Insight · MarTech

Roughly half of what your firm pays for marketing software goes to tools nobody uses.

The website, the CRM, the email tool, the events platform, the Sales Navigator seats. A five-step audit one person can run in a week: what it really costs, who actually uses it, what talks to what, and a kill, consolidate, keep or upgrade rule for every line.

Gary McRae, management consultant based in Singapore, PMC accredited and CAIG certified

By Gary McRae

Management consultant · Singapore · PMC accredited · CAIG certified

Last reviewed 11 September 2026 · 8 min read

Gartner’s 2025 marketing technology survey put utilisation at 49 percent. Half of every dollar spent on marketing software produces nothing. The same survey found that only a third of the features in any tool get used, and that roughly 15 percent of organisations get a positive return from their stack at all.

That is the average for organisations with marketing teams. A firm’s stack is usually worse, because it was never bought as a stack. The website came with an agency. The CRM came with a partner who has since left. The email tool came with a coordinator who has also left. Nobody reviews any of it, and the renewals go through on the firm’s card.

What the stack actually costs

Marketing technology takes 20 to 24 percent of the marketing budget across surveyed organisations: the CMO Survey reports 19.9 percent, Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey 23.8 percent. Both project it past 30 percent within five years.

The licence is the visible part. Forrester finds licence fees are 30 to 40 percent of the true cost. The rest is integration middleware (USD 4,000 to 12,000 a year per tool), custom integrations (USD 10,000 to 25,000 a build), training (5 to 10 percent of the platform budget) and admin time. Organisations at SGD 5 to 50 million revenue typically run 5 to 15 tools at USD 1,000 to 8,000 a month in licences, and a true cost of 2.5 to 3 times that once the hidden lines are added.

The consolidation arithmetic runs the other way. IBM took 40-plus marketing tools down to five capabilities and reported a USD 120 million cost reduction. Lenovo collapsed three platforms into one, saved USD 11 million a year, and content output rose 53 percent with click-through up 12.5 percent. Neither cut tools nobody used. They removed tools that were being used badly.

The 5-Step MarTech Audit

Five working days. One spreadsheet. The decision rule comes at the end. It does not need a consultant. It needs one person with a week, access to the contracts and the admin panels, and permission to ask blunt questions.

01
Inventory and true cost
List every tool. Pull the firm's card statements for the last twelve months; there is always a subscription nobody remembers approving. For each: annual licence, integration spend (middleware, custom builds), admin time (hours a month times loaded cost), renewal date. Total it. Compare with what the partners think marketing costs. The gap is the price of "I did not know we were paying for that."
02
Adoption and utilisation
Two ratios per tool: active users in the last 30 days over purchased seats, and features used over features available. Multiply them. Below 30 percent is a removal candidate. Below 50 percent is train and monitor. The Gartner average is 33 percent; the target for anything the firm keeps is at least 60.
03
Integration map
Draw the data flow. Which tools sync to the CRM? Which sync to each other? Where does someone export a CSV and paste it somewhere else? Every manual transfer is an accuracy risk; every broken integration quietly degrades the numbers the partners make decisions on. The output is one page showing every connection, and every gap.
04
Return test
For each tool, name in one sentence what it does for new work, existing clients or hours saved. If it cannot be said in one sentence, the tool fails. Analytics nobody reports from, a social listening dashboard nobody opens, a proposal tool used for one pitch a year: removal candidates.
05
Decision and roadmap
Apply the rule below to each line. Build a 90-day plan: what is cancelled this quarter (subject to contract terms), what is consolidated, what the savings fund. Organisations running this audit typically find SGD 25,000 to 60,000 of annual cost in the first quarter. The larger return is the integration debt unwound and the hours the coordinator gets back.

Kill, consolidate, keep, upgrade

Applied per tool. The criteria are strict on purpose. Loose criteria are how the firm got here.

Kill. Cost above 3 percent of the marketing budget, utilisation under 30 percent, and no clear return. No exceptions for “we might use it later.” Cancel at the next renewal.

Consolidate. Feature overlap with another tool the firm has, and combined adoption under 60 percent. Pick the better-integrated one, move the workflows, decommission the duplicate.

Train and monitor. Cost under 3 percent of budget, utilisation under 50 percent, but a real return exists. Schedule training; check utilisation again in 90 days. If it has not moved, demote to Kill at the next renewal.

