More than 60% of B2B marketers say martech stack is too complex

More than 60% of B2B marketers say their martech stack is too complex, with one in five saying it’s “more complex than a black hole,” according to a new survey.

That complexity is a result of increasing challenges when it comes to collecting, orchestrating and utilizing data. That’s the conclusion of The 2022 Outlook on Data and Technology, put out by B2B marketing solution provider Anteriad. It is based on a survey of 370 B2B marketing professionals with senior manager titles and above, at U.S. and U.K. businesses with more than 250 employees. 

The solution to this problem seems to be adding more to the stack. More than 90% of U.K. marketers expect their budget to grow in the coming year, despite the fact that the nation’s economy is reeling. In the U.S. 70% expect they will get more money. 

Across the board, 93% say replacing, updating or consolidating tools in their current martech stack would make it function more efficiently.

The top problems they want to solve are:

• 35% – Data isn’t normalized across systems.
• 33% – Tools don’t talk to each other, so everything is manual.
• 33% – We have features we don’t need or don’t utilize.
• 29% – We have technology we don’t need or don’t utilize.
• 26% – Data is old/outdated.
• 24% – I’m missing key parts of my tech stack.

So many data providers

Companies are getting their data from many different providers. Nearly half (46%) say they use from one to five sources for third-party data, 32% use between five and ten and 15% use more.

Unfortunately, more sources doesn’t mean more efficiency. The report found those using more than six third-party sources actually reported 10% less targeting benefit and 13% less customer experience benefit.

Dig deeper: Why B2B buyers now hate traditional B2B selling

What you hope to accomplish in the coming year seems to depend on where you are organizationally. Among C-suite respondents, updating the technology stack is the top priority (48%). For VPs, it’s adopting a data strategy (56%). For managers and directors, it is centralizing/unifying data (47%).

Why we care. While the priorities for the coming year may be different, they all need the others in order to succeed. Also, there’s a need for a person or a team to focus on keeping the martech stack as simple as possible. This technology is supposed to make marketing more effective and more efficient. If it’s too complex to use then neither of those is happening.