For something that dominates so much of a marketer’s day-to-day, there’s no denying that martech is something of a known unknown for many teams.

Our 2025 Career & Salary Survey showed more than two-fifths of marketers (42.8%) says there is a lack of understanding around martech in their organisation – something compounded by the 59.4% who see a significant data and analytics skills gap.

When you consider as well the quarter of marketers (25.4%) who believe that an understanding of martech is an underrated skill in the business and the baffling 6% who believe an understanding of the tools they use on a daily basis is an overrated skill, it paints a challenging picture for the industry.

When you add in the three-quarters of marketers (75.8%) who have identified an AI skills gap in their business – something that will only become more prevalent as AI tools get more deeply embedded into the martech stack – you can see there’s a huge problem. Marketers don’t seem to understand the technology they are using beyond a surface level.

These figures don’t come as much of a surprise to Barney O’Kelly, head of solutions and product marketing at global consultancy AlixPartners, who believes marketers haven’t always “done enough to educate themselves” about technology.

“It’s like a little microcosm of businesses in general, where technology belongs to the technological people and everybody else does other things,” he tells Marketing Week.

He points to the struggles marketers have had in getting to grips with AI as an example of the reticence many have when it comes to understanding something new.

“You get a lot of people going, I don’t really understand how to use it,” he says. “But it’s like, well, it’s there. Go onto the internet and it’s there. And if you’re sufficiently curious, AI is the only piece of technology that’s emerging where you can use it to teach you how to use it.”

Consultant and martech specialist Victoria Lennon sees a similar thing but notes it’s not that marketers are inherently against learning how to use marketing technology – but more they simply don’t have the time to do so effectively.

“The reality is that for most marketers it’s not their main focus,” she says. “They may be business development experts. They might be an expert in another field. Finding the time, when you’re quite busy day-to-day, and all the demands that you will get from your business, that’s really difficult.”

Companies underestimate the amount of time it takes people to learn and use a new system.

Victoria Lennon

Lennon points out that in larger businesses you could look to “centralise” some of the tech responsibilities and allow those who aren’t as advanced to get on by without those skills.

But in SMEs and smaller businesses, it is more likely that your marketing function will be a “jack of all trades” and it’s harder for them to get beyond a “surface level” knowledge of a new tool when they have so much else going on.

It means that when smaller businesses make a decision over a tech platform to use they need to be stringent about training. “We’re buying this technology. Are we making it the backbone of our function? And if we are, then everyone needs to be trained to this standard and agreeing that standard,” says Lennon.

‘Want is different from need’: Are marketers drowning in their tech stack?

Training pains

Training is, of course, the answer to this problem. It usually is. But it is more complicated in this space than it might be to solve a skills gap in a different area of the function. For one, there’s a lot of marketing technology out there – the first article in this series details that challenge, and while a CRM is ultimately a CRM, the intricacies and integrations that operate out of it may be completely alien for someone trained on a different platform.

David Lawrence is head of digital marketing and brand at law firm Travers Smith and, for him, the biggest challenge when it comes to dealing with skills gaps in his team is the steady rotation of new people joining the business and subject matter experts moving on.

“It becomes like a moveable feast,” he tells Marketing Week. “You almost feel like you can never quite get on top of it.”

This is doubly hard when the tech you are training staff on has been an established part of the business for quite some time. “It’s harder work, almost, to maintain the ongoing training piece than that initial launch,” he explains. “That can be why it can almost fall away, because people don’t necessarily appreciate that it’s really important to have and update your training.”

AI is the only piece of technology that’s emerging where you can use it to teach you how to use it.

Barney O’Kelly, AlixPartners

This is ultimately a change management problem and it’s something that Lennon believes is often ignored across the marketing industry – particularly when it comes to implementing a new martech platform. You can bring in a new system, she says, and do some basic training on it in that moment and there’s a tendency to think “job done” but that is rarely the case.

Instead, she explains, there needs to be a “change of mindset” and a “change of process” and to not get bogged down in the system but rather to consider how it is going to help people work and “understanding and buying into” the new system.

“Companies underestimate the amount of time it takes people to learn and use a new system,” she says. “You can’t just send them along to a one hour training session and think, ‘Oh well, that’s it. Job done.’ It’s a constant programme over six and 12 months of making sure and checking in that people are using it, if they need refresher sessions, and then thinking about new people coming in as well. Often that induction piece gets left behind.”

And when it comes down to it – sometimes you need to pick your battles in your team and focus on those who are going to be most amenable to learning a new skill. Keith Mitchell is the founder of digital marketing consultancy Chiefs Digital Media and he believes looking at the “willing” of individuals to become a more data-driven marketer is key.

“We talk a lot about the colours camp and the numbers camp,” he explains. “You go into some organisations and you can see it’s a very creative team, and while, yes, you’ve got to educate and inform, realistically there’s not really the desire to learn that technical element.”

Similar to Lennon, he believes larger organisations can mitigate these problems by creating separate functions to own martech, but in an SME they might not have the “CTO or the tech and dev team” to help bridge some of these skills gaps. “It’s skill versus will and there’s sometimes a lot of political challenges to navigate regarding who owns it.”

Vendor value

While much of the impetus for training and upskilling has to fall on marketing teams, there is a more than reasonable argument that vendors have a greater role to play in this space.

We’ll explore the impact vendors can have in improving the relationship between marketers and their martech stack in a later feature – but the impact they can have on training is apparent.

Lawrence notes how he has set up induction training for any new starter on the brand’s CRM – as well as training for those marketing tech tools that any given employee would need – but he would love to see extended support from the vendor beyond the initial band of training.

“There’s probably a place for a wider support from the vendor around more trainings, training guides and things like that,” he says. “ Something more than just a ‘how to’ page or something similar that doesn’t really live and breathe what people are trying to do.”

O’Kelly agrees that marketers need to demand more from their software partners and to ensure the relationship is something that lives beyond that initial transaction so the team always has access to support when they run into problems.

“One area where I have historically spent more money than maybe I needed to was to ensure I got really good customer success support from a software vendor,” he says.

“And I don’t just mean, ‘it’s broken, can you fix it’, but people who have skin in the game to help you drive adoption, who understand the friction points in clients similar to my own organisation, and are invested in making this work.”

As part of Marketing Week’s Unpack the Stack series we will be exploring the challenges and opportunities of martech. We have already explored the vast martech landscape and in the coming weeks we will be looking at how to get the best out of the tech marketers already have, as well as digging into why marketers’ tech stacks have got out of hand and what can be done about it.