Keep, or upgrade. Clear return, high adoption, integrates cleanly. Consider the next tier only if you can name the capability it adds and put a revenue or hours number against it.

Five stacks gone wrong

Recognise the pattern before the audit. These recur in firms of this size.

The CRM as an address book

HubSpot Marketing Hub at SGD 4,000-plus a month, used to store contacts. Email goes out of Mailchimp. Events run somewhere else. Analytics come from somewhere else again. Fix: commit to the hub (email and events inside it), or downgrade to the starter tier and consolidate around the tool that is actually the hub.

The email splinter

The newsletter tool, the events platform's own mailer, and a partner's Outlook mail merge. Three senders, no shared suppression list, and a client who has unsubscribed three times. Fix: one email tool. The savings usually pay for the migration.

The analytics hoarder

GA4, the website platform's own analytics, LinkedIn's campaign manager and an agency dashboard. Four sources, three definitions of an enquiry, and no report the management committee reads. Fix: one web analytics tool, one definition, one page a quarter.

Legacy shelfware

A Marketo or Eloqua licence at USD 20,000-plus a year, kept "just in case" after a migration. Nobody has logged in for six months. Fix: cancel. The renewal notice is the forcing function for a conversation the firm should have had a year ago.

The free tier forever

Twelve free tools, each at 40 percent capacity. Direct cost: nothing. Real cost: 15-plus hours a week of glue work, manual transfers and arguments about which system is the source of truth. Fix: pay for fewer tools that connect. Free is not free.

Frequently asked questions

How long should the audit take?

Five working days for a firm of this size. One day each for inventory, utilisation, integration mapping, the return test and the decision. If it is taking longer, it is being over-engineered. The audit is a forcing function, not a research project.

Cancel before contracts renew, or buy out?

It depends on the contract. Most SaaS contracts auto-renew unless cancelled 30 to 60 days before the renewal date. Inside that window, the renewal is the forcing function. If the firm is locked in, put the buy-out cost against twelve months of unused licence; buying out is often the right call for a tool nobody uses anyway.

How do we get people to use the tools we keep?

Three moves. Scheduled training, one hour a quarter per kept tool. Named ownership, one person per tool, accountable for its adoption numbers. A quarterly utilisation review, the same metrics from the audit, run again, in the diary. Without those three, adoption decays back to baseline within six months.

What about the AI tools? Same audit?

The same five steps, plus a sixth: a governance check. Each AI-adjacent tool needs the data classification and consent questions from the AI governance essay: what data enters it, where it processes, whether the contract permits training on the firm’s data. The MarTech audit and the AI governance review usually overlap on around 30 percent of the stack.

Can EDG fund a MarTech audit?

Until 29 September 2026, yes in principle. An audit delivered as management consultancy by a PMC-accredited consultant can qualify under the Enterprise Development Grant’s business strategy or IT consultancy categories, at up to 50 percent of eligible costs for an SME, and Enterprise Singapore decides. EDG closes to new applications on 29 September. EDGE replaces it on 30 September, and its terms for consultancy are not published. The threshold has not changed: worth applying if the scope is above SGD 30,000.

What is the difference between an audit and a migration?

The audit decides what to keep, kill, consolidate or upgrade. The migration executes it: moving data, rebuilding integrations, retraining the people. The audit takes a week. The migration takes two to six months depending on the stack. Run the audit first, and commit to the migration only when the findings justify it.

Sources

About the author

Gary McRae is a management consultant in Singapore. MCR.AE is management consultancy for how a professional services partnership wins work: business development, marketing, and who runs both, for firms of 6 to 60 fee earners. He ran digital and marketing technology inside a global law firm, as Associate Director of Marketing: the website, the CRM, the systems the firm paid for, under partner governance, with fee earners as internal clients. 12+ years in Singapore. PMC accredited (SBACC), CAIG certified (NTU). The audit above is the one that runs inside the Review when the firm’s systems are in scope.

Run the audit on your firm’s stack.

The Review covers the systems the firm pays for as part of how it wins work: what they cost, who uses them, what they feed. Four weeks. Written, evidenced. If the audit is all the firm needs, it says so.

Start with the Review What the Review covers