The approach that’s saved me from more disasters than I can count goes like this: “This is what I believe today, but I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow.”

Early in my career, I was too rigid to understand this power. I made decisions and defended them long past the point where they stopped working. The ability to pivot and admit that my first approach might not be right transformed how I work and the success of related outcomes. The bottom line? Being right today but unable to change tomorrow guarantees you’ll be wrong eventually.

Marketing technology demands this same flexibility. Organizations treat their martech stack like a 30-year marriage when they should treat it as a capability that improves through continuous optimization. Effective martech stack optimization recognizes that your buyer behavior changes, your business priorities shift, and your team’s skills develop. How you use your tools must evolve with these changes.

The organizations thriving today embrace this reality.

Flexibility without active evaluation isn’t agility, it’s drift. The difference between adapting strategically and getting swept along by change comes down to paying attention. These three practices keep you flexible while ensuring you’re steering toward your goals, not away from them.

Make quarterly reviews mean something

58% of organizations evaluate their martech stack annually, but here’s the problem: 13% rarely or never review their stack, leading to outdated tools and missed opportunities. Most reviews confirm existing choices instead of challenging them through strategic martech stack optimization.

Quarterly reviews work when they start with “what if we’re wrong?” Not as self-doubt, but as honest evaluation. Your email deliverability was 98% six months ago. Has it dropped as your sending volume increased? Your marketing automation had 47 workflows. Can anyone explain what all 200 current workflows do today? Your analytics dashboard loaded in 3 seconds. Why is it timing out now?

Add a standing agenda item to every quarterly review: “What assumptions are we defending that might not be true anymore?” This forces you to examine utilization rates, integration health and whether your tools still match how your team works. Data integration remains the biggest challenge at 65.7%, which means the platforms you thought worked together six months ago might be creating new silos today.

If you’re only confirming your choices work, you’re missing the point. The goal is finding what’s not working so you can fix it through better training, improved processes, or optimized configurations.

Map your stack to the buyer journey as it exists today

Only 28% of marketers are confident they understand their end-to-end buyer journey. Your martech stack might be perfectly configured for the buyer journey you documented two years ago. The problem? Your buyers stopped following that journey.

Take AI integration as an example. 95% of buyers anticipate using generative AI to support their decision process in the next 12 months. If your content strategy relies entirely on traditional keyword searches while buyers shift to AI-synthesized answers, you need to adapt your approach. The question is whether your content management system and analytics tools give you the data and flexibility to make that shift.

Build buyer journey evaluation into your quarterly reviews to support continuous stack improvement. Walk through how a prospect discovers you, what they want from you, how they evaluate your solution and make a purchase decision. At each step, ask whether your tools let you adapt to how buyers work today.

When buyer behavior shifts, your stack should allow you to pivot your approach. If your tools prevent you from meeting buyers where they are, that’s when you have a problem.

Optimize how you work before you change what you use

55% of CMOs say martech underperforms expectations. My work indicates that the problem isn’t the tools. It’s how organizations use them.

Your quarterly reviews should start with three questions, in this order, to guide your marketing technology optimization:

Are your people using the tools effectively? Most teams use 40% of their platform capabilities because nobody trained them on the other 60%. Before you blame the tool, ask whether your team knows what it can do. Schedule training. Document workflows. Share best practices between team members.

Do your processes match how the tools work? Your attribution model gives you partial visibility because your team manually exports data from three systems and combines them in spreadsheets. The tool can automate this, but your process doesn’t use that capability. Fix the process before you replace the tool.

Are you using the tools for what they’re built to do? Your marketing automation platform handles email workflows perfectly but struggles with complex lead scoring because you’re pushing it beyond its design. Optimize your scoring model to work within the platform’s strengths, or add a specialized tool for scoring instead of replacing your entire automation platform.

Replacement is the last option, not the first. But when optimization hits a wall—when tools genuinely can’t scale with your growth, when vendors stop investing in their platforms, when integrations break more than they work—you need the ability to move without rebuilding everything.

That’s why avoiding lock-in matters. When you evaluate tools, understand your exit options. Can you export your data in usable formats? Do integrations depend on proprietary APIs? These questions aren’t about planning to leave. They’re about maintaining your ability to optimize as your business changes.

The flexibility advantage

Rigid thinking traps you defending decisions that stopped working. Flexible thinking lets you optimize continuously as reality changes.

“This is what I believe today, but I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow” applies to your approach to martech stack optimization the same way it applies to strategy, tactics and execution. Being right today means nothing if you can’t adapt when tomorrow proves you wrong.

Start with your next quarterly review. Add “what if we’re wrong” to the agenda. Challenge one assumption about your current stack. Map one buyer journey to see whether your tools enable or block your approach. Look for optimization opportunities in how your team uses the platforms you already have. And when optimization isn’t the answer, get the big hammer.

The flexibility advantage doesn’t come from having the perfect stack. It comes from continuously improving how you use what you have through deliberate martech platform optimization, and knowing when optimization isn’t enough.

About the Author

Digital Mindshare LLC (Digital Mindshare), sponsor of How Marketing Technology Works®, is led by Gene De Libero, a Martech Healer with over three decades of experience helping organizations and leaders ‘Ride the Crest of Change.’ Digital Mindshare is a New York-based Marketing Technology Transformation® consultancy that helps clients optimize their martech investments, ensuring maximum returns and strategic alignment.