"Last quarter, I watched a marketing team spend $180,000 on an attribution platform they'd been lobbying for all year. The demos were impressive. The business case was approved. The contract was signed. Three months later, they still couldn't get reliable data from it. No one had mapped which systems needed to connect to it, who owned the data quality issues in their CRM or what their IT team's integration capacity actually looked like that quarter."
"In many organizations, martech buying still looks like this: Team A has a problem. They search for a tool. They sit through a few demos. They compare feature lists. They make a case for the budget. They buy. Then they figure out how to make it work. That approach feels fast and pragmatic, and it almost always creates long-term drag. Why? Because it optimizes for speed and features rather than strategic fit, operational impact, data implications and long-term cost of ownership."
Organizations often buy marketing technology as discrete products rather than parts of an operational system. Teams prioritize demos, feature checklists, and speed over mapping system connections, clarifying data ownership, and understanding IT integration capacity. The result is overlapping platforms, underused licenses, fragile integrations, and a stack that fails under operational pressure. Strategic procurement treats the martech stack as an operating system for how marketing works, aligning purchases with operational fit, data implications, and total cost of ownership. Tactical, ad-hoc buying creates long-term drag and undermines the ability to demonstrate meaningful marketing impact.
Read at MarTech
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