Is your martech stack costing more time than it saves?

Companies keep buying technology to make sales and marketing teams more productive. Yet much of the workday still goes to finding information, updating systems, entering data, and handling administrative tasks.

Pipedrive’s 2026 “CRM trends report,” based on a survey of 1,000 sales and marketing professionals, shows how widespread the underlying problem is. Nearly three-quarters of respondents need at least two systems to get a complete view of a customer account, and 62% say disconnected tools cause them to miss actions, opportunities, or updates at least once a week.

Those findings expose a cost that’s easy to miss when evaluating martech. A tool can perform its intended job perfectly and still make the overall workflow worse. Every additional system can create another place to look for information, another record to update, and another handoff where context can get lost.

Your employees are the integration layer

Only 21% of respondents can get a complete customer view from a single system. For everyone else, understanding a customer means piecing together information from multiple places.

People end up doing the work the stack doesn’t. They move between applications, find missing information, update records, and carry context from one system to another.

That creates consequences beyond inconvenience. Sixty-two percent of respondents say disconnected tools cause missed actions, opportunities, or updates at least once a week. For 42%, it happens every day.

Marketers need to reevaluate how they look at their stack. Instead of focusing on what each application does, look at what happens between applications. How many systems does someone open to understand a customer? Where does information need to be copied or re-entered? Where does someone have to remember to update another system?

The answers reveal work that individual product demos and ROI calculations can easily overlook.

Administrative work is part of the technology cost

Software prices are visible. The employee time required to operate the stack usually isn’t.

More than half of respondents spend at least six hours a week on manual data entry, system updates, and administrative tasks. Forty-two percent spend at least 40% of their working day on work that doesn’t directly generate revenue.

The report also found a striking difference between two common activities. Thirty-eight percent of respondents list logging calls, emails, or meetings among their most frequent weekly tasks, compared with 11% who list advancing prospect conversations and closing deals.

That doesn’t mean every administrative task is unnecessary. Customer records need to be maintained, activities need to be captured, and teams need reliable data. Thus, maintaining the system consumes time that the system was supposed to give back.

Marketers evaluating technology should account for that labor. A tool that saves time in one part of a process while requiring manual updates elsewhere can simply shift the work around.

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Automation should make work disappear

The report’s AI findings show where automation can help. Respondents already use AI for meeting scheduling, task and reminder creation, follow-up emails, data entry, and prospect research. Among those using AI in their CRM, 45% say it saves meaningful time.

But AI is only one way to address the larger problem. Integration, workflow automation, better data architecture, and eliminating redundant applications can all reduce the manual work created by a fragmented stack.

The useful measure is what disappears. Does a change eliminate duplicate data entry? Does customer context automatically follow someone, rather than requiring another lookup? Can an update in one system trigger the next action without someone moving information between applications?

Pipedrive’s 2026 “CRM trends report” can be downloaded here. (No registration required)