We are paying for twenty plus GTM tools and I cannot justify half of them. How do I cut the stack?
Run a real audit before renewal season, not during it. For each tool write down four things: licence cost, actual weekly active users, which integrations depend on it, and the one decision or workflow that breaks if it disappears. Tools that fail the last question go, regardless of how much the team likes them. The number people underestimate is maintenance: a tool that needs several hours a week of admin costs far more than its invoice, so the true cost is usually two to three times the subscription. Aim for one platform per functional layer (data, signals, execution, analytics) rather than a best of breed point solution for every task, because every extra sync is another place your numbers can quietly diverge.
Go deeper
4 resources, 4 link-checked.
📄 Article
✓ Link checkedFreeIntermediate
Gives you a scoring framework for deciding which tools survive the next renewal, and argues convincingly that four functional layers is enough. Read it with a spreadsheet of your current contracts open.
An eight step sequence for cleaning a CRM that correctly puts validation at the point of entry before the backfill, which is the order most first ops hires get wrong.
The clearest single document on what a revenue data model should look like end to end, from lead through renewal and expansion. It is the vocabulary most modern RevOps teams have quietly standardised on.
Exactly the exercise the answer describes, run live by operators who have done it: how they scored each tool, what they cut, and which cuts they regretted. The regret list is the part you cannot get from a checklist.
