Your team vets every new vendor. But who is reviewing the tools marketing has been running for years?
Procurement teams are among the most diligent gatekeepers in the enterprise. Every new vendor goes through security questionnaires, ROI reviews, and multi-stakeholder evaluations before a contract is signed. The process is thorough, documented, and defensible.
But here is a question worth asking at your next review: when was the last time anyone applied that same level of scrutiny to the tools marketing has been using for years?
Across most enterprises, marketing’s technology stack is littered with tools that predate the current procurement framework. They were adopted informally, renewed on autopilot, and now sit outside the governance perimeter that applies to every other category of spend. According to Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey, organizations utilize only 49% of their martech capabilities, and martech still accounts for roughly 22% of total marketing budgets. That is a significant pool of spend that may be operating without active oversight.
The status quo is not neutral. It is often the most dangerous technology decision in your portfolio, precisely because no one is making it actively. It just persists.
Here are five questions procurement leaders should be asking right now about marketing’s existing tools.
1. When Was the Last Time This Tool Underwent a Security Review?
Many of marketing’s core tools were purchased years ago, often before formal procurement and IT security processes were applied to SaaS acquisitions. At the time, the evaluation may have been a quick demo and a credit card charge. The tool worked, it got renewed, and no one looked at it again.
The problem is that security standards evolve. A tool that passed muster in 2019 may have critical gaps against today’s requirements for SOC 2 compliance, data residency, encryption at rest, or GDPR obligations. The Cloud Security Alliance’s 2025 State of SaaS Security Report found that many organizations still rely on vendor-native tools and manual audits, leaving significant blind spots across the SaaS environment.
The risk for procurement: if a legacy marketing tool experiences a breach, your team may be held accountable for not having reviewed it, even though it was never in scope. The absence of a review is itself a governance failure.
Action step: Request the most recent SOC 2 Type II report, penetration test results, and data processing agreement for every marketing tool that has been in use for more than 24 months. If the vendor cannot produce them, that is a finding, not an inconvenience.
2. Does This Tool Connect to Finance Systems, or Is Data Being Manually Exported?
In most enterprises, marketing’s budget and spend data lives in a different universe than finance’s general ledger. Marketing teams track budgets in spreadsheets. Finance tracks actuals in the ERP. And somewhere in between, someone is manually exporting CSV files, reformatting columns, and reconciling numbers in a process that nobody has documented.
Every manual handoff between a marketing tool and a finance system introduces reconciliation risk. Numbers get rounded, categories get mismatched, and timing discrepancies create phantom variances that take hours to resolve. For a procurement leader evaluating total cost of ownership, these hidden labor costs often dwarf the license fee itself.
Enterprise organizations like Cisco and IBM have recognized this gap. Cisco aligned over 1,000 marketers onto a unified platform that connects plans, budgets, and actuals, cutting budget approval cycles to less than 48 hours and achieving 99.5% budget accuracy. IBM estimates that connecting planning and budgeting systems will save an estimated 115,000 hours of unproductive time.
The risk for procurement: manual data flows between marketing and finance are not just inefficient. They are audit liabilities. When reconciliation depends on a person rather than a system, errors become invisible until they become material.
Action step: Map every data flow between marketing tools and finance systems. If the connection requires manual export, transformation, or re-entry, flag it as a process risk and evaluate whether the tool can support direct integration with your ERP or financial planning platform.
3. Who Has Access, and Is It Managed Through Our SSO/Identity System?
Legacy marketing tools are notorious for operating outside the enterprise identity perimeter. They often have standalone login systems with their own credential stores, no integration with your SSO provider, and no automated provisioning or deprovisioning.
The practical result? Former employees and agency contractors may still have active accounts. Shared passwords circulate through Slack messages and sticky notes. And your identity governance team has no visibility into who is accessing what. According to Gartner’s research on shadow IT, 41% of employees acquire, modify, or create technology their IT departments are unaware of, and that number is projected to reach 75% by 2027.
The risk for procurement: orphaned accounts and unmanaged credentials are among the most common vectors for unauthorized data access. If a marketing tool cannot integrate with your identity management infrastructure, it represents an uncontrolled access point in your security architecture.
Action step: Require that all marketing tools support enterprise SSO through SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect, role-based access controls, and automated user provisioning/deprovisioning through SCIM. Any tool that cannot meet these requirements should be flagged for replacement.
4. If This Tool Failed Tomorrow, What Would Be the Business Impact?
Here is a scenario that plays out more often than most organizations realize: a marketing tool that started as a “nice to have” has quietly become mission-critical. It holds the only copy of the current campaign calendar. It is the system where budget allocations are tracked. It is the place where performance data is aggregated for the CMO’s board presentation.
Nobody planned for this tool to become essential. It just happened, organically, over years of incremental adoption. And because it was never formally classified as business-critical, there is no redundancy, no documented recovery plan, and no contractual SLA that addresses extended downtime.
Consider the impact of a prolonged outage. If your marketing team cannot access budget data, campaigns stall, spend goes untracked, and finance loses visibility into a significant portion of the company’s investment portfolio. For organizations managing large, distributed budgets across regions and brands, even a few days of downtime can cascade into missed media windows, misallocated spend, and lost confidence from finance leadership.
The risk for procurement: tools that have not been formally assessed for business criticality may not have appropriate disaster recovery provisions, data portability guarantees, or vendor financial stability assurances. If a small vendor goes under or experiences a major incident, your marketing organization could be left without its operational backbone.
Action step: Conduct a business impact analysis for every marketing tool in active use. Classify each tool by criticality tier (mission-critical, important, discretionary) and verify that vendor contracts include appropriate SLAs, data export capabilities, and business continuity commitments.
5. What Is the TOTAL Cost of This Tool, Including the Time People Spend Working Around Its Limitations?
License cost is the number that shows up on the invoice. It is also the least significant component of what a marketing tool actually costs the organization.
The real total cost of ownership includes the hours your marketing operations team spends on manual workarounds: building pivot tables to reconcile budget data, creating custom integrations to bridge disconnected systems, and maintaining “shadow” spreadsheets that serve as the actual source of truth because the tool itself cannot provide the views people need. Gartner research shows that organizations frequently underuse their martech investments, with hidden costs often reaching 3 to 5 times the license fee when labor, integration maintenance, and reconciliation effort are factored in.
When one global enterprise audited the true cost of their spreadsheet-based marketing budget process, they discovered that the team was spending the equivalent of 125,000 hours on manual data management, a figure that dwarfed the cost of replacing those spreadsheets with a purpose-built marketing system of record.
The risk for procurement: when TCO analysis only counts the license fee, your team is approving renewals based on incomplete information. The “cheap” tool that generates 200 hours of manual work per quarter is not cheap. It is the most expensive line item in the category, and it does not show up on any invoice.
Action step: For every marketing tool up for renewal, require a TCO analysis that includes labor costs for manual workarounds, custom integration maintenance, training and onboarding overhead, and the opportunity cost of time spent on non-strategic tasks. Compare this fully loaded cost against purpose-built alternatives that eliminate the need for workarounds.
The Status Quo Is Not Free
Procurement teams exist to protect the organization from vendor risk, overspend, and operational fragility. But the biggest risks are not always in the next purchase order. They are hiding in the tools that were never evaluated, the renewals that were never questioned, and the processes that nobody owns.
The status quo is not free. It is often the most expensive and riskiest option in your portfolio, precisely because no one is treating it like a decision.
Start asking these five questions. The answers will tell you everything you need to know about whether marketing’s existing tools are assets or liabilities.
