You use half your martech, and the missing half is already paid for. Fix it in three steps. Audit the stack against actual use, not brochure capability. Cut the redundant platforms. Move the savings into enablement, on the 10/90 rule: 10% on tools, 90% on the people who run them. It is a quick win because the value is idle, not absent.
Most martech projects start with a purchase. This one starts with an inventory. You already own more capability than you use, so the work is switching it on, not buying more. Here is the sequence, with owners and what to measure at each step.
Step 1: audit the stack against actual use
You cannot fix what you have not counted. Build one table. Every tool, its annual cost, its renewal date, its active logins, and the features your team genuinely uses. The last column is the one that matters, and the one nobody keeps: real use, not the capability on the sales sheet.
Pull login and usage data from each platform’s own admin panel. Where a tool cannot show you usage, that silence is itself a finding. Sort the table by cost. Then mark each tool: fully used, half used, or dark.
The pattern will be stark. Marketers use 49% of their martech capability (Gartner, 2025), so expect roughly half your rows to be half-used or dark. That is not a failure to feel bad about. It is a map of paid-for value waiting to be claimed.
Owner: marketing operations, or the person closest to the stack day to day. Measure: percentage of tools with a named owner and known usage. Aim for 100% counted, even if the answer for some is “nobody uses this”.
Step 2: cut the redundant platforms
Now look for overlap. In a stack of 20 to 29 tools, drawn from a market that grew from 150 products in 2011 to nearly 10,000 by 2022 (2X), capability duplicates constantly. Two tools send email. Two build landing pages. Two claim to be your analytics layer.
For each overlap, keep the tool your team actually runs and retire the other. The deciding question is not which tool is better on paper. It is which one your people use with confidence today. A slightly weaker tool that gets run beats a stronger one that sits dark.
Move the dark tools to a cancellation list with their renewal dates. Time the cuts to renewals so you do not eat early-termination fees. This is where the money comes from: underutilisation can cost a $250 million company up to $4 million a year (Gartner, 2025; and 2X), and cutting redundancy converts a slice of that from waste into budget you control.
Owner: the person who holds the martech budget, so cuts are decisions, not suggestions. Measure: annual spend removed, and the count of jobs now covered by one tool instead of two.
Step 3: reinvest the savings in enablement
The savings do not go back to finance. They go into the people who run the stack. This is the step teams skip, and it is the one that makes the fix stick.
Spend the recovered budget on three things. Training, so the team can run the features that were dark. Documentation, so the knowledge survives the person who has it. And time, protected time, for people to actually adopt a tool before the next need arrives.
The ratio to hold is the historic 10/90 rule: spend 10% of your martech budget on tools and 90% on the people who run them. Most stacks are inverted, heavy on licences and thin on enablement, which is exactly why half the capability stays dark. Flip the ratio and the idle features light up.
Owner: the marketing leader, because enablement is a budget-defended priority, not a nice-to-have. Measure: feature adoption on your top three tools, tracked quarter on quarter. You want the used-capability number climbing off that 49% baseline.
How to train your team to hold the fix
A stack audit is a moment. Utilisation is a habit. The fix decays the same way the sprawl grew, one unadopted purchase at a time, unless you change how tools enter and age.
Set a rule that no new tool is bought until the capability is confirmed absent from the current stack. Make the martech table a living document, reviewed each quarter, with usage refreshed and dark tools flagged. Give every tool a named human owner responsible for its adoption, not just its billing. And run a short internal session whenever a feature gets switched on, so knowledge spreads instead of sitting with one person.
The culture you are building is simple to state and hard to keep: use what you own before you buy more. It runs against the buying reflex, so it needs a leader defending it. That defence is the whole difference between a one-off cut and a stack that stays lean.
Where Morphy helps
We run a four to eight week martech utilisation audit. We map your full stack against real usage, identify the redundant platforms and the dark features, and hand you a costed cut list timed to your renewals. Then we design the enablement plan that turns the savings into adoption.
The defined metric is your used-capability rate: we baseline it against the 49% starting point (Gartner, 2025) and set a target for the features that matter most to your revenue. No new platforms. We work the stack you already pay for, because the value is already there. It is just switched off.
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The playbook companion to You use half your martech. How to get revenue from the stack you own. Post 16 of 25 in the Customer Data Maximization series.
Frequently asked questions
How do you audit a martech stack?
List every tool, its annual cost, its login activity, and the features your team actually uses, not what the tool could do. Marketers use 49% of their martech capability (Gartner, 2025), so map the idle half. The redundancies and dark features become obvious once usage sits next to cost.
What is the 10/90 rule in martech?
The historic 10/90 rule says spend 10% of your budget on tools and 90% on the people who run them. It holds because adoption, not acquisition, turns a licence into revenue. A tool nobody is trained to operate returns nothing, however good it is.
How long does a martech utilisation fix take?
It is a quick win because the value is already paid for and sitting idle. A stack audit and first round of cuts fits inside four to eight weeks. You are not buying capability, you are switching on capability you already own and moving the savings into enablement.