identity and access. Ask IT for a list of applications with active single sign-on connections or OAuth grants against marketing accounts. This catches free tools and anything connected to your core systems, which is the category that matters most for data governance.
Then ask the team, by workflow rather than by tool. Walk through how a campaign actually gets built and shipped and note every product touched along the way. This catches shadow tools that neither finance nor IT can see, and it produces the workflow map you will need for the next part.
What the exercise actually reveals
The total is the least useful output. Four other findings matter far more.
Overlap. Count the tools that do substantially the same job. Two email tools, three analytics products, several places where the same audience segment is defined differently. Overlap is where cost and inconsistency both live.
Ownership. For each tool, name the individual accountable for it. Anything without a name is either abandoned or a risk, and frequently both, because unowned tools still hold data and still have credentials.
Abandonment. When was the last new user onboarded, and when was the tool last used in a campaign? A product with an active subscription and no activity for six months is a straightforward saving.
Data flow. Which tools hold customer records, and which exchange them with which. This is the map you need for any consent or deletion request, and most organisations discover they cannot draw it from memory.
What to do with the findings
Cancel the abandoned tools. That is immediate, uncontroversial and usually pays for the exercise several times over.
Assign an owner to everything that survives, or remove it. An unowned tool will drift back into abandonment within a year.
Then examine the overlaps, one workflow at a time, asking whether the duplication is deliberate. Sometimes it is: two teams with genuinely different needs. Often it is not.
Consolidation, if it is warranted, comes after all of this rather than before. A rationalised stack is a much better starting point for a platform decision than a sprawling one, and some teams find that once the abandoned and duplicated tools are gone, the consolidation case they were building has largely evaporated.
Repeat annually. A stack audit is not a project, it is maintenance, and the second one takes a fraction of the time the first did.
How we work. This article was researched and written by the Marketing Hub Media editorial team. We do not republish press releases. Where we cite data we name the source and the method. Corrections are made openly on the article - if you believe something here is wrong, write to info@marketinghubmedia.com.
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