TL;DR:

Gartner's 2025 Marketing Technology Survey found that businesses use only 49% of their martech stack's capabilities, and just 15% of organizations qualify as high performers. Meanwhile, 61% of marketers regret at least one software purchase within the last 18 months. This post gives you a step-by-step audit framework to figure out which tools are earning their keep, which ones are dead weight, and what to do with the results. Every stat is sourced from Gartner's primary research.

A contractor in Kimberly pulled up his credit card statement last month and counted nine recurring software charges. CRM: $99. Email platform: $50. Scheduling tool: $25. Social media scheduler: $39. Lead database: $149. Invoicing: $40. Review management: $29. Website hosting: $35. A "workflow automation" platform someone on his team signed up for in January that nobody had logged into since February: $49.

Total: $515 a month. $6,180 a year. For tools that mostly didn't talk to each other, stored overlapping versions of the same customer data, and required him to remember nine different passwords.

He's not unusual. He's average.

The utilization problem is worse than you think

Gartner has been tracking marketing technology utilization for years, and the numbers tell a consistent story: businesses buy far more than they use.

Their 2023 Martech Survey, surveying 405 marketing leaders, found that organizations were using just 33% of their martech stack's capabilities. That was down from 42% in 2022 and 58% in 2020. Three years of declining utilization while spending on marketing technology rose 35% over the same period.

By 2025, things improved slightly. Gartner's 2025 Martech Survey shows utilization rebounding to 49%. But that still means half of what businesses pay for sits unused. And only 15% of organizations in Gartner's sample qualified as high performers, meaning they both met strategic goals and demonstrated positive ROI on their technology.

The biggest obstacles Gartner identified: complexity of the current ecosystem, customer data challenges, and inflexible governance. In plain English, the tools are too complicated, the data doesn't flow between them, and nobody owns the problem.

For small businesses without dedicated martech teams, those obstacles are even more severe. There's no IT department to manage integrations. There's no marketing ops person auditing utilization quarterly. The tools just accumulate, and the invoices keep hitting.

Why businesses keep buying tools they don't use

The math feels logical in the moment. A new tool costs $49 a month. If it saves five hours of manual work, it pays for itself. But that calculation almost never plays out because it ignores three hidden costs: the time to set it up, the time to learn it, and the friction of moving data between it and everything else.

Gartner's Digital Markets 2024 Tech Trends Survey, covering 3,484 software buyers across nine countries, found that 61% of marketers experienced regret for one or more software purchases within the past 12 to 18 months. The top reasons: 36% said the investment was more expensive than expected, and another 36% said the technology wasn't compatible with their existing systems.

That last point is the one that kills small businesses quietly. You buy a tool that works fine in isolation, but it doesn't connect to your CRM, your email platform, or your calendar. So you end up doing the same data entry in two places, which is worse than having one tool because now you have two conflicting sources of truth.

The audit framework: five questions for every tool

Here's a practical methodology you can run this week. Pull your credit card and bank statements for the last 12 months. List every recurring software charge. Then ask these five questions about each one.

Question 1: Did anyone on my team use this tool in the last seven days?

Not "could someone use it." Not "it would be useful if we had time." Did someone actually log in and do something with it in the past week? If not, it's a candidate for cancellation. A tool that sits unused for seven days is almost certainly sitting unused most of the time. Check the login history if the platform provides it.

Question 2: Does this tool hold data that also exists somewhere else?

If your contacts live in both your email platform and your CRM, you have a duplication problem. Duplicated data means inconsistent records, missed follow-ups, and decisions made on incomplete information. Every tool that stores overlapping data with another tool is a source of friction. One of them should be the source of truth. The other should either sync automatically or be eliminated.

Question 3: Would anything break if I turned this off tomorrow?

This is the most clarifying question. If the answer is "nothing would break," cancel it. If the answer is "we'd lose our pipeline visibility" or "we couldn't send invoices," keep it. Most owners discover that 30 to 40% of their tools fail this test. Nobody notices when they're gone because nobody was using them.

Question 4: Is this tool doing something my CRM should already handle?

Many small businesses pay separately for email marketing, appointment scheduling, review requests, and lead capture when their CRM platform already includes those features (or could, with a different CRM). Before renewing a standalone tool, check whether the function is available inside a platform you're already paying for. You might be paying twice for the same capability.

