Why martech ROI should include work between tools

Your martech ROI may be missing the cost between the tools

A martech application can meet its ROI target while making the wider workflow more expensive to operate. Employees may still search across systems, copy data, update multiple records, and carry customer context from one application to another. That work consumes paid employee time. Measuring the end-to-end workflow makes these costs visible alongside license costs and application-level gains.

Pipedrive’s 2026 “CRM trends report,” based on a survey of 1,000 sales and marketing professionals, says only 21% of respondents get a complete customer view from a single system. Pipedrive sells CRM software and has a commercial interest in demand for CRM, integration, automation, and AI capabilities. Its findings are useful evidence, but executives should consider that commercial position when assessing its claims.

Employees have become the integration layer

When customer information is spread across applications, people may have to reconstruct the view they need before acting. A salesperson might leave one system to find account information in another, return to update a record, then carry relevant context into the application used for the next step. Each action may take little time. Repeated across customers and employees, those actions become operating cost.

Pipedrive reports that more than half of respondents spend at least six hours per week on manual data entry, system updates, and administration. These tasks consume employee capacity even when each application performs as designed. A workflow that depends on repeated human updates remains partly manual even when every application in it is digital.

Pipedrive also reports that 42% of respondents spend at least 40% of their working day on work that does not directly generate revenue. That category can include necessary work, so the figure does not show how much time is waste. It does give executives a reason to examine how employee capacity is distributed across a workflow before treating software adoption as evidence of greater sales or marketing capacity.

Fragmentation can also affect execution. Pipedrive says 43% of respondents report that disconnected tools cause missed actions, opportunities, or updates every day. A missed update can leave the next employee or system working with incomplete information. The cost can include delayed or incomplete decisions as well as time spent moving between applications.

The survey’s single-system finding points to the underlying mechanism. When an employee cannot get a complete customer view in one place, a person or automated process must assemble the required context. If systems do not exchange the information a workflow needs, employees can end up doing the integration through lookups, re-entry, updates, and memory. That work belongs in the operating model for the workflow.

Pipedrive further reports that 38% of respondents list logging calls, emails, or meetings among their most frequent weekly tasks, while 11% list advancing prospect conversations and closing deals. These figures describe reported task frequency and do not establish that logging activity reduces selling activity. They can still prompt leaders to inspect the mix of work employees perform.

A workflow review makes this work concrete. Start with a real customer process and count how many applications an employee must open to understand the account. Identify where information must be copied or entered again, and where an update depends on someone remembering another step. These handoffs expose employee effort that a metric inside one application can miss.

A useful tool can still make the overall workflow worse

An application can create a local benefit while generating work elsewhere in the process. Suppose a tool shortens one sales or marketing task but requires employees to reconcile records with another system afterward. Reconciliation consumes some of the time saved. Copying customer context into another application adds more labor downstream.

License cost captures one part of stack economics. Employee time spent finding records, entering the same information again, transferring context, and maintaining parallel data also has an operating cost. An end-to-end workflow boundary shows where work is created, removed, or shifted. It lets executives compare a product’s local benefit with the employee effort required around it.

This boundary matters during procurement and renewals. Adoption or a measured time saving inside one interface cannot establish the total workload unless the surrounding steps are measured too. Leaders can trace what employees do immediately before and after using a product, then identify the manual work it creates or removes. That connects an application decision to the operating result of the full process.

Preserve necessary information work

Administrative activity can create business value. Customer records need to remain accurate, activities need to be captured, and teams need reliable information for decisions and follow-up. Removing useful information work can reduce data quality or weaken operational controls. The target is work created by avoidable system boundaries.

Recording a new piece of customer information once may be necessary. Entering the same information again because another application cannot receive it automatically is separate labor. Researching new customer context may also be useful, while repeatedly reconstructing context already stored elsewhere signals a handoff problem. This distinction gives executives a more precise target for integration and automation.

The same distinction changes how leaders should interpret administration time. Some tasks preserve useful information or provide necessary control. Others exist because data and actions cannot move reliably between systems. Executives should separate those categories before estimating recoverable capacity. Automation creates measurable operating value when a specific manual step disappears while required information quality and controls remain intact.

Measure automation by the work that actually disappears

Evaluate an automation change across the workflow before and after implementation. Map the manual steps required today, then identify which ones cease to require employee effort after the change. If an employee saves time in one interface but must validate, transfer, correct, or re-enter the output elsewhere, some work has moved downstream. Measuring those downstream steps prevents a local time saving from being mistaken for an end-to-end gain.

The same method applies to AI, integration projects, workflow automation, data architecture changes, application rationalization, and renewals. For each change, identify which repeated lookup disappears, which duplicate entry stops, and which update can move automatically to the next required system or action. Then measure the human work that remains because it contributes judgment, data quality, or necessary control. This gives executives a common decision boundary across different technology investments.

Pipedrive reports that respondents already use AI for meeting scheduling, task and reminder creation, follow-up emails, data entry, and prospect research. Among respondents using AI in their CRM, 45% reportedly say it saves “meaningful time.” The phrase describes a perceived benefit but does not quantify the employee hours eliminated from an end-to-end workflow.

For an AI investment, examine what happens after the output is produced. If AI generates a follow-up email while the employee still finds context across systems and updates records manually, those steps remain in the workload. If automation can create the next task, carry forward the required customer context, and update the appropriate records while preserving necessary controls, it can remove more employee effort. The measurable outcome is the change in specific manual activities.

Integration and data architecture can be evaluated the same way. Passing information automatically between systems can eliminate repeated entry and context transfer while employees continue using several specialized applications. Application rationalization can remove work when redundant systems require employees to maintain duplicate information. For the ROI calculation, the key variable is the amount and type of employee work the implementation changes.

Executives can test this with important workflows before making a purchase, renewal, or removal decision. Record the manual steps and employee time from the beginning of the workflow to the end, implement the proposed change, then repeat the measurement. Include validation, correction, data transfer, and downstream updates in both measurements. The difference shows whether the investment removes avoidable labor while preserving the information and controls the business requires.

Key executive takeaways

• Measure work between tools: Martech ROI can miss the employee time spent searching systems, re-entering data, and transferring customer context. Technology owners can measure end-to-end workflows to capture these operating costs alongside licenses and application-level gains.
• Assess the whole workflow: A tool can improve one task while creating reconciliation or duplicate work elsewhere. Procurement and technology teams can measure the steps immediately before and after each application to determine its full impact on employee capacity.
• Preserve valuable information work: Some administrative work maintains data quality, customer records, and operational controls. Process owners can distinguish necessary information work from repeated entry, lookups, and updates created by system boundaries.
• Measure the work automation removes: Automation, AI, integration, and application rationalization create measurable capacity when specific manual steps disappear across the workflow. Technology teams can compare before-and-after employee time, including validation, correction, data transfer, and downstream updates.