The Bourne Identity of Marketing Stacks
You know the feeling. You’re three months into a role, and someone shows you the software subscriptions. HubSpot is sitting dormant with 47 contacts. There’s ActiveCampaign for “automation,” Zoho Mail for “transactional emails,” Sendinblue for “the newsletter,” and Mailchimp because someone set it up in 2019 and nobody’s bothered to cancel it. Four email platforms, all for “different purposes,” none of them talking to each other, all of them billing monthly. Someone bought Front because the inbox was “too chaotic.” Nobody uses it. There’s a SEMrush subscription on a website with five pages, none of which rank for anything, and a content team that hasn’t published a blog post in eight months. It’s like Memento—you’re piecing together clues about who bought what and why, but nobody remembers, and the handover notes don’t make sense.
Never Missing an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity
I’ve walked into this scene more times than I care to count. The pattern is always the same: someone had a problem, bought a solution, and then never addressed the actual situation. The tool just became another thing not to manage, another login nobody remembers, another “we should probably use that” in meetings. It’s not that these tools are bad. It’s that they were brought in to solve problems that either didn’t exist yet or couldn’t be solved with software in the first place. A CRM doesn’t fix your pipeline if you don’t have a sales process. A social scheduling tool doesn’t help if you’re testing Facebook ads but bought it for LinkedIn. SEMrush doesn’t rank your website if nobody’s writing content that deserves to rank.
The worst part isn’t the money, it’s the opportunity cost. Every pound spent on a tool you don’t properly use is a pound you didn’t spend on something that might have generated leads or sales. Every hour spent “evaluating platforms” is an hour you didn’t spend talking to customers, fixing your positioning, or figuring out why your ads aren’t converting. We’ve turned marketing into a software procurement exercise, and wonder why nothing’s working. The tools aren’t the strategy. They never were.
The Prerequisites Nobody Talks About
Before you buy any marketing technology, you need three things: volume, repeatability, and cost justification. Not just to be interested in having those things. Not a roadmap to those things. Actual, current, demonstrable evidence of them.
Volume
Volume means you’re doing something enough times that it’s hard to do manually now. If you’re sending 50 emails a month, you don’t need marketing automation. If you’re publishing one blog post a quarter, you don’t need a content management system with workflow approvals. If you’ve got 100 visitors a month, you don’t need a personalisation engine and so on.
The threshold isn’t “could this theoretically help us scale?” It’s “are we currently drowning in manual work that a tool would eliminate?” One company I encountered spent £8,000 on subscription management software before they had a single repeat customer. They had a spreadsheet problem, not a software problem.
Repeatability
Repeatability means you’ve done the thing manually enough times that you know exactly what the tool needs to do. You can’t automate a process that doesn’t exist. You can’t optimise a workflow you haven’t run. This is where most martech purchases die. Someone sees a demo, imagines a future state where everything’s humming along beautifully, and buys the software to “help us get there.” But the software doesn’t create the process. It just makes a good process faster and a bad process more expensive.
I’ve seen teams buy social schedulers for platforms they haven’t posted to yet, email platforms for newsletters they haven’t written, and analytics tools for campaigns they haven’t launched. I once watched a company spend £500,000+ on an event, ignore ticket sales until three months out, then want to throw £30,000 at boosted posts linking to event management software with no conversion tracking. They needed to sell £250,000 worth of tickets. The math didn’t add up from the outset, but the train had left the station.
Cost Justification
Cost justification is the simplest test and the one everyone skips. Will this tool save us more money than it costs? Will it directly generate revenue that exceeds its cost? If you’re spending £200 a month on a tool, you need to save £200 a month in time or produce £200+ in revenue. Not eventually. Now. If your team is sitting around with spare capacity, buying tools to “save time” is literally setting money on fire. If you can’t draw a straight line from the tool to revenue or cost savings, you’re not buying a tech stack, you’re buying hope. I’ve seen an expensive dashboard displaying surface-level metrics nobody acted on, while an affiliate programme running on spreadsheets generated £15,000 in referrals for almost nothing—but got shelved because it “wasn’t slick enough.” The shiny dashboard stayed. The thing that actually made money got killed for aesthetics.
How to Actually Evaluate Tools
Start with the problem, not the solution. Write down what’s broken. Be specific.
Name the Problem in One Sentence
“We need better marketing” isn’t a problem. “We’re spending 15 hours a week manually pulling data from three platforms into spreadsheets” is a problem. “Our ads team can’t test fast enough because our designer is booked solid” is a problem. “We’re losing deals because follow-up emails fall through the cracks” is a problem.
If you can’t articulate the problem in one sentence without using the words “automation” or “optimisation,” you don’t have a problem worth solving with software.
Run It By Hand Until It Hurts
Solve it manually first. Run the process by hand for at least a month, ideally three. Track how long it takes. Document the steps. Find the bottlenecks. Most of the time, you’ll discover the problem wasn’t what you thought it was. The social scheduler won’t help if your real problem is that nobody knows what to post. The CRM won’t help if your real problem is that sales and marketing don’t talk to each other. The analytics dashboard won’t help if your real problem is that nobody knows what metrics matter. I’ve seen a team of four people, each with completely separate remits, end up on Asana to “coordinate better.” Everyone had to do their own inputs. Nobody looked at anyone else’s boards. They coordinated by walking over to each other’s desks, exactly like before, except now they also had to update Asana. Another team bought ClickUp—only the project manager ever logged in. Solve the human problem first.
90 Days to Justify or Die
When you do buy something, make it pay for itself within 90 days or kill it. It’s the marketing budget. Set a clear success metric before you sign the contract. If it’s a scheduling tool, the metric is hours saved per week. If it’s an analytics platform, the metric is decisions made faster or revenue directly attributed to insights. If it’s a CRM, the metric is deals closed that would have been lost. Check the metric at 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days. If the tool isn’t hitting its number, cancel it. No sunk cost fallacy. No “we just need to use it more.” You either get value or you don’t. Most marketing tools fail this test, which tells you everything you need to know about how most marketing tools get purchased.
The best marketing teams I’ve seen run lean tool stacks because they’ve earned every piece of software. They started with spreadsheets and elbow grease. They built processes that worked without automation. They documented what broke at scale. Then, and only then, they bought tools to fix specific, expensive problems. Marketing tools aren’t there to sit in a toolbox for when you need them. They get used every day towards a common goal. Everything else is just a hobby collection.