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As global martech spend races toward $215 billion, most CMOs still struggle to extract value from increasingly complex stacks. The CMO Council has teamed with MartechTribe to help companies optimize their marketing technology (martech) stacks through independent research, data-driven benchmarking, and customer-centric insight, to help integrators and businesses select, implement, and manage the right software tools to improve marketing efficiency and achieve goals.

Over the past decade, MartechTribe has run hundreds of benchmarking probes to extract “success insights” from a massive data warehouse of 15,000 customer technology solutions, over 1,600 real-world cross-industry stacks, and 4,500+ documented requirements, curated by 200+ experts across 30 countries.

To identify what truly drives value, MarTechTribe isolates the top 30 percent of companies within each industry, ranked by revenue per employee ratios based on annual reports. This removes subjectivity from performance claims. These “apex performers” show clear preferences for specific solution categories and requirement sets.

Instead of following opinions and qualitative research, MartechTribe identifies what apex performers actually do in real life, not just what they say. MartechTribe has analyzed what differentiates outperforming Martech stacks from the rest of the market. The data shows that context drives stack architecture, not generic best-tool rankings.

In the new AI-driven world, according to MarTechTribe, the winning stacks are not the most complex or complete. They are the fastest to validate value. Martech advantage is no longer determined by tool ownership, but by adaptability. It is determined by Speed2Value.

Enter the Apex Martech Matrix, a collaboration between the CMO Council and MartechTribe’s new data-driven framework and visual model that maps how martech investment, capability and maturity align to drive superior business outcomes.

Instead of relying on feature comparisons or analyst rankings, the Apex Martech Matrix is grounded in one of the industry’s most comprehensive independent datasets, reflecting real-world deployment patterns of top-performing organizations.

The dataset includes:

• 15,000+ martech solutions
• 1,600+ real-world martech stacks
• 4,500+ documented technology requirements
• Insights curated by 200+ experts across 30 countries

This benchmarking intelligence reveals consistent patterns in how top-performing organizations design, deploy and evolve their martech architectures. The findings show that performance is not driven by the number of tools deployed, but by how well capability coverage and operational maturity are aligned.

With insights from the Apex Martech Matrix, marketing leaders can build a business case grounded in proven value and move forward with confidence.

Offerings for the Apex Martech Matrix include:

State of Industry Report
Get a deep dive into the Apex Martech Matrix for your industry—retail, banking, consumer goods, technology, telecommunications, manufacturing, or professional services—revealing how top performers invest, build capability and drive results.
Price: $1,495

Full-Stack Scan
See exactly where you stand. Benchmark your martech stack against industry peers within the Apex Martech Matrix, identify capability and maturity gaps, and receive clear, prioritized recommendations on where to invest, optimize or eliminate spend across tools and skills.
Price: $4,500

Three-Tool Scan
Lock in on what matters most. Evaluate your performance across three selected martech tools, such as CRM, CDP, DAM or email, chosen from a comprehensive set of 49 domains. Benchmark against top performers to identify feature gaps and optimization opportunities.
Price: $13,500

Annual Subscription Bundle
Turn insight into an ongoing advantage. This annual package includes an industry report, full-stack scan and three-tool scan, providing ongoing benchmarking and a clear roadmap to optimize performance year over year.
Price: $14,950