CMOs, CEOs and marketers are all struggling with martech data issues

Three major surveys released between Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 offer distinct yet complementary views on martech and organizational readiness: 

• The CMO Survey (Duke University). 
• MarTech’s State of Your Stack Survey.
• Gartner’s CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey. 

Despite differences in methodology and audience, a cross-analysis reveals troubling patterns in how organizations navigate technology transformation.

Inside the surveys: Audiences, methods and focus areas

• The CMO Survey: 281 U.S. marketing leaders, focusing on marketing performance and budget allocation.
• MarTech State of Your Stack: 169 marketing and marketing operations professionals examining technology tool usage and challenges.
• Gartner CEO Survey: 456 global C-suite executives, measuring leadership perceptions of organizational AI readiness.

Despite fundamental differences in methodology, audience and geographic scope, these surveys offer insights that help reveal organizational patterns.

Dig deeper: 4 ways to correct bad data and improve your AI

Shared insight: Data challenges persist across all organizational levels

Perhaps the most striking finding is the universal reporting of data-related challenges:

• CMO Survey: 65.7% cite data integration as their biggest martech management challenge.
• MarTech Survey: 65.7% identify data integration as the top stack management issue.
• Gartner Survey: CEOs highlight the inability to calculate value or outcomes as a primary AI deployment barrier.

This insight suggests that most organizations remain in the early stages of data maturity despite years of digital transformation initiatives. The persistence of basic data integration problems across tactical (marketing execution), operational (technology management) and strategic (business measurement) levels indicates systemic rather than isolated challenges.

That may point to what might be called a data value chain breakdown:

• Technology teams struggle with system integration.
• Marketing teams can’t execute unified campaigns.
• Leadership can’t measure business outcomes.

These findings suggest that many organizations invest in martech tools without first addressing foundational needs such as data architecture, governance and literacy. As a result, success in martech appears to depend less on the tools themselves and more on an organization’s ability to build the right capabilities — coordination mechanisms, cross-functional alignment and data fluency among them.

Dig deeper: These are the challenges and barriers impacting your martech stack

How marketers can address these critical issues

Marketing professionals are uniquely positioned to drive solutions to these systemic problems. Here’s how to help leadership in addressing each major challenge.

Become data integration advocates

• Map your customer journey across all touchpoints and identify where data breaks occur.
• Document specific integration pain points with concrete business impact examples.
• Create compelling business cases for data integration investments by quantifying lost opportunities.

Lead cross-functional data initiatives

• Establish regular data health check meetings with IT/Ops, sales and customer service teams.
• Develop shared data dictionaries to ensure consistent terminology across departments.

Build internal data literacy

• Develop basic data analysis skills within your marketing team.
• Create data storytelling capabilities to communicate insights effectively to leadership.
• Establish data quality standards and monitoring processes for marketing-owned data.

Establish martech governance

• Create a formal martech evaluation process before purchasing any new tool.
• Develop technology roadmaps that align with business objectives rather than tactical needs.
• Institute regular stack audits to identify redundant or underutilized tools.

Bridge the IT/ops-marketing gap

• Participate actively in IT planning sessions and budget discussions.
• Translate marketing needs into technical requirements that IT can understand and prioritize.
• Develop relationships with IT leadership to improve collaboration and mutual understanding.

Drive organizational integration

• Map all marketing tools and their connections to create visibility into integration complexity.
• Advocate for API-first tool selection to ensure future integration possibilities.
• Lead pilot programs that demonstrate successful cross-departmental tool integration.

Dig deeper: The marketer’s guide to conquering data quality issues

Important caveats: Why cross-survey analysis has limitations

These surveys employ fundamentally different methodologies:

• Sample populations: U.S. marketing leaders vs. global martech professionals vs. international C-suite executives.
• Question frameworks: Budget allocation vs. tool usage vs. strategic perception.
• Response mechanisms: Different scales and measurement approaches.

Terms like data integration and technology investment may mean different things to different respondent groups, potentially creating false equivalencies in cross-survey comparison.

While these surveys cannot be directly compared, they reveal consistent patterns that warrant attention. The convergence around data challenges and coordination gaps suggests systemic issues in how organizations approach technology transformation.

However, these insights should be interpreted cautiously. For marketers specifically, the key questions become:

• Are you positioned as a strategic technology partner or just a tool user?
• Do you have the skills and authority to drive cross-functional technology initiatives?
• Are you measuring and communicating the business impact of martech investments?

The actual value of these surveys lies less in their findings and more in what they reveal: a need for deeper organizational assessment of technology management maturity. In a fast-moving tech landscape, understanding internal dynamics is often more critical than understanding the tools themselves. 

Marketers who can bridge the gap between tech capabilities and business outcomes have a growing opportunity to lead, not just as tool users but as strategists driving the organizational capabilities these surveys show are missing.

Dig deeper: Does your marketing team have a martech problem or a data problem?