Too Many Tools Are Killing Your Marketing Team

Episode Transcript

Did you know that there are over 15,000 MarTech tools on the market now? That is a 9% increase from last year. Every year I think it can't possibly keep going up. There's just no way. And then every year it does. But here's the thing: most companies with 10 or more tools only use five or fewer of them on a weekly basis.

So it's pretty clear that when it comes to tools and technology for marketers, more is not necessarily better. But it often seems easier, because when we're faced with the choice between changing the deep-seated ways of working that have governed our marketing department for the last decade or just signing an SOW for a bunch of new seats in this shiny new piece of software, a lot of us are going to pick the SOW for the new piece of software. And now in the age of AI, where everything is AI native or AI powered or has a sweet and juicy AI center, all of this is just getting worse. So it is now time for some real tool talk, because if you're not being vigilant, your MarTech stack might actually be making your process problems worse, not better. So let's explore.

Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning agile theory into real world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing. Every week we unpack the what, who and how behind agile marketing — from building high velocity workflows and slashing waste to measuring what really matters and scaling success across teams. You'll hear quick hit strategies you can deploy today, plus candid stories from marketers who have traded chaos for clarity and never looked back. Hit follow wherever you listen and let's carve the next switchback together.

I want to start out by telling you a kind of scary story about marketing technology that I have seen play out way too many times.

There's a problem in a marketing organization. It might be that work is taking too long, or that collaboration has stalled, or that stakeholders are frustrated. It doesn't matter. There's a problem, and technology is seen as the solution. And people pay absurd amounts of money for sometimes hundreds of seats in these insanely expensive tools. And it's a multi-year agreement. But there's no rollout plan and there's no fundamental change to the way that people work to go along with the tool that was supposed to fix this really gnarly operational problem.

And so you get like two years into a three-year agreement and everyone is furious because two thirds of these really expensive seats are still not being used. And so now the people who paid sometimes millions of dollars for these seats are trying to cancel this huge contract while the vendor is freaking out because they don't want to lose this multimillion dollar contract. So they start throwing consultants and professional services at the account trying to figure it out. Now there's this haphazard rollout, absolutely no fundamental changes have happened, and maybe the seats actually get used — but everyone knows it's not going to stick. And sometimes the seats are used for another year or two, and then we just churn that tool. It gets canceled, we pick another tool, and the whole cycle starts again.

This is a terrible cycle to be in because it makes everybody resistant to any kind of meaningful change — whether it's tools, processes, or anything — because we all think we're just going to have to wait it out. No matter what it is, we don't actually have to fundamentally change. And when we start blending in an overall sense of churn in the marketing technology landscape, things just start to get a little more uncertain. In 2025, 1,211 tools came off of the MarTech landscape, either because they shut down altogether or they were acquired and merged with another tool. And then 2,489 new ones came onto the landscape. So overall, that's 8.6% churn across the entire landscape. There's a lot of stuff happening, so we need to be careful about how we approach marketing technology.

Think about how much time we spend on tool adoption. We're going to research tools — and even with our good friend AI in the mix now, where we can ask questions and get a lot of comparison data a whole lot faster than we used to, we still have to do some due diligence and go test these things out. And then we're going to sit in demos. You're not going to buy a piece of technology sight unseen. You're going to sit through a demo. And then your team is going to need to discuss and debate, and everybody's going to have an opinion about features and benefits. Is it really going to solve the problem? Some people are going to think it's this one and some people are going to think it's that one. We're going to make spreadsheets and debate the pros and cons and all of that fun stuff. Then somebody's going to like the expensive one, or we're going to have to advocate for more budget. And then once we pick one, we're going to have to train everybody on the tool, and that's a whole thing. Again, AI makes some of this easier, but not a lot of it. We still have to learn how to use these tools if we want to get the bang for our buck.

Eventually people get fatigued. We have change fatigue, we have tool fatigue. So that even when we find something that's really, really good and might actually be the answer and the solution to a really serious problem, people aren't going to believe it. It's like the boy who cried wolf — once the wolf is actually around, nobody believes it because there were too many times when the wolf wasn't there. We've said "this is it, this is the piece of MarTech that's going to save us, that's going to make us more productive, that's going to make us more effective" too many times for it not to be true. So when the real deal finally comes along, nobody's going to believe it because we've cried wolf too many times.

And there are really good tools out there. Tool quality overall is getting better — the average product rating of MarTech tools rose from 4.36 in 2023 to 4.42 in 2025 on G2. Despite the explosion in new tools, the overall rating is going up. So there are great tools out there. We don't want to waste our political capital and introduce change fatigue into our team by constantly churning through tools when we don't have to.

What matters is choosing fewer, better-integrated tools that match up to our real needs, and then being disciplined about retiring the tools that are underutilized. Remember the stat from the top of the show: if you have 10 or more things in your MarTech stack, you probably use less than half of those on a weekly basis. It is almost certainly time for an audit right now. There are probably things that can come out of your stack to make room for other things — or maybe you don't need those things at all. There's a lot of potential for consolidation so that we can save up our change efforts for tools or process improvements that are actually going to make a difference.

And there are a lot of those kinds of things. We talk about process improvements constantly on this show — there are innumerable ways that you can improve your process. And with AI changing technology on practically an hourly basis, we need people who are willing and ready to adopt new pieces of technology as they roll out, and who aren't so jaded by botched rollouts. The data is very clear on areas of opportunity as well, especially in areas that have historically sucked up tons of time and brainpower — and generally the souls of marketers. Repetitive things like scheduling social content, follow-up emails, and lead scoring and qualification can be increasingly handled by automation, and just free up our capacity.

