The Partnership Imperative: Why No MarTech Platform Wins Alone
- Oct 5
- 12 min read
The Problem: Why 67% of Your MarTech Stack Is Wasted
Three major surveys—The CMO Survey from Duke University, MarTech's State of Your Stack Survey, and Gartner's CEO Survey—revealed a stunning convergence: 65.7% of marketing leaders cite data integration as their biggest martech management challenge. The persistence of this problem across tactical, operational, and strategic levels indicates systemic rather than isolated challenges, pointing to what might be called a "data value chain breakdown."
Here's what that breakdown looks like across industries:
A retail brand invests heavily in Adobe Experience Cloud. A healthcare provider implements Salesforce Marketing Cloud. A financial services firm deploys HubSpot. An association purchases Braze for member engagement.
Six months down the line, across various industries and platforms, they all experience the same issues: fragmented data, repeated records, and campaigns that still seem impersonal.
What was the mistake? They acquired platforms, but not ecosystems.
This issue spans multiple industries!
1. Why This Matters Now: The Utilization Crisis
The numbers tell a sobering story regardless of your sector. Gartner's 2023 research found that organizations' overall martech stack utilization dropped to just 33% on average, marking a second consecutive year of decline from 42% in 2022 and 58% in 2020. Meanwhile, organizations are spending 25.4% of their 2023 marketing budget on technology.
The disconnect is clear: we're spending more but using less—whether you're in retail, healthcare, financial services, associations, or B2B technology.
For buyers, this represents wasted investment and missed opportunity.
For vendors, this represents a customer success crisis that threatens renewals and expansion revenue.
The culprit isn't the platforms themselves. Enterprise systems like Salesforce, Adobe, and HubSpot excel at orchestration—managing workflows, automating campaigns, and executing across channels. What they don't do is solve identity resolution, provide third-party data enrichment, or magically integrate with existing tech stacks.
Privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA) make identity resolution critical across all sectors. Cookie deprecation forces reliance on first-party data plus strategic data partners. And 61% of CMOs report they lack the in-house capabilities to deliver their strategy, with talent recruitment challenges and training underinvestments resulting in martech underutilization and ROI challenges.
The "build vs. buy vs. partner" question has been answered: most organizations lack resources to build, so partnerships fill the gap. Smart vendors recognize this and build robust partner ecosystems. Smart buyers evaluate vendors based on those ecosystems.
2. What is the Three-Legged Stool Martech Framework?
Think of the MarTech ecosystem as a three-legged stool. Remove any leg, and the whole thing collapses—whether you're targeting customers, patients, donors, or members.
Leg 1: Marketing Platforms (Salesforce, Adobe, HubSpot, Oracle, Braze)
What they do: Orchestrate campaigns, manage workflows, execute personalization What they DON'T do: Solve identity resolution, provide third-party enrichment, ensure data quality
Value Exchange Example: Adobe Experience Platform becomes infinitely more valuable when integrated with identity resolution capabilities from providers like Acxiom, LiveRamp, or Experian. Adobe gets to offer "identity as a service" through partnerships; clients get real-time personalization without building in-house data teams. As Adobe's Senior Director of Partner Sales noted regarding one such partnership, "We're thrilled about this integration to offer brands access to a configurable suite of connected identity capabilities to enhance their ability to deliver real-time personalization" Martech Solutions and Services | Acxiom.
For vendors: These partnerships make platforms stickier and increase customer lifetime value. For buyers: These integrations solve problems that would otherwise require hiring specialized data teams.
Leg 2: Data Infrastructure (Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure)
What they do: Store and process massive datasets with scale and speed What they DON'T do: Understand marketing use cases, provide clean identity graphs, activate data
Value Exchange Example: Cloud data warehouses like Snowflake enable clients to leverage data capabilities from identity providers (Acxiom, LiveRamp, TransUnion, Neustar) in a privacy-safe manner within their own environment. As one platform's Senior Director of Product Management stated, "Partners like [data providers] can give our customers greater flexibility around how they improve digital resilience while continuing to meet their marketing goals". Data providers gain distribution; warehouse customers get marketing-ready data without moving it outside their secure environment.
