Martech, explained · Buying and running · 2:36
The martech stack you bought twice
Duplicate martech tools: why nobody sees them, and the cheap way to find them
The short answer
Most martech stacks pay for the same job more than once. Unused features cost nothing, but a second contract for something you already own costs exactly what the invoice says. Nobody sees it because every list a company keeps is sorted by supplier. Rewrite a year of invoices as capabilities, sort by those, and the duplicates stack up.
Questions this answers
Why don't duplicate martech tools show up in a utilization survey?
Because both tools are in use. Each team runs its own, so nothing looks idle; the overlap only shows when you compare what the tools do.
Are unused features waste?
Not if the features you do use pay their way, as Scott Brinker put it. The money is in the second contract, not in the features nobody touches.
How do teams end up buying the same tool twice?
Each team has a real need, runs a sensible process and picks a tool it can defend. The stack ends up mirroring the reporting lines that bought it, as Melvin Conway described in 1968.
What does a duplicate cost besides the contract?
The seam, someone keeping two sides in agreement every week with no line item for it, and the habit: each team has tuned its tool, so giving it up sounds like going back to firefighting.
How do you find the duplicates?
Take a year of invoices, rewrite every line as the capability it buys, sort by capability and put a price on each overlap. Sometimes keeping both is the right result.
Transcript
Every chapter as text. Click a time to play the film from there.
0:00 Three tools, one job
The marketing team has a tool that builds segments.
The data team has one too, and so does the CRM team, for the same customers.
All three are in use, which is exactly why nobody spots the overlap.
This is the martech stack you bought twice, or three times.
0:20 Unused features cost nothing
The usual worry is unused features.
Scott Brinker made the point years ago: if the features you use pay their way, the rest isn't waste.
Paying twice for the same job is different.
It costs exactly what the invoice says, every month, twelve times a year, until someone cancels it.
0:41 Filed by supplier
Here's the stack, one box per tool. The bar on each box shows which team holds it.
Every list the company keeps sorts these tools by supplier: the contracts, the ledger, the renewal calendar.
Those lists tell you who gets paid. None of them tells you what the money bought.
1:00 Sorted by capability
Now list each tool by the jobs it does instead.
Now the duplicates line up, side by side.
Segments get built in three places.
Customers get matched in three, each with its own rules.
1:15 Nobody did anything wrong
Nobody did anything wrong to get here.
Each team had a real need and picked a tool it could defend.
Melvin Conway saw it in 1968: a system ends up copying the way its organization communicates.
Your stack mirrors the reporting lines that bought it.
1:35 Three bills
A duplicate costs you three ways.
First, the extra contract. That one's easy to show a CFO.
Second, the work in between: someone spends part of every week keeping two tools in sync, and no invoice shows it.
Third, habit: each team has tuned its tool until it works, so giving it up feels like starting over.
1:59 Turn each overlap into money
The fix starts cheap: take a year of invoices and rewrite each line as the job it pays for.
Then price each overlap: running the job in three places against running it in one.
Sometimes the answer is to keep both, and that's a real result.
2:17 Where the money is
So where's the money hiding in your martech stack?
Not in the features nobody uses. It's in the jobs you pay for twice, and you only see them when you list your tools by what they do.
Learn more at Martech Stack Builder, or build your own.
Read more
The articles this film is drawn from.