There's a conversation I have at least once a month with sales and marketing leaders across the world, and it always starts the same way. Pipeline is soft. The board wants growth. And somewhere in the discussion, someone floats the idea of buying a new platform - an AI content tool, a fresh intent data provider, another point solution to bolt onto the side of a stack nobody has fully mapped in three years.
My answer is almost always the same: before you sign anything, let's find out what you're already paying for and not using. In nine engagements out of ten, the pipeline you need is sitting dormant inside licences that renew automatically every twelve months.
Half your stack is idle, and it's the expensive half
This isn't a hunch. Gartner's 2025 Marketing Technology Survey puts martech utilisation at 49% - only about half the tools organisations own are actively used, and just 15% of organisations qualify as high performers that meet their strategic goals and show positive ROI. That figure is actually a recovery: the same research programme recorded utilisation bottoming out at 33% in 2023, down from 42% the year before.
Now stack that against the budget picture. Martech took roughly 22.4% of marketing spend in 2025, and its share has been eroding, while overall marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of company revenue - with 59% of CMOs reporting they don't have the funding to execute their strategy. The 2026 CMO Spend Survey has martech's share of budget at a five-year low of 19.4%, down from 26.6% in 2021 - even as 62% of CMOs say they plan to invest more in marketing technology.
Read those numbers together and the strategic implication is uncomfortable. You are spending roughly a fifth of a shrinking budget on technology, using about half of it, and being asked to deliver more pipeline than last year. Buying another tool doesn't fix that equation. It makes it worse, because every new platform adds integration debt, another admin to train, and another line item Finance will question at renewal.
Why the gap exists (and it isn't laziness)
Underutilisation is rarely a people problem. It's structural, and it usually traces back to three causes.
Buying is a project; adoption is a habit. Procurement, business case, security review, implementation partner - the organisation is brilliant at getting a platform live. Then the project team disbands, the implementation partner invoices, and nobody owns the roadmap of features that were sold in the demo but never switched on.
The data plumbing was never finished. Progressive profiling, behavioural scoring, dynamic content, propensity models - every advanced feature depends on clean, consistently structured data flowing between your CRM, your automation platform and your website. When that plumbing is half-built, marketers quietly retreat to the features that work without it: batch email sends and static forms.
Nobody owns marketing operations. Gartner's earlier utilisation research pointed to talent and ecosystem complexity as primary barriers, and that's what I see on the ground in Australia. Local teams supporting global stacks often have no dedicated marketing ops resource at all. The capability exists in the licence; the capacity to activate it doesn't exist in the org chart.
The ten-day utilisation audit
Before any recommendation, I run the same diagnostic. It takes about ten working days and needs no new spend.
Build the licence-to-usage map. Every platform, its annual cost, its renewal date, its contract owner, and - critically - the specific modules included in the tier you're on. Most teams discover they're paying for an enterprise tier while using standard-tier functionality.
Count active seats against licensed seats. Idle seats are the fastest, least political cost recovery available to a CMO under budget pressure.
Trace one lead end to end. Take a single real enquiry and follow it from first anonymous touch to closed revenue, documenting every system it passes through and every field that gets dropped, overwritten or manually re-keyed. This one exercise surfaces more broken pipeline than any dashboard.
Rank features by pipeline proximity. Score every unused capability on two axes: effort to activate, and distance from revenue. Lead scoring sits close to revenue. A new brand asset library does not.
Assign an owner and a date to the top five. Not a workstream. A named person and a calendar date.
Four plays that turn licensed features into pipeline
These are the activations that consistently pay back fastest, and every one of them uses functionality already included in the major platforms - Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Dynamics, Braze, Adobe, Pipedrive.
1. Switch on behavioural lead scoring, then actually route on it. Nearly every automation platform ships with scoring. Most organisations configure it once, never calibrate it against closed-won data, and let Sales ignore the output. Rebuild the model from your last four quarters of won deals, agree the MQL threshold with Sales in the same room, and route scored leads with an SLA. Pipeline lift here is typically the largest single gain available, and it costs nothing but a fortnight of analysis.
2. Mine the dormant database. Closed-lost opportunities from 12–24 months ago, unconverted trials, webinar registrants who never spoke to a rep. Your platform already supports the segmentation, the dynamic content and the send. Most organisations have tens of thousands of contacts sitting in a database being emailed a monthly newsletter and nothing else. Reactivation campaigns against a well-segmented dormant list routinely outperform cold acquisition on cost per opportunity, because you're paying for send volume you've already bought.
3. Push marketing signals into the seller's workflow. Alert-based selling - notifying an account owner when a target contact visits pricing, opens a proposal-stage email, or returns after 90 days quiet - is a native feature of every enterprise CRM and most automation platforms. It's also the single fastest way to convert marketing data into sales conversations, and it makes marketing visibly useful to the revenue team, which matters more than any dashboard at budget time.
4. Rebuild reporting on the data you already capture. Attribution arguments usually aren't a tooling problem; they're a definitions problem. Standardise your source and campaign taxonomy, enforce it at the form and UTM layer, and build one revenue view that Marketing, Sales and Finance all read from. When the CFO trusts your number, your budget conversation changes character entirely.
What good looks like in 90 days
The Australian context
There's a distinctly Australian shape to this problem. Many Australia-based marketing teams are the local end of a globally procured stack - the tool was bought in London or New York, configured for a different market, and handed over with a login and a wiki page. Local budget is under pressure, headcount is capped, and marketing operations talent in the Sydney market is scarce and expensive to hire permanently.
That combination is precisely why utilisation work suits a fractional or project-based engagement. You don't need a permanent marketing ops hire to run a ninety-day activation programme. You need someone who has done it before, can navigate a global platform owner in another time zone, and will leave your team with the documentation and capability to run it themselves.
Start this week
Pull up your martech renewal calendar and your last two invoices. Identify the three most expensive platforms. For each one, ask your team a single question: what percentage of what we're licensed for are we actually using, and what would it take to switch on the next 20%?
If nobody can answer confidently, that's not a failure of your team. It's the gap - and it's almost always worth more in pipeline than the next tool you were about to buy.
Frequently asked questions
What is martech utilisation? Martech utilisation is the proportion of licensed capability in your marketing technology stack that your team actively uses. Gartner's 2025 research puts the average at around half, meaning most organisations pay full price for partial value.
How do I audit my marketing technology stack? Start with a licence-to-usage map covering cost, tier, renewal date and owner for every platform; compare active to licensed seats; trace one real lead end to end across every system; then rank unused features by effort versus proximity to revenue.
Do I need new martech to improve lead generation? Usually not. Lead scoring, database reactivation, sales alerting and unified revenue reporting are standard features in most enterprise platforms and can be activated within a quarter using existing licences.
Can a fractional CMO help with martech? Yes. Utilisation and marketing operations work is well suited to a fractional or project engagement, particularly for Sydney teams supporting globally procured stacks without dedicated marketing ops headcount.
Neil Collins is a marketing consultant based in Sydney, working with scale-ups and enterprise organisations on martech and AI transformation, growth strategy, and fractional CMO engagements. If your stack is costing more than it's returning, get in touch.