According to Gartner’s 2023 Martech Survey, organizations use just 33% of their martech stack’s capabilities on average. This is down from 42% in 2022 and 58% in 2020 – meaning utilization has declined every year while investment has increased. Gartner identifies the top barriers as ecosystem complexity, customer data challenges, and inflexible governance – all of which are people and process failures, not technology failures.

McKinsey’s Rewiring Martech report (2025) found that not one of approximately 50 senior marketing leaders at Fortune 500 companies could clearly articulate the ROI of their organization’s martech investment. The core problem is that most marketing teams measure operational metrics – email sends, open rates, campaign delivery – rather than connecting martech investment directly to revenue growth, customer lifetime value, or strategic business outcomes. Martech ROI is hard to measure because the measurement framework is wrong, not because the ROI isn’t there.

Gartner research consistently identifies three barriers: complexity of the martech ecosystem, customer data challenges, and inflexible governance. All three are fundamentally people and process problems.

The deeper issue is that just 13% of martech budgets are typically allocated to people – training, development, and capability-building – while 87% funds licenses that sit underutilized (University of Southampton Business School). The ratio of platform spend to people spend is the primary driver of low utilization.

Talent development improves martech ROI by closing the capability gap between what a tool can do and what the person operating it can extract from it. Coca-Cola trained 500+ people in digital skills before deploying new technology and saw productivity improve by over 20%. IBM upskilled its sales team before scaling its digital platforms and grew priority offerings 20% faster than the rest of the business. Unilever built 70% of its talent internally rather than buying it, and sustained attrition below market rates for three consecutive years. In each case, people development preceded and enabled technology ROI.

The 5 Shifts framework, developed by marketing strategist Nicola Ziady, is a model for marketing leadership development built on the premise that every advance in team performance starts with how a person thinks, not what tool they use.

The five shifts are: from Tactics to Strategy, from Reacting to Anticipating, from Tools to Systems, from Managing to Multiplying, and from Data to Insight.

Shift 4, From Managing to Multiplying, is most directly linked to martech ROI, because a team of multiplying leaders uses a modest stack at high efficiency, while a team of task-executors under-uses even a premium one.

Technology is genuinely the bottleneck when a capable team hits a ceiling that training and development cannot resolve. Legitimate technology constraints include legacy infrastructure that prevents system integration, missing category tools (no CRM, no attribution platform), compliance or security limitations, and vendor failure.

The practical test: if your most capable person used your current stack at 80% of its potential, would you still need the new tool? If the honest answer is no, the bottleneck is capability, not technology.

A martech capability audit maps each tool in a team’s stack to the human capability required to extract value from it. Unlike a standard martech audit, which checks licenses, features, and renewal dates, a capability audit asks 5 questions per platform: Who owns this tool day-to-day? Are they using it operationally or strategically? What percentage of the tool’s capability is the team actually using? What development has this person received in the last 12 months? If this person left tomorrow, what would happen to the value of this platform?

The audit takes approximately 10 minutes per platform and identifies whether the real ROI problem is a technology gap or a talent gap.

According to Gartner’s CMO Spend and Strategy Survey 2023, marketing technology accounts for 25.4% of the average marketing budget – the single largest line item, ahead of paid media (25.6% was paid media combined), labour, and agencies.

Despite being the largest budget category, martech produces the lowest utilisation rate of any major marketing investment, at 33% of capabilities used (Gartner 2023).