By Dan Khabie, co-founder, CourtAvenue
Businesses are spending more on martech than ever, despite having less visibility into the impact of their investments.
A recent McKinsey survey of 233 senior marketing and tech leaders, each spending more than $500,000 annually on martech and adtech tools, found none could clearly articulate return on investment.
Bloated stacks, weak integration, and vanity metrics have created a murky ecosystem that undermines confidence in otherwise valuable tools.
But there is a framework businesses can follow to attribute hard metrics to martech spend, starting with small, measurable pilots and progressing to full-funnel, outcome-linked operating models.
With martech spend on track to reach roughly $215 billion by 2027, closing the ROI gap is a major growth opportunity.
By defining a handful of revenue-tied KPIs, running simple experiments that prove lift, and reporting in financial terms to strengthen CMO–CFO alignment, teams can shift funding from maintenance to outcomes so they can scale what performs and sunset what doesn’t.
The problem: SaaSmaggedon
The product explosion of the past decade has SaaSified the corporate world, with organizations buying software faster than they learn to use it.
There’s a SaaS product for everything: project management, customer relationship management, financial tracking, marketing automation, HR.
Businesses are playing a volume game, hoping more products means better results. The result is a messy stack that fractures the flow of data and intelligence and accumulates eye-watering levels of technology debt.
The fix: Define growth or cost-saving KPIs
Improving ROI starts by working backward from the P&L. Evaluate tools against metrics a finance leader will recognize: incremental revenue against a clean baseline, conversion lift within a defined journey, qualified lead acceptance and the win rate that follows, improvements in customer value relative to acquisition cost, or demonstrable reductions in cost-to-serve.
Pick the two or three metrics that matter and the trigger levels. For example, if conversion moves 3–5% or lead acceptance jumps, scale your investment; if it doesn’t, cut it. Communicate these impacts with finance on a monthly cadence, including confidence levels, expected versus realized revenue, and the total cost to run.
The ultimate goal is to be able to say with confidence that as a result of your martech investments, your profit margin or stock price improved or you shipped more products.
Build the measurement spine
Most ROI problems can be linked to poor architecture: siloed data owned by different teams that don’t talk to each other. Unifying those sources into one data lake gives businesses a single source of truth for how they are performing, and enables specific actions to be linked to revenue outcomes.
Make the plumbing dependable by using one customer ID across channels and a consistent taxonomy for events, and implement simple data service level agreements (SLAs) for freshness and completeness. Where you need to combine first-party data with partner data, use clean rooms to stay within governance. Keep a changelog of content, targeting and automation updates so when performance moves, you can see what changed and link it back to revenue. Once the foundation is clean and organized, you can add orchestration layers on top.
Consolidate around three layers
An effective martech stack is composed of three layers: data, orchestration and experience.
Start with a customer data platform and a central warehouse so every touchpoint — sales, web and app analytics, retail channels, CRM, service — rolls up to a single source of truth, with identity resolution, consent management, and clean-room partners added where needed.
Layer on orchestration that turns insight into action through customer engagement and personalization tools, and keep this tier deliberately swappable so you can upgrade components without rebuilding the stack.
At the top, a unified experience layer — the content supply chain plus the customer-facing interfaces — ensures a consistent, high-quality journey across every touchpoint. Manage it with a combined CMS and DAM, supplemented by commerce, analytics, and observability.
The key is to consolidate around a few major partners for mission-critical services like data and content management, and compose around them with lighter services you can retire if they don’t pay back.
Assemble a lean, certified team
Stacks don’t create value, the people operating them do. An integrated team that blends your internal talent with the right partners will ensure your business is set up to support the stack end-to-end, from strategy and experience to middleware and data.
What sinks programs fastest is when companies become too insular and don’t bring fresh water into the system, so keep the team porous to outside specialists while maintaining clear ownership.
Mandate vendor and cloud certifications so the team understands the limits and strengths of the tools they own.
Start small, and hold software partners accountable
You don’t need to consolidate everything overnight. The best way to convince your CFO of the value of your martech strategy is by proving small successes.
Begin in the most transactional parts of the experience and demonstrate lift against a baseline before you scale.
Treat vendors as accountable participants in outcomes, not just providers of features. If a component fails to move the agreed metric after a fair test, reconfigure it or replace it. This discipline turns a sprawling stack into a reinvestment loop.
The bottom line
A well-designed martech stack leads to better personalization, drives more sales at velocity, and gives clear oversight into the specific actions that move the business.
When you can point to one journey, one change, and the revenue it created, the conversation shifts from “we don’t know” to “we do – and we can do it again.” Make the proof small and undeniable, then make it repeatable.
