This article was based on the interview with CMO Council Chief Content Officer Tom Kaneshige on why the best martech stack doesn’t exist by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
As marketing leaders, we’ve all been through the gauntlet. The endless cycle of analyst reports, the feature-by-feature bake-offs, the polished demos, and the Herculean effort of the RFP. For two decades, this has been the accepted machinery for technology acquisition, all built on a simple, alluring premise: the best software produces the best performance. We invest millions in “best-in-class” platforms, secure in the knowledge that we’ve procured the most powerful tools on the market. And yet, for many, a nagging question remains: why doesn’t the promised lift in business performance always materialize? Why do our teams still feel like they’re driving a Formula 1 car on dirt roads?
The problem, it turns out, may not be with the tools themselves, but with the question we’ve been trying to answer. New research from the CMO Council, in partnership with MarTech Tribe, suggests that the entire apparatus of tech buying has been optimizing for the wrong thing. Instead of asking “What is the best tool?” the highest-performing organizations are implicitly asking, “What is the right tool *for us, right now*?” This shifts the focus from an abstract notion of “best-in-class” to a far more practical and potent concept: “best-aligned.” It’s a distinction that separates the over-built, underutilized stacks from those that genuinely function as an engine for growth. In an era where AI is poised to amplify every decision we make, understanding this difference is no longer an academic exercise; it’s a critical imperative for survival and success.
The Misalignment Problem: The Peril of Being “Over-built”
At the heart of this research is the Apex MarTech Matrix, a framework that plots a company’s stack along two simple but profound axes: Technological Capability on the y-axis and Organizational Maturity on the x-axis. This isn’t just about what your software can do; it’s about what your people, processes, and skills are equipped to do with it. The most common and costly mistake leaders make is ending up in the top-left quadrant: “Over-built.” This is the organization that has purchased more technological firepower than its operational maturity can effectively wield. It’s a state of chronic misalignment that breeds frustration, wastes budget, and leaves value on the table.
Tom Kaneshige likens this common predicament to a familiar luxury analogy, but with a crucial twist that places the focus not on blame, but on the mismatch itself.
“You have more technology capability than your operational maturity can handle. And that’s what we call over-built. And the Ferrari example… is a great one. It’s like buying a Ferrari, right? It’s great, great technology, a great car, yet all your drivers are only familiar with driving on dirt roads. So you have this misalignment. It’s not the technology’s fault. It’s not even the driver’s fault. It’s a misalignment problem.”
This distinction is vital. The issue isn’t that your team is unskilled or that the technology is flawed. The issue is that they are mismatched. This misalignment manifests in countless ways we’ve all witnessed: the enterprise CDP used primarily for batch-and-blast emails; the sophisticated personalization engine that only ever swaps out a hero image; the powerful analytics suite whose dashboards are dutifully ignored. Recognizing that this is an “alignment” problem, rather than a “people” or “tech” problem, empowers leaders to diagnose the root cause and seek a solution that brings the two axes into harmony, rather than simply throwing more training or more technology at the issue.
The Strategic ROI of Maturity
The conventional wisdom in our field often dictates that more investment in organizational maturity—more training, more process refinement, more skilled hires—is always a good thing. While well-intentioned, this belief can be just as misguided as buying technology for technology’s sake. The research reveals a more nuanced reality: organizational maturity should be viewed as an investment, subject to the same ROI calculations as a new software license. The question isn’t whether to invest in maturity, but where that investment will yield the greatest return. For some technologies, the platform itself does the heavy lifting; for others, human expertise is the primary driver of value.
Kaneshige illustrates this strategic trade-off with two classic martech examples: marketing automation and email marketing. While they may seem related, the leverage points for extracting value are fundamentally different.
“On the other side of the spectrum is, say, email marketing. Now email marketing, the technological capabilities are pretty mature, right? You’re not gonna get a huge variance in terms of abilities. What matters is operational maturity, which means can your marketers extract the most value out of that technology? And that’s when it comes to things like… deliverability… authenticating, avoiding blacklists… list hygiene. These things require experience and skill to really extract a lot of value out of it.”