For vendors: Partnerships expand use cases and prevent customer churn to competitors. For buyers: You get enterprise-grade data warehouse plus marketing intelligence without complex custom development.
Leg 3: Activation Platforms (The Trade Desk, ActionIQ, Segment, Tealium, mParticle)
What they do: Execute across channels, orchestrate customer journeys, manage real-time engagement. What they DON'T do: Enrich sparse first-party data, resolve cross-device identity, append missing attributes
Value Exchange Example: CDPs become exponentially more valuable when they can append missing attributes through data enrichment partnerships (whether with Acxiom, Experian, TransUnion, or specialized providers). The CDP gains richer profiles for segmentation; data partners gain new activation channels and use cases.
For vendors: Partnerships demonstrate solution completeness and reduce "gaps" that lose deals.
For buyers: You avoid the integration nightmare of stitching together five-point solutions.
3. The "Intel Inside" Model: Why Data Foundation Matters
Here's the critical insight that separates successful MarTech implementations from failed ones: platforms are only as good as the data foundation underneath them.
Think of it like building construction. You can have the most beautiful architecture (your marketing platform), but without a solid foundation (your data layer), the building will crack and shift over time. This is where strategic data partnerships become non-negotiable.
Consider how Intel transformed the PC industry in the 1990s with "Intel Inside." Consumers didn't buy Intel processors directly—they bought Dell, HP, or IBM computers. But Intel became the essential ingredient that made those computers valuable. The sticker on every machine signaled quality, performance, and reliability.
The same dynamic is emerging in MarTech: "Data Foundation Inside" is becoming the critical layer that makes platforms like Salesforce, Adobe, and Snowflake fully valuable to their clients. The specific provider matters less than the capability—whether it's Acxiom, LiveRamp, Experian, TransUnion, or another established identity and data partner.
For vendors: This model creates co-marketing opportunities and shared customer success metrics. When your platform works seamlessly with best-in-class data foundations, you close more deals and reduce implementation risk.
For buyers: This model simplifies vendor selection—you evaluate complete solutions, not component parts you'll need to integrate yourself. The key is ensuring your marketing platform has native integrations with reputable data foundation providers.
Here's why this model works across every industry:
For Retail & E-commerce: A fashion retailer using Salesforce Commerce Cloud can't achieve true omnichannel personalization without resolving customer identity across mobile app, website, in-store, and social media. Identity resolution from providers like LiveRamp, Acxiom, or specialized retail data partners becomes the foundation that makes Salesforce's orchestration capabilities actually work at scale.
For Healthcare: A hospital system using Adobe Experience Cloud to improve patient engagement can't send personalized health reminders without clean, HIPAA-compliant patient data. Data foundations from providers like Experian Health or specialized healthcare data partners enable the platform to deliver value while maintaining compliance.
For Financial Services: A bank using HubSpot for wealth management client engagement can't create sophisticated segmentation without enriched data showing life stage, assets, and propensity models. Whether through TransUnion, Experian, or financial services specialists, the platform orchestrates while the data foundation enables intelligence.
For Associations: A professional society using Braze for member communications can't achieve relevant messaging without understanding member journey stage, certification status, and engagement patterns. Data enrichment from association-focused providers or general data partners makes the engagement platform smart.
The Universal Truth: Across every sector, the pattern is identical. The platform provides the engine; the data foundation provides the fuel. Without both, you're pushing a car uphill.
As Salesforce's EVP noted, "A data-first approach and a single source of truth have never been more important for brands to deliver on customers' expectations in today's digital world". Notice: "data-first," not "platform-first."
