A martech audit that pays for itself
The one-page instrument we use to surface duplicated spend, blind spots and integration debt inside a fortnight.
Most martech audits produce a 90-slide deck and no decisions. This one produces one page and a fortnight of found money.
Why most audits fail
The typical martech audit is scoped as an inventory exercise. Someone catalogues 140 tools, colour-codes them by vendor, and files the deck. Nothing gets switched off. Nothing gets consolidated. The renewal cycle resumes untouched.
The audit that actually pays for itself is scoped differently. It's a decision instrument, not a catalogue. It exists to force four calls per platform: keep, consolidate, replace, retire. Every finding maps to one of those four verbs, or it doesn't belong in the report.
The one-page instrument
For each platform we score five dimensions on a 0-3 scale, then let the totals do the talking:
- Commercial fit — is anyone using this against a live commercial goal this quarter?
- Data centrality — does it originate, enrich, or route the customer record?
- Integration health — is it wired into the operating spine, or living in a side channel?
- Licence efficiency — cost per active seat, cost per actioned record, or cost per campaign shipped.
- Replacement cost — realistic switch cost, in weeks and dollars, not vendor-brochure claims.
Where the money hides
Duplicated spend rarely lives in the CRM line item. It hides in three places: overlapping CDP-style capabilities inside three different suites, seat-based analytics tools where 80% of seats haven't logged in this quarter, and 'strategic' pilots that quietly auto-renewed twice.
The audit's job is to make those three categories visible on one page, alongside a named owner and a decision date. That's it. No 90-slide narrative, no maturity model wheel.
A realistic two-week cadence
- Days 1-3: pull contracts, seat data, and integration diagrams. Interview two operators, not fifteen.
- Days 4-7: score the stack against the five-dimension instrument. Flag anything with a total under 6.
- Days 8-11: run a keep/consolidate/replace/retire session with the accountable exec — one hour, four columns, decisions live.
- Days 12-14: publish the one-pager, the savings number, and the switch-off calendar. Nothing longer.
What good looks like at the end
The output isn't a report. It's a page: the four verbs, the numbers next to them, and the dates. If it can't be pinned above a desk, it isn't finished.
Done well, this audit funds itself inside the first switch-off. Done poorly, it becomes another artefact. The difference is entirely in the scoping — decisions in, catalogues out.
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