7 tips for auditing your marketing and sales tech stack

Companies accumulate marketing and sales tools gradually. A sales engagement platform here, an intent data provider there, a second analytics tool because the first one could answer most but not all of the questions. Each one made sense at the time. Now you’re spending $3,000 or $8,000 or $15,000 a month across a stack that feels bloated.

This happens to almost every B2B company between 20 and 200 employees. Here’s how to clean it up.

Step 1: Make the full list

Pull every marketing and sales tool your company pays for. Not just the ones you use daily. Every subscription, every license, every “we signed up for the free trial and then it converted to paid and now it’s in the mix.”

For each tool, write down what it costs per month (or per year divided by 12), who on the team uses it, and what they use it for. If you don’t know who uses it, that’s a signal.

Step 2: Sort into three categories

Core. These are the tools that your daily operations depend on. Your CRM, your marketing automation platform, your website CMS, your email. If you turned these off, work would stop.

Supporting. These make your core tools work better. Analytics, reporting dashboards, integrations, data enrichment. They add value but they’re not foundational.

Marginal. These are the tools that sounded promising but don’t get used consistently. If you turned them off, most of your team wouldn’t notice for a week.

Step 3: Ask three questions about each tool

Is more than one person using this regularly? If a tool is only used by one person once a month, it’s worth asking whether it’s necessary or whether the same thing can be done in a core tool you already have.

Does this integrate with our core stack? A tool that lives on its own island and requires manual data transfer to be useful is creating work, not saving it. If it doesn’t connect to your CRM or your automation platform, the data it generates is probably not making it into your decision-making.

Could we do this with a tool we already pay for? This is the big one. Many modern CRMs and marketing automation platforms can do 80% of what the specialty tools do. The specialty tool might do it better, but sometimes it’s only slightly better, and that might not be worth $5,000 a year and the complexity of maintaining another integration.

Step 4: Make the cut list

For every tool in the “marginal” category and every tool where the answer to all three questions above was unfavorable, put it on the cut list. Don’t cancel everything right away. Check contract terms, figure out what data you need to export, and make a plan to shut things down over the next 30 to 60 days as terms and team capacity allow.

Step 5: Document what stays and why

For every tool you keep, write a short internal doc that covers what it does, who owns it, how it connects to the rest of the stack, and what you’d need to do if you had to replace it. This sounds tedious, but it takes maybe 20 minutes per tool and it saves you from having the same “wait, why do we have this?” conversation a year from now. Revisit this document regularly, ideally twice a year minimum.

A note on consolidation

There are specialized tools for nearly everything in marketing and sales. Some of them are worth it, but many B2B companies under 200 employees can run their sales and marketing operation on fewer tools than they may think. Every additional tool should justify both the cost and the complexity of maintaining it.

When to do this

If you haven’t audited your stack in the last 12 months, make a plan to do so. If you’re about to renew a major contract, definitely do it before you sign. And if you just raised a round and there’s excitement to buy new tools, do it first so you don’t add to the pile.