Signs Your Marketing Tools Aren't Talking

Monday morning, 9:15

A client’s marketing manager opens her laptop. She logs into the ad platform, exports last week’s campaign data as a CSV. Opens the CRM, exports another CSV. Pastes both into a spreadsheet she built herself. Spends 45 minutes matching records, fixing formatting, and reconciling numbers that don’t quite add up.

She does this every Monday. She calls it “reporting.”

Her company pays for 12 marketing tools. Most of them were chosen because they’re “best in class” at something specific. None of them talk to each other properly.

---

Three signs your stack is broken

The export ritual

If someone on your team regularly exports data from one tool and pastes it into another, you don’t have a stack. You have a collection of tools and a human integration layer.

Every manual transfer introduces lag and errors. The data is always behind. The person doing it is always one sick day away from the whole process falling apart.

10-20 hours a week. That’s what I typically find teams spending on data janitoring. That’s a half-time hire doing copy-paste instead of marketing.

The number fight

You pull the same metric from two systems and get two different answers. This happens in every meeting. Nobody knows which number is right, so the team debates for twenty minutes, then makes the decision on gut feel anyway.

I sat in a quarterly review where the ad platform said 340 leads, the CRM said 287, and the spreadsheet said 312. Three systems, three truths, zero confidence. They ended up picking the middle number. That’s not data-driven. That’s negotiation.

The integration that was never finished

Someone started connecting your tools six months ago. Got it “working enough.” Then moved on to something else. It’s been limping along since, syncing some records but not others, throwing errors nobody sees, slowly accumulating data gaps.

The worst part: everyone assumes it’s working because nobody’s checking.

---

What it actually costs you

The direct time waste is obvious. But the invisible cost is bigger.

Think about the campaigns you scaled because the numbers looked good in one system but were wrong. The campaigns you killed because they looked bad in your spreadsheet but were actually converting in the CRM. Budget decisions made on data that was three days stale.

What could your team build if they stopped fighting their tools?

---

How to audit it

Before fixing anything, map what you have:

• Every tool: what it does, who owns it, what it costs, what data it holds
• Every connection: what data flows where, how (native, Zapier, manual, API), and how often
• Every gap: what should be connected but isn’t

This doesn’t need to be a project. A whiteboard and two hours will get you 80% of the picture.

---

Where to start fixing

Start with CRM ↔ marketing automation. Fix the spine, and everything else follows. That connection determines whether your leads, contacts, and campaigns share a single version of the truth or keep generating three different numbers in every meeting.

Simple Zapier connections and native integrations that just need configuring: you can do those yourself. Custom API work, complex data transformations, enterprise system connections? That’s where getting help saves you months of trial and error.

---

Want to diagram your stack together? Book an hour and we’ll map it on a call.