In a 2025 Qualtrics study of more than 700 senior marketing executives, two-thirds said they rely on gut feeling for critical decisions. Instinct isn’t inherently wrong. Leaders earn their roles on a track record of judgement that reads a situation faster than the analysis can catch up. In fact, our company name is anchored in the value of instinct.
But instinct is incomplete and trusting it without knowing what’s missing can be dangerous.
Here’s one place that it’s dangerous. And it’s alarming.
Only 49% of owned marketing technology is put to use, according to Gartner's 2025 Marketing Technology Survey.
In our experience working in scaled marketing organizations, the other 51% of martech not utilized can be directly tied to CMOs and the senior leaders not having full visibility into the platforms their marketing teams use. Even many individual contributors who use the tools each day don’t fully understand the full breath of functions their platforms provide.
Layering this marketing technology gap on top of another pair of findings brings the problem into sharper focus. According to McKinsey, only 27% of marketing leaders feel their organizations are equipped to handle the expanding scope of their role. And Gartner reports in its 2025 CMO Spend Survey that 59% of CMOs have insufficient budget to execute their strategy.
When fused, a lack of readiness and budget shortfalls show up in prioritization trade-offs that almost always push the hardest, most impactful work below the line.
So here’s the full picture.
CMOs and their senior leadership teams in scaled marketing organizations make their decisions about what to prioritize and where to spend based on gut feel in absence of objective data. And this is the default mode of decision making. Not the exception.
So it's not surprising that CEO confidence in marketing is slipping. McKinsey found that 70% of CEOs believe marketing's role is clearly defined and understood by the C-suite, down from 90%.
The daunting task of making decisions
With an ever-expanding field of responsibility, the breadth of decisions the marketing leadership team is expected to make in a given week is daunting. But not all decision categories carry equal weight.
Marketing technology alone accounts for roughly 22% of the marketing budget annually, according to Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey. Add the data, operations, teams, and governance that surround it, and the capability layer represents a substantial share of where marketing investment goes.
Which means, on a financial basis, a sizable percentage of prioritization decisions that marketing leaders are making on instinct in the absence of data is focused on getting more business value out of the capability stack.
Marketing capability transformations are expensive, multi-year investments. They’re one category of decisions where instinct often leads to the right action, but cannot direct the right steps to take.
The lack of cost-effective resources available to provide marketing leaders with an accurate understanding of their marketing capabilities maturity and the underlying marketing technology and data that supports them is the primary driver behind the afterblink.co assessment platform.
But availability does not immediately translate into use. Sometimes senior leaders would rather operate only on instinct, because having objective data in hand requires an ever bigger demand. That is, to evaluate and interpret what the data says then get everyone to agree on what to do about it. That’s effort that, frankly, is just easier not to do.
To help nudge leaders toward leveraging data-driven insight, here are six benefits of a marketing capabilities assessment built to help marketing leaders see their capabilities clearly, align the organization on what they're seeing, and decide where to invest.
Seeing current capabilities maturity clearly
Seeing clearly means having one objective read across every capability at once, a vantage no single leader holds from inside a siloed operation.
- Benefit #1: Exposing weakness hiding behind strength. An assessment that looks across the full spectrum of marketing capabilities and the operations beneath them can pinpoint where data isn't flowing, where governance is breaking down, and where handoffs are missing their agreed SLAs or introducing risk. Most of these problems stay invisible because the organization compensates for them, and that compensation reads as competence from the outside. It reveals where what looks like strength is overcompensation for a weakness somewhere else, which is the constraint a leader's instinct is most likely to pass over.
- Benefit #2: Finding the redundancy no single team can see. In scaled organizations, separate lines of business build and buy independently, which means the same capability often gets stood up several times over in incompatible ways. No individual team is positioned to notice, because each one sees only its own stack and its own roadmap. An assessment that spans the whole organization surfaces where effort and spend are duplicated, where tools overlap, and where two groups have solved the same problem in ways that now conflict. That view turns parallel, redundant builds into a single coordinated one, eliminating the duplicated cost no individual budget owner could see well enough to question.
Aligning the organization on what they’re seeing.
Aligning means getting every function to accept the same read of reality, which is far harder than producing the read, because each team arrives with its own version shaped by its own incentives.
- Benefit #3: Taking the politics out of the diagnosis. When functions disagree about what's working, the argument usually gets settled by tenure, volume, or whoever owns the most territory, and the result reflects influence more than evidence. An assessment replaces that with a structured standard no single team authored, so the conversation runs on a shared measure instead of competing opinions. With a neutral read on the table, cross-functional decisions that used to stall can move, and they move without anyone having to concede ground to a rival or spend political capital to be heard.
- Benefit #4: Setting honest expectations with the business. Sales, product, and finance carry their own assumptions about what marketing can deliver, and those assumptions usually run ahead of what the capabilities can actually support. An assessment gives marketing an objective account of what it can do well today and where it's still building, grounded in a standard the other functions can see for themselves. That account lets marketing commit to what it can deliver and push back on what it can't yet, before an inflated expectation hardens into a promise no one can keep.
Decide where to invest
Deciding means choosing what to fund and what to defer under a budget that won't cover everything, a choice instinct alone can't defend to a CFO.
- Benefit #5: Turning a long list of gaps into a sequence. Most marketing organizations know they have more to fix than any single year of budget can cover, but knowing the list isn't the same as knowing the order. An assessment ranks the gaps by impact and maps how they depend on one another, so the work runs in a sequence where each fix clears the way for the next instead of being redone later. That sequence concentrates limited budget on the moves that return the most, and it gives the CMO a fundable plan rather than a scattered set of competing requests.
- Benefit #6: Recovering value from technology already paid for. Only 49% of owned martech gets put to use, which means roughly half of a significant annual investment sits idle while the bills keep clearing. An assessment enables mapping utilization against what each tool costs and what it was bought to do, separating the capabilities producing value from the ones consuming budget. That informs what to consolidate, where to renegotiate, and where to retire tools outright, recovering spend before any new investment is even considered. It also equips the CMO to answer the return question on the existing stack.
What a new CMO needs on day one
There's one more scenario where the value of a marketing capabilities maturity assessment proves itself. It’s a scenario that every enterprise faces about every 4.1 years, according to the Spencer Stuart 2025 CMO Tenure Study.
The arrival of a new CMO.
A new CMO inherits an operation they didn't build and can't yet see. And they have to start making consequential calls before they've earned the relational or organizational credibility that lets them engage their teams on anything other than objective ground. Pushing on political or territorial lines too early stalls the conversation, because trust is not yet established inside the team or cross-functionally.
A maturity assessment enables a new CMO to shift the discussion onto the state of the organization and off the fact that a new person is running it, which matters most in the window when teams, especially the senior leaders reporting to the CMO, are most uneasy about what the change means for them.
The data carries the conversation. And that’s the through line across everything a marketing capabilities maturity assessment provides. It provides clarity to see the capabilities for what they are, a common standard to align the organization around that picture, and an objective basis to decide where the investment goes.
The value of gut-instinct that earned the senior leaders the role still matters. The assessment is what lets the next decision rest on evidence the whole organization can see, rather than on gut alone.
