Your company just renewed its Marketo contract. Your HubSpot instance has seventeen workflows that nobody has touched in two years. Your CDP was supposed to unify your customer data. Three quarters in, your team is still exporting CSVs manually.

Sound familiar?

You are not alone. The average organization uses just 33% of its MarTech stack’s capabilities. That means two thirds of what companies are paying for every month is sitting idle. If you are only using a third of your stack, you are not just underutilizing tools. You are operating at a structural disadvantage. And yet, the default response to underperformance is still to buy more tools.

At Sloane Staffing, we talk to marketing leaders every day who are frustrated by this gap. Here is what we have learned: the utilization problem is not a technology problem, it’s a talent problem.

The Stack Did Not Fail You. Your Hiring Strategy Did.

When a MarTech investment underperforms, the instinct is to blame the platform. Maybe the tool is not intuitive enough. Maybe it was not the right fit. Maybe the vendor oversold it.

Sometimes that is true. More often, the issue is that organizations hire people to build the stack and nobody to maintain, improve, or teach it. The people who implemented the system moved on. The people left behind never got the training to use it well. New hires inherit a maze of half documented processes with no guide to help them navigate it.

A bad stack behaves a lot like an undertrained team. From the outside, both look the same. Slow delivery. Inconsistent customer journeys. Unexplained failures. A growing sense that the system is heavier than it should be.

What “Diagnostic Talent” Actually Means

The most in demand MarTech hire in 2026 is not someone who knows five platforms. It is someone who can look at what you have and tell you why it is not working.

We call this diagnostic talent, and it is rarer than it sounds. These are the people who can:

Audit an existing stack and distinguish between a tool problem and a process problem
Map what is actually happening in your data flows versus what is supposed to happen
Identify where workflows have drifted from their original logic
Train and enable the broader team rather than becoming the only person who understands the system
Communicate clearly to stakeholders about what is broken and what it is costing the business

This is not a new type of role. It is a new lens for evaluating candidates. A Marketing Operations Manager with diagnostic instincts is fundamentally different from one who simply keeps the lights on.

The Hidden Cost of Hiring for Build Over Maintain

For the past decade, MarTech hiring was dominated by builders. Companies needed people who could stand up automation platforms, configure integrations, and launch campaigns at scale.

That work still matters. But the ratio is shifting.

Most organizations already have a stack. What they are missing is the institutional knowledge and cross functional fluency to get real value from it. When you consistently hire builders without also investing in diagnostic talent, complexity builds quietly and compounds every year.

The cost is not just wasted software spending. It shows up in slower revenue growth, campaigns that never get optimized, segments that stay generic, and attribution models that nobody trusts. It shows up in data that exists but never gets used to make better decisions.

What to Do About It

If you are evaluating MarTech candidates right now, here are three shifts worth making:

Ask “tell me about a stack you inherited” instead of “tell me about a stack you built.” The answer reveals whether someone can operate in ambiguity.
Test for sensemaking, not just execution. Give candidates a scenario involving conflicting data or a broken workflow and see how they diagnose it.
Hire for literacy alongside skill. You want someone who can bring the rest of the team along, not someone who becomes a single point of failure.

The tools in your stack are probably good enough. The question is whether you have the people to unlock them. Most MarTech stacks do not need more technology. They need the right people to make sense of what is already there.

At Sloane Staffing, we specialize in placing Marketing Operations and MarTech talent with diagnostic instincts. These are people who can walk into a complex or underperforming stack, identify what is not working, and turn it into a system your team actually uses.