Martech budgets just hit a five-year low, yet half of stack capability goes unused. A four-factor audit shows what to cut first.

The Gist

Idle capability. Marketers use 49% of their martech stack's capabilities, per Gartner's 2025 Marketing Technology Survey.

Shrinking budget share. Martech fell to 19.4% of marketing budgets in 2026, a five-year low, even as 62% of CMOs plan to spend more on it.

Data layer first. Data integration is the top stack-management challenge for 65.7% of organizations, so consolidation starts with where customer data lives.

Score before cutting. Rank each tool on utilization, overlap, data dependency and switching cost, then re-measure every quarter.

A marketing operations lead at a mid-market software company sat down last quarter to renew a customer data platform contract and could not name a single team that had logged into it in ninety days. The seat count was 40. The active users were closer to four. The renewal was six figures.…