4. Evaluating Data Foundation Providers
Not all data partnerships are created equal. When evaluating your platform's ecosystem, consider these criteria for data foundation providers:
Identity Resolution Capabilities:
Cross-device identity matching
Household-level linkage
B2B vs. B2C specialization
Global vs. regional coverage
Major Players: Acxiom, LiveRamp, Neustar (TransUnion), Experian, Oracle Data Cloud
Data Enrichment & Append Services:
Demographic attributes
Behavioral data
Firmographic data (B2B)
Propensity models
Major Players: Experian, TransUnion, Acxiom, Dun & Bradstreet (B2B), ZoomInfo (B2B)
Compliance & Privacy:
GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA compliance frameworks
Consent management capabilities
Data lineage and auditing
Industry-specific certifications
Major Players: OneTrust, TrustArc, BigID (privacy-focused); most major data providers have compliance frameworks
Integration Maturity:
Native connectors vs. API-only
Certified partner status with your platform
Reference customers in your industry
Speed of implementation
The Bottom Line for Buyers: Don't just ask "Does this platform work with data providers?" Ask "Which specific providers, what's the integration depth, and can I see proof?"
The Bottom Line for Vendors: Partner tier programs and technical integration depth matter. Surface-level "we have an API" partnerships don't solve customer problems.
5. The End User Impact: Why This Matters to Your Audience
Here's where partnerships translate into tangible outcomes across industries:
Better Personalization:
Retail: A customer browses running shoes on mobile, abandons cart, then receives an email with those exact shoes plus recommended accessories based on their purchase history. Engagement increases 40-60%.
Healthcare: A patient receives appointment reminders via their preferred channel (text vs. email) with relevant pre-visit instructions based on their specific condition and provider.
Associations: A member is recognized across web, mobile, email, and event apps—eliminating duplicate renewal notices and instead receiving personalized content based on certification track and career stage.
Privacy Compliance: Partnerships between platforms like Snowflake and data governance providers ensure sensitive information (patient records, financial data, member information) doesn't leave secure environments while still enabling marketing activation. The data foundation handles compliance; the platform handles execution.
Cost Efficiency: Rather than paying five different vendors to solve identity, data enrichment, activation, compliance, and analytics separately, get it through your platform's partnership ecosystem. One integrated solution, dramatically lower complexity, faster time-to-value.
For vendors: Customer success stories like these drive referrals and expansion revenue. For buyers: These outcomes justify the investment and demonstrate ROI to your board.
6. What This Means for Buyers: The Partnership Question
Practical advice for technology leaders across any sector evaluating their next platform investment:
Ask the partnership question: When evaluating Salesforce, Adobe, or any major platform, don't just ask "Can it do X?" Ask "Who does this platform partner with to solve X, and how mature is that integration?"
With 61% of marketing professionals experiencing regret for technology purchases within 12-18 months, and 36% citing incompatibility with existing systems as the reason the partnership ecosystem matters as much as the platform itself.
Evaluate ecosystem health: A platform with strong partnerships signals ongoing innovation and commitment. Look for:
Partner tier programs: Platinum, Gold, and Elite status with clear benefits
Third-party validation: Analyst reports, industry awards, customer case studies
Technical depth: Native connectors, not just API documentation
Market coverage: Partners across data foundation, integration, and activation layers
These aren't participation trophies—they're signals that the platform vendor has invested in making partnerships work seamlessly.
Demand native integrations: Pre-built connectors between your data foundation and your marketing platform mean faster time-to-value. One retail brand saw 90-day revenue lift simply by activating existing partnerships rather than custom-building integrations. A healthcare provider reduced patient no-shows by 25% within 60 days using the same approach.
Map your industry requirements: Different sectors have different needs:
Healthcare: HIPAA-compliant data handling, patient consent management
Financial services: Regulatory reporting, audit trails, KYC/AML compliance
Retail: Real-time inventory, transaction data, omnichannel identity
Associations: Member lifecycle tracking, certification/education history, engagement scoring etc.
Make sure your platform's partnership ecosystem addresses your specific industry requirements, not just generic marketing capabilities.
Conduct partnership due diligence:
Request reference customers using the specific integration you need
Ask for implementation timelines and common pitfalls
Verify that the partnership is active (some "partner pages" list defunct relationships)
Understand the economic model (revenue share, referral fees) and how it impacts pricing
7. What This Means for Vendors: Building Partnership Strategy
For software vendors and platform providers, the implications are equally clear:
Partnerships are product strategy: Your platform's value proposition depends on what you can enable through partnerships. 61% of CMOs lack in-house capabilities to deliver their strategy, which means they're looking for complete solutions, not components they need to assemble.
