Marketing Technology: A Team Sport, Not a Solo Game

When it comes to procuring marketing technology, the stakes have never been higher. With budgets tightening, teams stretched thin, and more pressure to demonstrate ROI, the days of impulsively buying the next shiny tool are over. Sure, it’s tempting to grab the latest platform that promises to solve your most pressing problem, but buying tech in a silo leads to more headaches than solutions.

Let’s face it: siloed anything rarely works. Whether it’s adoption struggles, misaligned goals, or a glaring lack of integration with your existing business systems, this “quick fix” approach almost always costs more time and money in the long run. The real game-changer? Making marketing technology procurement a collaborative process—one that ensures your tech works with your business, not against it.

The Danger of Siloed Tech Purchases

1. Adoption is an uphill battle

Marketing teams often purchase tools that solve their problems without involving other stakeholders. While this might make sense in the short term, it’s a recipe for disaster when the technology needs to be adopted across the organization.

Picture this: Your marketing team invests in a sophisticated analytics tool that offers valuable insights, but it’s too complex for sales or customer success to understand—or worse, it doesn’t integrate with their systems. What happens? Resistance. Without alignment across teams, adoption falters, and your investment goes underutilized.

2. Organizational value isn’t clear

Every tool comes with a cost, and when budgets tighten, CFOs look for expenses to cut. If your new tech doesn’t show clear value across the organization, it’s often the first to go.

For example, a marketing automation platform may deliver value to your marketing team by streamlining email campaigns. But if leadership or sales doesn’t see how it contributes to revenue growth, it’s viewed as an expendable expense—not a critical piece of infrastructure.

3. Lack of integration creates silos

Technology that doesn’t integrate seamlessly with your existing systems or processes creates more problems than it solves. Instead of fostering collaboration, it creates data silos, manual workarounds, and inefficiencies. Over time, these issues erode trust in the tool—and in the decision to invest in it.

Why Collaboration Matters in Tech Procurement

The solution to these problems? Collaboration. MarTech procurement isn’t just about solving one team’s problem; it’s about solving organizational problems and enabling growth. This requires involving the right people, asking the right questions, and ensuring that the technology aligns with your business strategy.

Here’s why collaboration is so critical:

1. It ensures alignment on goals

When you involve multiple stakeholders—marketing, sales, customer success, IT, and leadership—you’re able to align on what the business actually needs. Instead of focusing solely on marketing’s priorities, the discussion shifts to broader goals like revenue growth, customer experience, and operational efficiency.

This alignment ensures that the technology you choose solves real, cross-functional problems. It’s not just about “What’s in it for marketing?” but rather, “How does this tool drive business outcomes for everyone?”

2. It accelerates adoption

People are far more likely to adopt a tool they helped select. By involving key stakeholders in the decision-making process, you foster a sense of ownership and buy-in. This buy-in is crucial when it’s time to onboard users, train teams, and integrate the tool into existing workflows.

3. It positions the tool as a long-term investment

When the value of a tool is clear across the organization, it’s no longer seen as an expense—it’s seen as an investment. Stakeholders understand how the technology contributes to business growth, which makes it easier to justify its cost during budget discussions.

How to Get Stakeholders Involved

Now that we’ve established the importance of collaboration, let’s talk about how to make it happen.

1. Start with discovery

Before evaluating tools, bring stakeholders together to discuss their pain points, needs, and goals. What challenges are they facing? What outcomes are they trying to achieve? This discovery phase helps you build a clear picture of the problems your tech needs to solve.

Pro Tip: Include a mix of decision-makers (like executives) and end-users (like sales reps or customer success managers). This ensures you capture perspectives from both strategic and tactical levels.

2. Focus on organizational value

When evaluating tools, don’t just look at features—look at outcomes. How does the tool drive value for multiple teams? How does it align with your company’s broader goals?

For example, if you’re considering a customer data platform (CDP), highlight how it will:

• Provide marketing with better segmentation capabilities.
• Enable sales to prioritize leads based on engagement data.
• Help customer success teams personalize their outreach to improve retention.

This approach shifts the conversation from “How does this tool help marketing?” to “How does this tool help the business?” Bonus outcome, it will be easier to move into enablement and utilization across teams. 

3. Build a business case

Once you’ve identified the right tool, build a compelling business case that clearly articulates its value. Use real numbers and examples to show how it will save time, reduce costs, or drive revenue.

For instance:

• “This marketing automation platform will reduce manual email creation time by 50%, saving the marketing team 20 hours per month.”
• “The platform’s analytics capabilities will provide insights that improve campaign performance, driving a 10% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversion rates.”

4. Plan for adoption and integration

Adoption doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a plan. Work with stakeholders to map out:

• Training programs to get users up to speed.
• A timeline for onboarding and implementation.

How the tool will integrate with existing systems and workflows.

This proactive approach ensures that your investment doesn’t get derailed by technical or operational challenges.

Key Takeaways

• Tech purchased in a silo doesn’t work. Without organizational buy-in, adoption struggles, and the tool fails to deliver value.
• Stakeholder involvement is critical. Collaborating with key users and decision-makers ensures alignment, accelerates adoption, and positions the tool as a long-term investment.
• Focus on organizational value. Choose tools that solve problems for multiple teams and align with broader business goals.
• Plan for success. Build a business case, map out integration, and provide training to ensure the tool delivers ROI.

Investing in marketing technology is a big decision, and the stakes are high. But when you make procurement a collaborative process, you set your organization up for success. Instead of a shiny tool that gathers dust, you get a solution that drives real business value—and earns its place as a critical piece of your growth strategy.

So, the next time you’re considering a new tool, remember: it’s not just about solving today’s problem. It’s about building a foundation for tomorrow’s growth. Choose wisely. Collaborate intentionally.