Why Most Companies Underinvest in Martech

Your marketing team finally got the green light on that new platform 18 months ago. It promised better scoring, cleaner integrations, and the personalization engine everyone wanted. Fast forward to today, and campaign velocity hasn’t budged, lead quality looks identical, and the CEO is still asking the same tough questions about marketing’s contribution to revenue.

The platform itself likely isn’t the problem. Organizations with strong execution can squeeze impressive results out of average tools. Meanwhile, teams with weak execution routinely underutilize even the most sophisticated systems. The martech industry has spent years obsessing over which platforms to buy while ignoring a far more direct question: Can your team actually put any platform to work?

Three recent studies, each approaching the issue from a different angle, converge on the same uncomfortable conclusion. The gap between what marketing technology can do and what marketing teams can execute continues to widen.

The 34th edition of The CMO Survey asked senior marketing leaders to rate their skills across multiple areas. Managing marketing as a growth engine ranked dead last. Enabling talent and developing marketing capabilities sat just above it. Hiring the right people is the single biggest challenge for 41% of these leaders. Among those who cited training as their top concern, 44% said their organizations have no training programs at all.

That skills deficit directly impacts technology performance. McKinsey’s 2025 martech research found that 34% of buyers cite under-skilled talent as a key hurdle to getting value, while 47% point to stack complexity and integration challenges. When researchers dug deeper through interviews, many organizations claiming operational maturity lacked the core enablers to back it up.

This pattern isn’t unique to marketing. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends survey, two-thirds of managers and executives across industries say most recent hires were not fully prepared, with applied experience being the most common gap. Your team members may know which buttons to click, but translating platform features into business outcomes requires experience most organizations haven’t built.

The through line across all three studies is clear: Organizations are buying platforms that outpace the people operating them. Each new tool adds configuration demands, training requirements, and governance overhead that nobody planned for. Every tool you add increases the operational burden on a team already stretched thin. MarTech’s 2025 State of Your Stack survey found 45% of respondents cite lack of skilled resources as a significant challenge.

Most organizations respond to underperformance by buying more technology. Personalization falling short? Add a CDP. Attribution broken? Layer on another analytics tool. Lead scoring unreliable? Bolt on an intent data provider. Configuration, training, and governance demands stack up faster than headcount or budgets can address them.

Most marketers remain in early stages of maturity, applying technology to automate old processes instead of developing new customer engagement methods. Organizations layer new tools onto legacy systems rather than rationalizing what already exists. Tool replacement gets deprioritized because migration looks expensive and cross-functional coordination is painful. So the redundant platform stays, the new one goes on top of it, and now your team manages both. The stack grows, but the team’s ability to manage it doesn’t.

Most organizations don’t budget for the people and processes that determine whether platforms perform. Here’s what it looks like when they do, with three benchmarks you can take to your CFO.

First, training should be 15 to 20% of annual software license cost. On a $200,000 annual platform contract, that means $30,000 to $40,000 per year earmarked for vendor certification courses, hands-on configuration workshops, and cross-training across platform functions. This isn’t a one-time onboarding session cost during implementation. It’s an annual cost that should be budgeted and tracked like any other operational expense. When team members leave or roles shift, this budget covers bringing replacements up to speed before performance degrades. If 44% of marketing organizations have no training programs at all, the starting point is getting this line into the budget.

Second, process and operations headcount requires one full-time role per three to four core platforms. That means your CRM, MAP, CDP, and analytics layer, not every point solution or utility tool. Process design gets bypassed in favor of platform selection, yet it’s the primary driver of whether those platforms produce returns. Budget for this headcount the way you budget for implementation: defined ownership for each integration point, with someone accountable when data stops flowing between systems. Document the workflows your team follows daily so they survive personnel changes. Without that headcount, coordination falls to already-overloaded people, and every vendor update or integration change becomes a fire drill.

Third, data governance should account for 10% to 15% of total martech software spend. Your personalization engine, scoring models, and attribution frameworks depend on clean, well-governed data. That budget covers dedicated data engineering hours for normalization and deduplication, third-party enrichment services, periodic audit cycles, and tooling for monitoring data health across integrations. Without data governance, sophisticated platforms produce unreliable outputs, teams lose trust in the tools, and the organization reverts to spreadsheets and gut decisions.

The martech industry’s $215 billion spending trajectory through 2027 won’t deliver returns on its own. None of the roughly 50 Fortune 500 CMOs McKinsey interviewed could measure the ROI of their martech investments. That’s the predictable outcome when organizations fund platforms and skip the operational work those platforms depend on. Every dollar spent on software without a corresponding investment in people and process is a dollar at risk of producing nothing measurable.

The benchmarks above should be included in your next budget cycle. If you’re planning a martech investment, look at the team that will operate it. Ask whether they have the skills to configure it, the processes to sustain it, and the data practices to feed it. If you can’t point to the training budget for your new platform, you aren’t buying a solution. You’re buying shelfware.