Investment in integration pays dividends: Native connectors, joint solution architectures, and co-developed use cases reduce customer implementation risk. This translates to shorter sales cycles and higher win rates. Invest in:
Technical integration (APIs, connectors, pre-built workflows)
Joint go-to-market (co-marketing, co-selling, shared quota)
Customer success alignment (shared KPIs, joint business reviews)
Partner tier programs matter: Well-structured programs with clear benefits create competitive dynamics among partners to achieve higher status. This drives deeper integration, more co-marketing, and better customer outcomes. Design tiers based on:
Technical certification and integration depth
Revenue contribution and pipeline generation
Customer satisfaction scores
Market coverage and specialization
Customer success requires ecosystem thinking: With martech utilization dropping to 33% your renewal rates depend on whether customers can actually use what they bought. Partnerships that solve integration challenges directly impact your net revenue retention.
Avoid partnership theater: Having 500 "partners" listed on your website means nothing if only 10 have real integrations. Buyers see through partner pages that list every company with a logo. Focus on depth over breadth.
8. The Competitive Moat: Why Partnerships Are Strategic
Partnerships create three strategic advantages that apply universally:
Switching costs: Once identity resolution or data enrichment is deeply integrated into your platform instance, ripping it out means re-solving the foundational data problem from scratch. Integration creates stickiness across your entire tech stack.
For vendors: Deep integrations increase customer lifetime value and reduce churn.
For buyers: This creates predictability and stability in your tech stack, but also requires careful vendor selection upfront.
Network effects: The more partners in an ecosystem, the more valuable each becomes. Snowflake + data provider + Salesforce creates exponential value, not additive value. Each integration makes the others more powerful.
For vendors: Ecosystem network effects create winner-take-most dynamics in your favor. For buyers: Rich ecosystems give you more flexibility and future-proof your investment, but also increase complexity.
Shared innovation: With 63% of marketing leaders planning to invest in generative AI in the next 24 months partnerships accelerate AI adoption by combining platform capabilities with clean data foundations and domain expertise. The platform provides the AI interface; the data foundation provides the training data and context. Neither works without the other.
For vendors: Co-innovation partnerships position you at the forefront of emerging trends. For buyers: You get access to cutting-edge capabilities faster than if each vendor worked in isolation.
Final Takeaway: The Partnership Imperative
The convergence of data challenges across tactical, operational, and strategic levels suggests systemic issues in how organizations approach technology transformation. The solution isn't better standalone products—it's better partnership ecosystems built on solid data foundations.
For technology buyers: In 2025, your technology stack isn't measured by individual platforms, but by how well those platforms work together—and whether you have the data foundation to make them actually work. Evaluate vendors based on their partnership ecosystem, not just their feature list. Demand transparency about integration depth, not just partnership logos.
For technology vendors: Your competitive advantage increasingly depends on who you partner with and how deeply integrated those partnerships are. Customers buy solutions, not products. If your platform requires customers to source and integrate five other technologies to realize value, you'll lose to competitors who offer complete, pre-integrated solutions.
The winners—whether buyers or vendors—are those who understand that success lives at the intersection of platform and data foundation.
The New Marketing Tech Evaluation Framework
For Buyers:
Ask about partnerships before you ask about features
Evaluate data foundation capabilities before platform capabilities
Demand ecosystem validation (partner tiers, certifications, case studies)
Require proof of native integrations, not just "we have an API"
Conduct partnership reference checks (talk to customers using specific integrations)
Remember: no platform wins alone, and no platform works without clean data
For Vendors:
Build partnership programs with clear tiers, benefits, and requirements
Invest in native integrations with complementary solutions (not just APIs)
Create joint go-to-market programs with key partners (not just logo sharing)
Measure partnership success by customer outcomes, not just revenue share
Be transparent about integration depth and implementation timelines
Recognize: your platform's value depends on your ecosystem's strength
Just as consumers learned to look for "Intel Inside" when buying computers, technology buyers should look for proven data foundation partnerships when selecting MarTech platforms. And technology vendors should build partnerships that make "complete solution inside" a competitive advantage—regardless of which specific providers are in the ecosystem.