This is where true leadership comes into play. Outperforming organizations aren’t just buying great tech; they are making shrewd, surgical decisions about where to deploy their resources. For a sophisticated marketing automation platform, the primary investment should be in the technological capability itself, as the advanced workflows and segmentation logic are where the value lies. For email marketing, where the technology is largely commoditized, the smarter investment is in the operational maturity—the human skills and processes around deliverability, hygiene, and testing that make the difference between a 1% and a 3% conversion rate. This is about moving from a monolithic approach to a portfolio management mindset for your stack and your team.
The Consolidation Myth: Are You Turning On as Much as You’re Turning Off?
Few mandates strike more fear into a marketing department than the CFO-driven call for stack consolidation. It often kicks off a defensive, budget-cutting exercise focused on identifying redundant tools and justifying every line item. The underlying assumption is that our stacks are bloated with unnecessary technology. However, the data suggests this may be a solution in search of a problem. The real issue isn’t what you can turn off, but what you haven’t yet turned on.
The research found that across industries, the percentage of technologies that could or should be divested is surprisingly small. The far bigger opportunity lies in activating the latent capabilities already paid for but sitting dormant within the existing stack.
“Our research shows that that’s not the case… there’s like 3% that they found of technologies that could and should be divested… It’s, wait a minute, there’s quick wins here, right? You don’t really need to increase your maturity gap, you just need to turn the damn thing on… This kind of alignment thinking is strategy, but consolidation is just a tactic.”
This insight reframes the entire conversation. Instead of a defensive scramble to justify costs, it becomes an offensive hunt for untapped value. The strategic questions for a leader become: “What features are we paying for that we’ve never used?” and “What small investment in maturity could unlock a major capability in a tool we already own?” This is the difference between strategy and tactics. Consolidation is a tactic, often a blunt instrument. Alignment is a strategy, a continuous process of ensuring that every dollar invested in technology is matched with the right level of operational maturity to extract its full business value.
The AI Amplifier: Get Your Foundation Right, or Fail Faster
No conversation about martech in the current climate is complete without addressing AI. The promise is immense, but so is the peril. Many organizations are layering AI capabilities onto their existing stacks, hoping to find new efficiencies and unlock novel capabilities. But AI is not a magic wand that can fix a broken foundation. It is an amplifier. It will take whatever processes, data structures, and strategic alignment you have—good or bad—and scale them at an unprecedented rate.
If your stack is over-built and your data is siloed, AI will simply help you generate misaligned campaigns and derive flawed insights more quickly. This makes the “boring” work of achieving alignment more critical than ever.
“To do that, you better have a solid martech foundation because if you don’t, you’re going to accelerate and scale the wrong things very, very quickly.”
This is a sober warning for every leader rushing to implement the latest generative AI tool for content creation or predictive model for audience segmentation. Before you can harness the power of AI, you must ensure your house is in order. Does your data supply chain flow freely, or is it dammed by silos? Are your teams capable of exercising the human judgment needed to guide, govern, and validate AI-driven outputs? Building a well-aligned stack isn’t just about maximizing the ROI of your current investments; it’s about building the essential foundation upon which the future of your marketing organization will depend.
The era of chasing “best-in-class” as the sole North Star for martech acquisition is coming to a close. The evidence is clear: performance isn’t born from features lists, but from the elegant alignment of technological capability and organizational maturity. This is not an indictment of past decisions, which were made with the best information available at the time. Rather, it is an invitation to adopt a more nuanced, strategic, and data-driven framework for the future. It’s about understanding that the Ferrari is only a superior vehicle if you have a paved road to drive it on.
As leaders, our role is shifting from that of a procurement manager to that of a portfolio manager. We must diagnose where our stacks are over-built or under-built, make surgical investments in both technology and maturity, and reframe consolidation as a quest for untapped value. By focusing on building a “best-aligned” martech ecosystem, we not only maximize the return on our current investments but also create a resilient and powerful foundation capable of truly harnessing the transformative power of what comes next. The best stack, it turns out, is the one that is a perfect reflection of who you are, and who you are ready to become.
