Enterprise marketing teams have never had more technology at their disposal — and never used less of it. Gartner’s most recent Martech Report found that organizations are utilizing only 33% of their marketing stack’s capabilities, a figure that has declined for three consecutive years, down from 58% in 2020.
Meanwhile, the average enterprise marketing stack has grown to somewhere between90 and 120 individual tools, according to Chiefmartec’s ongoing research into the martech landscape.
Put those two numbers together and you get an uncomfortable picture: enterprises are paying for more capability than ever, and using less of it than ever before. It’s not a technology problem. It’s a visibility and workflow problem.
The Budget Squeeze Makes This Worse, Not Better
This inefficiency would sting in any budget environment. It’s especially painful in the one CMOs are living in right now. With 64% of marketing leaders reporting to Gartner that they don’t have the budget to execute their strategy, a resource gap has been compounding as marketing budgets have shrunk relative to overall company revenue over the past several years.
When budgets are tight, the instinct is to cut.
But the data suggests the bigger opportunity isn’t cutting tools. It’s fixing how teams actually use the ones they already have, and the processes surrounding the people they work with.
This is because the tool sprawl problem inside marketing technology has an almost identical twin sitting one layer up: agency and partner management.
The Same Sprawl Problem Shows Up in How Teams Manage Agencies
Ask most enterprise marketing teams how they select, brief, and manage their agency roster, and you’ll hear a familiar story, one that mirrors the martech utilization crisis almost exactly.
What teams have:
- Generic procurement systems: supplier lists with no performance context, no case studies, no clarity on what an agency is actually good at.
- Email threads and spreadsheets: agency comparisons scattered across inboxes that nobody can find three months later.
- Word docs, decks, and shared drives: briefs sent by email, versioned by filename, effectively untrackable, and isolated to a few individuals.
- Post-campaign recaps, if they happen at all: performance data that lives and dies inside an agency’s own deck, never making it back into the next sourcing decision or brief.
What teams actually need:
- A pre-approved roster with context: searchable by service, region, and past work, with peer reviews that make a decision-ready in minutes rather than months.
- A centralized selection audit trail: documented rationale that’s compliance-ready and shareable with procurement, not reconstructed after the fact.
- Centralized, collaborative briefing: agency and internal teams aligned on scope, and incorporating insights from past work, before a single dollar is committed.
- Built-in performance recording: proof of execution and results that are documented, peer-reviewed, and searchable for the next project.
Notice the pattern. In both cases — martech stacks and agency rosters — the issue isn’t a lack of resources. It’s that the resources exist in silos, disconnected from the workflow and from each other, so nobody can act on what’s already there. There is no shared knowledge. When a person leaves the company, all their siloed knowledge is lost.
Why This Keeps Happening
There’s a reason this problem is so persistent, and it’s structural, not a failure of individual teams. As enterprises scaled their marketing function over the last decade, they added tools and added agencies at roughly the same pace, but rarely built the connective infrastructure between them.
- A CRM doesn’t know what a creative agency delivered last quarter.
- A project management tool doesn’t know which supplier is approved for a given region.
- A procurement system doesn’t know which agency actually performed well, only which one has a signed contract.
Each system does its job in isolation. None of them do the job of connecting decisions to data, which is precisely the capability Gartner’s utilization research suggests is missing at the tool level, and precisely what’s missing at the agency-management level too.
The Fix Isn’t More Systems. It’s One Layer That Connects Them.
The instinct when facing this kind of fragmentation is often to buy another point solution: a better spreadsheet, a nicer dashboard, another procurement add-on.
But that’s how enterprises ended up with 90-120 tools and 33% utilization in the first place. Adding another disconnected system to a stack that’s already underused doesn’t close the gap; it widens it.
The more durable fix is a layer that sits across the existing mess and makes it usable — one place where the roster, the briefs, the performance history, the legal and procurement assessments, and the approvals all live together, visible to the people who need them, when they need them.
The problem isn’t that enterprise marketing teams have too many tools. It’s that none of them were built for how teams actually work.
This is what SpotSource was built to solve. It’s the operating system for your external partners — an all-in-one platform where your entire pre-approved agency roster lives, keeping marketing and procurement teams aligned from day one.
Instead of another tool added to the stack, it’s the connective layer that makes the rest of the stack — and the agency relationships running alongside it — actually work the way they were meant to.