3 critical truths about DXP platform selection

I’ve seen it too many times. The CMO leans back, impressed by the digital experience platform (DXP) vendor demo. The marketing team nods along to promises of omnichannel this and data-driven that. Everyone walks out buzzing about their digital future.

But they don’t take the advice they’ve paid me to provide. Twelve months later, I’m back, sitting around that conference room table with the same folks. They’ve burned through seven figures. They’re using maybe 20% of what they bought. The fancy personalization engine collects dust. Integration nightmares keep everyone up at night. Now, the CFO wants answers about that massive investment, which has seemingly nothing to show.

It’s a recurring real-world nightmare. Marketing organizations buy on features but fail on fundamentals. After decades of watching these expensive mistakes, I’ve boiled it down to three hard truths about DXP purchases that you’ll never hear in those glossy sales pitches.

Truth 1: Tomorrow will break today’s perfect solution

Think back to early 2020. You had a digital strategy, right? Then, COVID-19 blindsided everyone. Suddenly, your customers wanted totally different things through completely different channels. Some companies pivoted fast. Others struggled to force outdated platforms to do things they weren’t built for.

The painful lesson? Buying martech for today’s problems guarantees tomorrow’s headaches.

The most innovative companies I work with now run the “future shock test” — not how well a platform solves today’s problems, but how quickly it can adapt when the market throws a curveball. And make no mistake, another curveball is always coming.

The change resilience test

When evaluating potential platforms, ask these critical questions:

• Reconfiguration speed: If consumer behavior fundamentally changes, how quickly can we reconfigure this platform without developer intervention?
• Channel flexibility: When new channels emerge, will integration be straightforward or require months of custom development?
• Regulatory adaptability: Can the platform adapt without rebuilding core functionality if privacy regulations change dramatically?
• Feature evolution: Does the platform have a history of adapting quickly to market shifts or does it lag behind emerging trends?

I saw this happen in real time when a retail client with a rigid platform spent $2.2 million rebuilding their martech stack from scratch in 2020. Their competitor, who’d chosen a more modular approach despite having fewer “cool features,” simply reconfigured what they had and beat them to market by nine months. That’s not just lost technology investment — that’s real market share down the drain.

Your next platform decision boils down to this: Can you turn on a dime when the rules suddenly change? Because they will. I’ve lived through enough market disruptions to guarantee that.

Dig deeper: Digital experience platforms: 4 building blocks to success

Truth 2: Your team is already underwater

Let’s have that awkward conversation nobody wants to have during DXP sales meetings: your team is drowning and nobody’s throwing life preservers.

Last quarter, I sat with a healthcare CMO reviewing their team bandwidth. Their dev resources spent 78% of all hours just keeping existing platforms running. Their content team? They were buried under routine updates 65% of the time. Meanwhile, leadership was eyeing a DXP implementation that the vendor swore would take “just months.”

We crunched the real numbers. With their available hours, they’d need three years to implement what the vendor promised in six months. And when we dug deeper, we found this wasn’t unusual. But you knew that already, didn’t you?

Looking at dozens of similar implementations, we spotted the same pattern everywhere. Companies get the basic website live, then the complicated stuff — the schmancy personalization and omnichannel orchestration that justified that enterprise price tag? It sits unused. Forever.

Bandwidth reality check

Before signing your next martech contract, honestly assess these team capacity indicators:

• How long does it currently take to make basic updates to existing platforms?
• What percentage of their time goes to maintenance rather than new initiatives?
• How many partially implemented technologies already sit in your stack?
• How dependent are you on external resources for routine platform operations?
• What’s your current backlog of dev requests and how long has it been growing?

If your team struggles to maintain current systems, they’ll collapse under complex new ones. Regardless of capabilities, no platform delivers value when teams lack time to implement it.

“We’ll hire consultants,” you say. Sure. But who manages those consultants? Who takes ownership when they leave? Who expands functionality six months later? Your already-maxed-out team.

Dig deeper: Reinventing the digital experience platform

Truth 3: Platform bloat is the enemy of innovation

Every vendor roadmap I’ve ever seen points one way: More. 

• More buttons. 
• More modules. 
• More checkboxes for that RFP spreadsheet.

After a few decades of building digital platforms, I’ve learned the opposite is true. The platforms that deliver? They remove stuff constantly.

The best vendors ruthlessly kill underperforming features. They rip out bloated code. They push back on customer requests that would create maintenance nightmares. They occasionally piss people off by deprecating the thing someone somewhere still uses.

At your next vendor meeting, ask: “What major feature have you killed in the last year?” You’ll instantly separate contenders from pretenders. Most sales reps freeze like deer in headlights. The worst ones brag about never removing anything, as if digital hoarding deserves a medal. The vendors you want? They’ll immediately give examples and explain how they support customers through transitions.

I watched this exact dynamic play out during privacy regulation rollouts. A financial client with a legacy platform spent 18 months and nearly $2 million making basic compliance changes because everything was interconnected spaghetti code. Meanwhile, their competitor was compliant in 11 weeks because their cleaner architecture could adapt without touching decade-old abandoned features.

Dig deeper: The truth behind MACH-based DXP — Benefits, risks and key considerations

Breaking through martech vendor smoke screens

After suffering through hundreds of vendor demos in my career (no, that’s not hyperbole), I’ve developed a few tactics that cut straight through the BS.

Forget feature lists. Demand adoption metrics. “What percentage of your customers still use your personalization engine 12 months after purchase?” That number tells you everything a slick demo can’t.

When they start with vague timelines about implementation “phases,” stop them cold. “Show me the project plan from your last three clients in my industry.” That document reveals the painful truth their salespeople won’t.

Year-one pricing is a trap. Push for the full three-year projection with everything included — integration costs, training, maintenance, the works. Year two is where the bloodletting typically starts.

Questions that make vendors sweat

To get beyond polished presentations, try these questions:

• After two years, what percentage of your customers actively use more than half of your platform’s capabilities?
• Show me a comprehensive three-year TCO model, including all integration, support, and operational costs for an organization of our size.
• Walk me through your content migration process if we decide to switch platforms.
• What features have you deprecated in the past three years and how did you manage that transition for customers?
• Tell me about your three most challenging customer implementations and what went wrong.”

Most importantly, talk to former customers, not just current references. Understanding why organizations abandon platforms provides critical insights that no glossy case study will reveal.

Getting it right

Sounds bleak? Maybe. But I’ve pulled plenty of companies back from the DXP cliff. Here’s what works:

Forget the three-year fantasy. What will your team implement this year with the people and hours you have? Buy for that reality. I had a client slash their initial scope by 60% and they still delivered more value than competitors who bit off too much.

Budget realism saves careers. Double whatever number you think the implementation will cost. Seriously. I’ve rescued so many “we can do it ourselves” train wrecks that I have a standard recovery playbook. One manufacturing client finally admitted they needed help after burning nine months and getting nowhere. Don’t be that call I get.

Chunk it down. My most successful clients build their digital experience piece by piece, not all at once. A retail client added one major capability per quarter — starting with the customer-facing stuff that drives revenue. Eighteen months later, they’ve lapped competitors still configuring their “all-in-one” platforms.

Brutal honesty beats wishful thinking every time. The platform you can implement beats the perfect one that sits unused. A healthcare client chose what they called a “B+ platform with A+ implementability” over the analyst-recommended market leader. Two years later, they outperform peers who went with the “superior” solution.

The platform choices you make now will either create flexibility or constraints for years. Pick martech that bends when the market throws curveballs — and that matches your team’s actual abilities and bandwidth. Features gather dust. Adaptability builds business.