The HubSpot updates announced at Inbound a couple of weeks ago are a great example of how this is becoming increasingly accessible across all kinds of tools and technology. For example, 74% of marketers say they are already saving time through the automation of repetitive tasks — to the tune of more than six hours per week, according to some studies. That's almost an entire workday that we are getting back thanks to these kinds of savings. And then there's a Thomson Reuters study, the Future of Professionals report, where people say they expect to free up four hours a week using AI within the next year, and that could get as high as 12 hours per week in the next five years.

So these tools are really important to modernizing our roles. But it is very easy to get these rollouts wrong, and we cannot expect the tools to solve everything. We've talked on this show already about how AI is best used as a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. And this is very much that same kind of situation. We don't want to just brute-force apply it across every part of the system or our processes. We're talking here about repetitive, mundane activities — that is where the real opportunity is. That's where we want to focus our efforts and leverage these change opportunities. We don't want to ask for tons of change across every single part of the workflow and introduce change fatigue. We have a limited amount of change willingness on our team — we don't want to exhaust it immediately and then not have it available when we really need it.

So what are some best practices we can exercise in order to make this work in our favor?

First and foremost, think about your process first and then the tools second. Because if you have a really serious, deeply rooted process problem — or maybe even a people problem — buying a new tool or creating a new role is not going to solve that problem. I have seen this happen so many times. There is a fundamental communication issue between marketing and another part of the business, usually the most important business unit in an organization, and there's just a broken line of communication. The leader of the BU and the marketing leadership don't get along for whatever reason. And somehow the go-to solution is to hire a "something manager" — a relationship manager or a project manager or something manager to act as the go-between. The creation of this role is somehow supposed to magically mend this broken relationship. It will not. Nor will a brand new workflow visualization or project management tool magically make that line of communication flow. This is a people-level problem that's going to have to be solved amongst those humans. Hiring another person or putting a tool on top of the problem will sometimes just make it worse. So think about what's really wrong and whether a tool is going to fix it. Go in at the process or people level first and make sure that's all solid before you start trying to put technology on top of it.

Next, always limit your WIP — your work in progress — and that applies to MarTech as well. We don't want to roll out 17 new tools at the same time. Think about where you're going to get the most value, the most bang for your buck. And if you don't have good workflow visualization — if you can't understand who is doing what across the entirety of your marketing function — that has got to be your first step. If you don't have that, go get something as straightforward and simple as you can that will give you the information you need. Depending on how big your team is: if you are 10 marketers or fewer, Trello or Monday will do. If you're talking more like 30, 40, or 50 marketers, you can probably still get away with Monday or Trello, and Asana will work for you too — Asana will actually take you pretty far into a pretty big organization. There's a lot of sophistication in these project management tools these days. You just need to get really tight on how they are set up across teams. But just get a tool. You need a work visualization tool and a project management tool. If you don't have one, that's your first step.

You'll also need some kind of planning visualization tool — Miro, Mural, one of those — to be able to plan at a quarterly level across teams. Check those boxes first and foremost. Once you've got those, then you can start worrying about other things. And of course, you'll need basic marketing-level tools: I'm assuming you have things like CRM and marketing automation if you're listening to this podcast — if you don't, you absolutely need those as well. The hierarchy is pretty clear. And in almost all things, simple is usually better, especially nowadays when almost everything is getting ever more sophisticated thanks to AI. Things that used to be kind of basic are getting a lot more interesting because AI is just leveling everything up super fast. So get your basics in order before you start getting really clever and sophisticated.

While it's effective to go as simple as you can, keep in mind that switching tools is not nothing. So while you want to go as simple as you can right now, you also want to think about how big and complicated your team is likely to be in the future and how involved you want your stakeholders to be. Plan a little bit ahead of where you are now and think about that when you're buying tools.

The next thing I would say is to think about whether you can combine tool change and process change. Clients sometimes get a little worried here and feel like it's too much for their team to take on, but this is actually a form of limiting your work in progress — because it's turning two changes into one, allowing people to roll it up into one thing and get it done at the same time. It lets people think about it as one thing, sort of rip the bandaid off, and get the change fatigue isolated and minimized. So especially if your change involves a project management tool or workflow visualization tool, that is actually a great time to also think about changing and evolving your ways of working. Think about whether you can get some bang for your buck. If you're going to be changing one thing, can you change some other things as well and just minimize change fatigue? Likewise, can your tools fill multiple needs? If you're going to be doing a change anyway, can that tool solve other needs so that you won't have to do another change in six months? Limit your WIP, limit your WIP, limit your WIP.

MarTech is great. We all need it. It is super essential. But it is not the magic wand that's going to make everything perfect. We have to think about the root cause of the problem — the process, the people, and the real changes that we're going to have to make. Making changes to MarTech every three, six, or nine months is not the solution. You need a process foundation that will stay with you forever, and then MarTech can be a bonus, a nice complement to that. Our MarTech, the process that underpins it, and the people that use the MarTech — all of these things have to work together to make the magic happen. MarTech is not the be-all and end-all.

So if you're concerned and not sure if your MarTech is helping or hurting at this point, we do have our free Marketing Agility Scorecard that you can take. Technology and data are included as a component so you can find out whether they are helping or hurting. You'll also find out how your team stacks up on things like speed, focus, and effectiveness — you'll get scores across nine dimensions of the way your marketing team works. It takes about 10 minutes and you'll get a very clear picture of your team's overall health. We will share the link in the show notes, and of course you can also find it at AgileSherpas.com. Until next time, I'm your host, Andrea Fryrear. Don't forget — the struggle is real, but so is Agile.