Martech: Clarity Before Capability

Marketing technology can accelerate growth or quietly drain ROI. In this post, Ian explores the risks and a structured approach to ensure your tech stack supports a clear, aligned and commercially effective Revenue Department.

For growing B2B businesses, sales and marketing are now inseparable from technology; it’s a necessary budget line item, and the decisions about where to place that bet, in terms of time and money, can be business-critical.

It’s an obvious statement, but it’s something we often find our clients grappling with.

The right mix and the wrong mix

The right marketing technology mix, especially when blended with emerging AI agent functionality, can deliver incredible process efficiencies, deep customer insights, a seamless digital customer experience, and internal visibility across the entire customer engagement, from awareness to revenue.

The wrong marketing technology mix can be a money pit of fragile duct-tape integrations, manual data wrangling (usually in spreadsheets), fractured customer engagement, budget-sapping shiny features that nobody uses, and shards of data spread across a myriad of $99/month solutions.

Then, when the business asks a question about sales and marketing performance, wants to launch a new product, add a new channel, or change a message, the answer is, “We’ll get back to you.”

And when you ask sales to update the CRM with the critical data that drives the business, you get that eyeroll. You know the one.

But maybe worse than all of this is that you are saddled with a fixed cost that negatively impacts your marketing ROI, because you can’t confidently attribute it to revenue.

That impact is felt most acutely in growing SMBs, where marketing teams are small, budgets are tight, internal technical capability is limited, and revenue operations often fall to whoever has the time.

In a £2–5M business, a poorly implemented platform is not a rounding error - it’s a business risk.

Not more tech, better outcomes

What these organizations need is not more technology, but confidence in their revenue engine and in the technology that connects and aligns the Revenue Department (what we call the joint sales and marketing function).

And of course, navigating the vendor marketplace for a solution to this doesn’t help; there are hundreds of options, with overlapping capabilities, all selling an aspiration of a future need rather than addressing the operational challenges of the business today.

It can also be tempting to experiment with “vibe coding” a rapid, AI-built solution to address an immediate gap.

And it’s easy to get swept up in the shiny thing du jour, distracted from solving the immediate need. Especially when one of your team is giving you the big eyes and saying, “But it’s so shiny!”

Dealing with FOMU 

Faced with this, the FOMU (Fear of Messing Up) when it comes to choosing the right technology is very real.

• What if we are overbuying features we don’t need?
• What if we are underbuying and not future-proofing our capabilities?
• How hard is this going to be to implement?
• Are there hidden costs?
• What will my team and peers think of using it?
• If I get this wrong, will we be back here in a year?
• Do I really need more, or can we get what we have working?

The real risk isn’t choosing the wrong tool. It’s choosing a tool before defining the revenue system it needs to support.

5 questions to ask

So, at this point, I encourage revenue leaders to pause and consider a few questions:

1. What is our revenue process? What information and metrics do we need at each stage, and how should that data flow through the business?
2. What are our audience's key touch points, how do we want to show up at each of them, and what engagement data do we need?
3. What are our functional requirements based on 1 & 2?
4. What do we already have that can meet those requirements? What are the total costs? Where are the overlaps, gaps, and maybe unused functionality we don’t need?
5. What capabilities and skills, both internal and external through our existing trusted agencies, do we have to support these needs?

We’ve seen many examples where a simple audit, viewed through the eyes of an experienced marketing technologist, can not only unlock marketing capability but also simplify a marketing stack, putting budget back into front-line marketing where it will see a return and improve the performance of the whole Revenue Department.

Let's DRIVE

I’ve summarised the process for brevity in a blog post, but we have a methodology called DRIVE, which stands for Diagnose, Refine, Implement, Validate, and Expand, a structured approach to de-risk technology decisions before committing budget and time.

If you are interested, maybe you are standing at the crossroads of what to do next with your marketing tech stack, or feel something is a little off, please get in touch. We’re always happy to chat about tech, and if you feel something is a little off, it probably is.