Question 5: How much time does my team spend maintaining this tool versus getting value from it?

Some tools take more time to manage (updating settings, syncing data, troubleshooting integrations) than they save. If your team spends more time feeding the tool than benefiting from it, the ROI is negative regardless of what the subscription costs. This is the hidden cost that never appears on an invoice but shows up in your team's productivity every week.

What to do with the results

After running the five questions, your tools will fall into three categories.

Keep. Tools your team uses weekly, that hold unique data, and that would create a real problem if removed. These are earning their subscription.

Cut. Tools nobody logged into in the last two weeks, that duplicate data held elsewhere, and that would cause zero disruption if cancelled. Cancel these today.

Consolidate. Tools that are individually useful but could be replaced by a single platform that handles multiple functions. This is where the biggest savings live, not in the $29 per month tool you cancel, but in the four $50 per month tools you replace with one $99 per month platform that does all four jobs from the same dashboard.

The consolidation category is where most small businesses find the real win. When your CRM, email marketing, lead capture, scheduling, review requests, and pipeline management all operate from the same data layer, three things happen. Your data lives in one place instead of five. Your automations work because they don't depend on fragile integrations between platforms. And your team opens one platform instead of switching between six, which matters more than most owners realize.

Context switching has a real productivity cost. Every time someone closes one tool and opens another, finds the right contact, remembers where they left off, and picks up the thread, they lose minutes. Multiply that by dozens of daily switches across a five-person team and you're looking at hours of lost productivity per week that never show up on any report. Consolidation eliminates most of that friction by keeping every action, every contact, and every next step inside one interface.

The compounding cost of fragmentation

The dollar amount on your subscription invoices is the visible cost. The invisible cost is the revenue you never capture because the system failed at the wrong moment.

A lead fills out a form on your website. The form lives in one tool. The CRM lives in another. The email follow-up lives in a third. If any of those handoffs break, the lead sits in a database nobody checks. By the time someone notices, the prospect has already called your competitor.

Gartner's data makes the scale clear: if you're using 49% of what you're paying for (the current average), you're carrying the full cost of a stack that's delivering half its potential value. For a business spending $500 a month on software, that's roughly $3,000 a year paying for capabilities nobody uses.

The fix is not buying more tools. The fix is using fewer tools more fully.

One platform that replaces the stack

LeadProspecting AI was built for this exact audit result. When small business owners run through the five questions above, they typically find four to eight tools that could be replaced by a single platform handling CRM, email marketing with built-in warming, lead capture, pipeline management, review automation, and follow-up sequences from one dashboard.

If your audit revealed a stack that's costing more than it's delivering, the free trial is the fastest way to see whether consolidation makes sense for your business. No credit card required.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I audit my tool stack? Quarterly is ideal. At minimum, do it twice a year. Tool sprawl happens gradually, and subscriptions that made sense six months ago may no longer serve a purpose. Set a recurring calendar reminder and spend 30 minutes reviewing every active subscription.

What if my team resists cutting a tool they like? Ask them to demonstrate what they accomplished with it in the last 30 days. If they can point to specific outcomes (leads captured, deals closed, time saved), the tool earns its place. If the answer is vague, the attachment is emotional, not functional. Give a two-week trial period without the tool and see if anyone notices.

Is it risky to consolidate to one platform? There's a tradeoff. You gain simplicity, unified data, and lower cost. You lose the specialized depth of best-in-class point solutions. For small businesses with two to ten people, the simplicity gain almost always outweighs the depth loss. Gartner's data shows that the biggest obstacle to utilization is complexity. Reducing the number of tools reduces complexity.

What should I do with the data in tools I'm cutting? Export it before you cancel. Most platforms allow CSV exports of contacts, pipeline data, and email history. Import the useful data into your primary CRM before cancelling the old tool. Don't leave customer records trapped in a platform you're about to shut off.

How much should I realistically expect to save? If you're currently spending $400 to $900 per month on fragmented tools, consolidation typically reduces that to $100 to $300 while improving functionality. Beyond direct savings, you recover the hours your team spends maintaining and switching between platforms. That time has a dollar value too.