About the Author
Chad Stewart is an AAiP-certified AI Professional and founder of SmartThoughts, specializing in independent enterprise technology advisory. With 20+ years of experience in vendor-agnostic software selection and ecosystem analysis, he helps buyers make informed overall tech decisions and advises vendors on effective partnership strategies. His career encompasses numerous years in helping with technology decisions in associations, nonprofits, the government sector, as well as various industries, including oil and gas, commercial real estate, insurance, technology, healthcare, financial services, restaurants, and retail.
Sources and References
Gartner Research:
Gartner CMO Spend and Strategy Survey (2023)
Martech utilization dropped to 33% in 2023 (from 42% in 2022, 58% in 2020)
Organizations spend 25.4% of marketing budgets on technology
Source: Gartner Survey Finds 63% of Marketing Leaders Plan to Invest in Generative AI
Gartner Marketing Data & Analytics Survey (2022)
61% of CMOs lack in-house capabilities to deliver their strategy
Marketing data and analytics among top three capability gaps for CMOs
Source: Gartner Survey Reveals Marketing Data & Analytics and Martech Among Top Capability Gaps for CMOs
Gartner Martech Survey (2022)
Marketers utilize just 42% of their martech stack capabilities
Complexity, customer data challenges, and inflexible governance cited as impediments
Source: Gartner Survey Finds Marketers Utilize Just 42% of Their Martech Stack Capabilities
Gartner Tech Trends in Marketing (2024)
61% of marketing professionals experienced regret for technology purchases within 12-18 months
36% cited incompatibility with existing systems as the reason
Source: 2024 Tech Trends in Marketing: Insights to Attract and Retain Software Buyers
URL: https://www.gartner.com/en/digital-markets/insights/2024-tech-trends-in-marketing
Gartner AI Investment Survey (2023)
63% of marketing leaders planning to invest in generative AI in next 24 months
Source: Gartner Survey Finds 63% of Marketing Leaders Plan to Invest in Generative AI
Multi-Survey Analysis:
CMO Survey, MarTech State of Your Stack, and Gartner CEO Survey (2024-2025)
65.7% cite data integration as biggest martech management challenge (consistent across all three surveys)
Data value chain breakdown across tactical, operational, and strategic levels
Source: CMOs, CEOs and marketers are all struggling with martech data issues
URL: https://martech.org/cmos-ceos-and-marketers-are-all-struggling-with-martech-data-issues/
Industry Partnership Examples:
MarTech Platform Partnership Statements
Adobe Senior Director Partner Sales quote on identity capabilities integration
Salesforce EVP quote on data-first approach and single source-of-truth
Data platform Senior Director of Product Management quote on digital resilience
Source: Acxiom MarTech Services (representative example of platform partnership dynamics)
Additional Industry Research:
Forrester Global Martech Software Forecast (2023-2027)
Worldwide martech spending expected to surpass $215 billion by 2027
13.3% annual growth rate
Source: Global Martech Spending Will Reach $148 Billion In 2024
URL: https://www.forrester.com/blogs/global-martech-spending-will-reach-148-billion/
Data Integration Adoption Research (2025)
Organizations achieving 171-295% ROI on integration investments
80% of data governance initiatives predicted to fail without proper crisis management
Source: Data Integration Adoption Rates in Enterprises – 45 Statistics Every IT Leader Should Know in 2025
URL: https://www.integrate.io/blog/data-integration-adoption-rates-enterprises/
Disclaimer: This analysis represents independent research and advisory perspectives. All statistics, quotes, and research findings are sourced from publicly available research reports, vendor websites, and industry surveys published between 2022-2025. Vendor mentions are for illustrative purposes and do not constitute endorsements. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and vendor evaluation based on specific organizational requirements.