Quick fact: Mid-market organisations waste close to AUD 4 million a year on MarTech features nobody touches.
The Value Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
Licence renewals tick over, seats stay idle and the finance team wonders why marketing’s cost-to-return ratio keeps creeping north. When only a third of your stack is delivering value, the unused two-thirds is not potential...it is overhead.
MarTech Maturity Debt: What It Is and Why It Hurts
I call it MarTech Maturity Debt. Every disconnected tool, duplicate report and spreadsheet workaround adds interest to the debt. The result:
- Lost confidence in data
- Longer campaign lead times
- A tired team spending Friday afternoons exporting CSVs instead of building pipeline
Left unchecked, the debt compounds until no one trusts the dashboards and new initiatives stall.
The 10-Minute Stack Health Check
Grab a coffee, open your licences spreadsheet and run these five steps:
- List the five most expensive tools.
- Ask the user of record two questions:
- When did you last log in?
- Which feature saves you the most time?
- Mark any silent seats amber.
- Count manual file transfers. More than one per workflow equals red.
- Compare key metrics across systems. If totals differ, flag amber again.
Scorecard
| Amber / Red Flags | Diagnosis |
|---|---|
| 0–1 | Stack is healthy |
| 2–3 | Rising risk and should act soon |
| 4 or more | Cause for concern, schedule a full audit immediately |
The Four-Week MarTech ROI Sprint
| Week | Focus | Key Tasks (1 hour a day) | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Inventory & Cost | List every tool, owner and true annual cost. | Cost profile |
| 2 | Usage & Adoption | Pull login stats, survey users, rank feature adoption. | Utilisation scorecard |
| 3 | Integration & Data | Map data flows, log manual steps, note broken APIs. | Data-flow diagram |
| 4 | Alignment & ROI | Link each tool to revenue or efficiency, decide Keep / Consolidate / Cut. | 90-day optimisation roadmap |
Rule of thumb
The top 20 percent of tools usually drive 80 percent of value. Protect those, then rationalise the rest.
From Insight to Impact
- Consolidate licences to the platforms people already love.
- Automate hand-offs with native connectors or low-code bridges.
- Re-invest the savings into data quality and user training.
- Track adoption monthly; any tool sliding back to amber gets remedial action straight away.
Ready to Reclaim Budget? Your Next Step
Book a Spark Session with Anthony for a focused, 90 minute diagnostic call.
Email [email protected] and we will lock in a time that suits you.