Your B2B Martech Stack Is Too Smart to Be This Dumb

You’ve spent millions on a marketing technology stack that promises unprecedented intelligence. With over 14,000 solutions now on the market and generative AI dominating your investment strategy, your arsenal has never been more powerful. Yet, if you’re like one in three CMOs, your campaign performance is stagnating or actively underperforming.

As B2B marketers, we own the most sophisticated tools in history, but we are failing to use them for strategic impact.

But how wide is the gap between the potential and our reality? And why are we using these incredibly powerful systems in such a dumb, disconnected way?

Marketing Has Created a Crisis of Confidence

Arguably, the dumbest reason for our collective failure is the simplest one. We aren’t driving results because we aren’t even using the tools we’ve invested in. There is simply a colossal failure of adoption.

According to Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey, marketing leaders report that just 33% of their martech stack is being used. For every dollar we invest in technology, on average, 67 cents are effectively wasted on dormant capabilities and shelf-ware.

This can no longer be ignored. The C-suite has noticed. And our failure to demonstrate value has triggered a budgetary backlash. As a whole, marketing budgets fell from 9.1% of company revenue in 2023, to just 7.7% in 2024.

It’s a vicious cycle:

• Underutilization makes it impossible to prove ROI, eroding our credibility.
• Lack of ROI makes our martech budget an easy target for a CFO focused on “efficient growth”.
• And finally, budget cuts eliminate the very funds needed for the training and integration that would increase utilization in the first place.

Where it was once predicted that marketing would outspend IT, that no longer appears plausible. When a team fails to use technology appropriately, IT takes more control. We have damaged our potential to influence tech spend towards revenue growth — and as IT leans towards enterprise-wide concerns like security and consolidation, we have cemented further a cycle of underutilization, as tools chosen by IT seldom focus on marketing productivity.

Garbage In, Garbage AI

The enthusiasm for AI is immense, with many leaders hoping it can create hyper-personalized marketing at scale. The potential is real. But this ambition is being built on a dangerously unstable foundation. You can’t win a Formula 1 race by putting cheap fuel in the tank.

The problem is twofold: a deficit in data strategy and a scarcity of talent. Research by McKinsey finds that a staggering 77% of companies lack the necessary data talent to build a functional data infrastructure. This human bottleneck ensures that even the most advanced AI is operating on incomplete, inaccurate and siloed data.

Any B2B marketer will know of campaigns they’ve produced that bombed because of bad data. It happens to the best of us. But when AI can effortlessly multiply marketing output, it can also multiply the damage of dirty data.

We’ve had plenty of time to get our data foundations right. We know we should have prioritized the volume of high-quality, fresh first-party data and kept up with data hygiene habits. But putting it off means that we face an impending  “garbage in, garbage out” AI crisis.

The result is not just ineffective, but actively damaging. Forrester predicts that thinly customized generative AI will degrade the purchase experience for 70% of B2B buyers. We see it already outside of AI: poorly personalized marketing generates negative experiences for more than half of B2B buyers, making them 44% less likely to purchase again.

Your smart tech, running on dumb data, is already alienating the very buyers you need to engage. With the horsepower that AI solutions offer, trying to fuel them with the same bad data is a recipe for disaster.

Our Marketing Doesn’t Reflect Modernity

In the days of polyester suits and smoke-filled conference rooms, purchase decisions were far less complex. Buyers often only had the information that their suppliers gave them. Hierarchical businesses collaborated less on decisions — to put it crudely, the boss called the shots. B2B marketers sent brochures, and sales reps dropped into offices unannounced.

A simple scenario can be addressed with a simple, linear revenue model. But the modern B2B buying journey is not a one-way street used by one person. It’s a complex, buyer-led process involving an average of 11 stakeholders who use ten or more channels to conduct their research. Yet most martech stacks are still architected to force this chaotic reality into a rigid sequence of MQLs and SQLs. The wider committee is an afterthought.

This misalignment between your process and the buying reality creates immense friction. We chase individuals, rather that creating consensus among a committee — and that’s a key reason why nearly 90% of B2B purchase processes end up stalling. The technology you bought to accelerate the pipeline has become its primary brake, creating a “martech-to-friction pipeline” that drives buyers away.

The Path to Smarter Strategy

Fortunately, there is good news. While your natural intelligence may be fixed, smart marketing is more than achievable. But it requires a fundamental shift in mindset.

First, you must move from accumulation to rationalization. You can no longer be the kid in the candy story. Audit your stack with a single-minded focus on utilization and decommission the shelf-ware. Reinvest those savings into the integration and training that will make your core platforms — your CRM, marketing automation and customer data platform — actually work together.

Second, fix the foundation before you chase the shiny object. Freeze untested investments and repurpose that capital towards reliable data foundations. Choose straightforward, proven, and tightly-integrated solutions that avoid the headaches of complex integration and disconnected workflows. When investing in AI, make sure the data it uses is high-octane rather than crude.

Finally, re-architect your strategy around the real, non-linear journeys your buyers are actually on. Your goal shouldn’t be to force them down your funnel, but to enable their journey, delivering helpful, context-aware engagement at the moments that matter.

The challenge isn’t making your stack smarter. It’s making your strategy smart enough to deserve the technology you already own — and to win back the confidence of the CEO.