Start With a Full Catalog — Not a Gut Feeling
Before you can cut anything, you need to know what you actually have. Most marketing teams are surprised to discover they are paying for 12 to 20 tools when they sit down and list them out — and that number often climbs once you loop in sales, ops, and whoever set up the website three years ago. Pull your credit card statements, your browser extensions, your CRM integrations, and your DNS records. If a tool touches your domain, your email, your analytics, or your ad spend, it belongs on the list.
For each tool, capture four things: what it costs annually, who owns the login, what it was originally purchased to do, and whether anyone on the team could tell you — right now, without looking — what it produced last quarter. That last question is the most revealing. If the answer is silence or a shrug, you have found your first candidate for the cut list. This is not about being ruthless; it is about being honest with yourself before you spend another renewal cycle on something that has become invisible infrastructure.
Map Every Tool to a Revenue Outcome
A catalog tells you what exists. A map tells you what it is actually doing. Take each tool and draw a straight line — or try to — between it and a measurable business outcome: pipeline generated, deals closed, churn reduced, cost per acquisition lowered. Some tools will connect cleanly. Your CRM connects to closed revenue. Your email platform connects to pipeline velocity. Others will require you to follow a longer chain, and that is fine, as long as the chain is real and not theoretical.
The tools that cannot be connected to any outcome — even indirectly — are not necessarily useless, but they are undefended. If you had to justify every line item to your CFO tomorrow, which ones would you struggle to explain? Mark those. You are not cutting them yet; you are simply being clear-eyed about which parts of your stack are running on faith rather than evidence. That distinction matters enormously when budget conversations come around, and they always do.
Find the Overlap and Name It Honestly
Martech stacks accumulate overlap the same way closets accumulate clothes — one tool at a time, each purchase made for a good reason in the moment. You may have three tools that each claim to do email automation, two that track website visitor behavior, and a handful of reporting dashboards that are all pulling from slightly different data sources. Overlap is not always waste, but it is always worth naming. When two tools do the same job, one of them is probably doing it better, and the other is creating confusion, inconsistency, or a false sense of coverage.
Build a simple grid: list your core marketing functions across the top — lead capture, nurture, attribution, reporting, SEO, social, paid — and map which tools serve each function. Anywhere you see two or more tools in the same column, you have a conversation to have. Sometimes the answer is consolidation. Sometimes one tool handles a specific edge case the other cannot. But you will not know until you look at it directly, side by side, rather than evaluating each tool in isolation the way most teams do.
Build a Defensible Cut List — Then Sequence the Work
A cut list only holds up if you can explain the reasoning to someone who did not do the audit. For each tool you are recommending to remove or replace, write one sentence: what it was supposed to do, why it is not doing it, and what happens if you remove it. That discipline forces you to be specific rather than reactive, and it gives you something concrete to bring into a leadership conversation instead of a vague sense that the stack feels bloated.
Once you have your list, sequence the cuts by impact and reversibility. Start with tools that are low-cost, low-usage, and easy to turn off without downstream consequences. Save the bigger consolidations — replacing your MAP, migrating your analytics setup, renegotiating an enterprise contract — for after you have built some momentum and confirmed your assumptions. A good audit does not try to fix everything at once. It gives you a clear picture of where you are, a prioritized path forward, and enough confidence to take the first step without second-guessing yourself. If your domain, email routing, or tracking setup is part of what is tangled, that is often the right place to start — because everything else in your stack depends on that foundation being clean.