A CMO’s Guide to Fixing Martech Stack Bloat—Permanently

Stacks don’t get bloated because marketers are careless. They get bloated because someone’s trying to solve the problem right in front of them.

Need to launch faster? Add a tool. Need to track something new? Add a platform. Trying to keep up with growth? Plug in another solution. Each new tool solves a real problem for a quarter, a campaign, maybe even a year. But over time, all those quick fixes start to look like a junk drawer. And the questions that matter—what’s working, where’s the waste, who’s actually converting—get harder to answer.

It’s tempting to assign blame to simply having too many tools, but most stacks only use 6 tools on average, according to G2. Still, the waste still adds up fast.

That’s because the problem isn’t the number of tools. It’s treating your stack like that pile of tools in the junk drawer instead of the infrastructure your business runs on.

How Stacks Spiral Out of Control

Most martech stacks weren’t built so much as…accumulated.

It starts with good intentions.

You need a way to capture leads, so you add a form builder. You want better engagement, so you onboard a marketing automation platform. You’re growing, so someone signs up for a sales CRM. Then comes a data warehouse. And maybe another automation tool for the product team. And so on.

Stacks balloon when:

• Tools are bought reactively, one use case at a time
• No one owns the full architecture
• Overlapping tools pile up
• The business evolves, but the stack doesn’t

Soon you’re burning budget on underused platforms, fixing broken integrations, and struggling to answer simple questions like: “what drove that conversion?”

The Real Costs of a Disconnected Stack

You can feel when a stack is bloated. But the real danger isn’t just size. It’s disconnection.

When tools aren’t acting together as a shared system, everything gets harder. Data gets duplicated, fragmented, or goes missing. Teams work in silos. Campaigns don’t land. Attribution falls apart.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Integration hell: Your systems only “work together” if you squint. There’s a maze of brittle APIs, manual uploads, and half-broken webhooks. You’re one outage away from chaos.

• Tool overlap: You’ve got three platforms that all claim to handle personalization, but none of them talk to the same customer record, so there’s no clarity on which one to trust.
• Shadow IT: Someone installed a new app last quarter to solve a niche problem. Now no one knows it’s there, or whether it’s secure, compliant, or even used.
• Missing muscle: Despite all the tools, you can’t run attribution that ties spend to results. You can’t trigger a retention play when a customer starts to ghost. Critical actions just… don’t happen.
• Stack-Journey mismatch: Your tools were chosen for the buyer’s journey you used to have. Now parts of the funnel are untracked or unsupported.
• Siloed, incompatible data: Different tools define the same event in different ways. “Lead” means something different in CRM, analytics, and ad platforms. No one agrees, so no one acts.

Fix the Foundation, Not the Furniture

The real mistake isn’t picking the wrong tools. It’s asking the wrong question in the first place.

Instead of “what platform should we use for this task”, start with this:

“What business outcome are we trying to drive, and what’s the minimum infrastructure required to support it?”

If your goals are acquisition, retention, personalization, or attribution, then every tool in your stack should earn its place by doing one of three things:

1. Capturing high-quality, structured data
2. Contributing to a unified customer view
3. Driving measurable outcomes

The fix isn’t subtraction. It’s structure, built around shared data and clear ownership. Without that structure, all you’re doing by cutting tools is resetting the bloat clock.

One More Time For People in the Back

If it hasn’t been said enough: your stack should be built around data, not tools.

When the architecture starts with clean, connected data, not individual features or teams pushing pet platforms, everything else gets simpler. You make better decisions. Move faster. Spend smarter. And you can finally track what matters without needing a translator.

At the heart of that infrastructure should be a Customer Data Platform (CDP).

We recommend Segment. It’s designed to unify data across every touchpoint and stitch together customer identities in real time. That persistent ID becomes your single source of truth, and from there everything else gets easier:

• Real-time personalization across channels
• Reliable, end-to-end attribution
• Cohesive journeys from anonymous visitor to long-term customer

When the data is right, the stack hums.

What Our Stack Actually Looks Like

This isn’t theoretical. This is the stack we use. And it works.

It’s designed to deliver high-quality data from across the customer journey. Every tool talks to the others. And when that happens, you stop fighting your systems and start getting usable insights.

• Google Tag Manager: Event capture at the source
• Segment (CDP): Identity resolution + data routing
• Clearbit: Enrichment for targeting and personalization
• Autopilot: Behavior-driven marketing automation
• Salesforce: CRM + revenue visibility
• Kissmetrics: Funnel analytics and lifecycle tracking
• Zapier: Lightweight workflow automation

Every tool is there for a reason, and integrated in a way that compounds value.

Because of the way this stack is built, it enables things we rarely see anywhere else, like tracking Salesforce stages directly in web analytics, or triggering real-time campaigns based on unified behavior data. We’ve only seen it work like this in companies we’ve helped architect ourselves.

Your stack might look different. That’s fine. But the standard is the same:

Every tool should earn its place. And every connection should move you closer to clean, actionable data.

Start With an Audit Before You Buy Anything Else

Before you rip and replace, map what you’ve already got.

• Inventory every tool. What’s it for? Who owns it? What’s it costing you?
• Trace how data moves. What’s getting duplicated, delayed, or dropped?
• Look for gaps, especially in personalization, attribution, and identity resolution.
• Identify redundancy and waste. Are multiple tools solving the same problem? Are any tools not solving anything?
• Evaluate alignment. Which tools actively support your top marketing objectives?

Use our [free Stack Builder] to visualize how everything connects, and simulate improvements, like adding a CDP at the center.

The goal isn’t minimalism for its own sake. It’s clarity. Efficiency. Control.

What You’re Really Building

A bloated stack isn’t just annoying. It’s a drag on growth, visibility, and control.

You don’t fix that with one more platform or a better spreadsheet. You fix it by rebuilding around shared data, real ownership, and the right foundation.

Put a CDP like Segment at the center. Map what you’ve got. Cut what you don’t need. Then build the system your marketing actually deserves.

Want access to a free tech stack audit by Dan McGaw himself? Book time with us here.