Marketing Tech Debt Audit: Identify Hidden Friction Points
Marketing LeadershipintermediateClaude 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o. Claude excels at structured analysis and identifying systemic patterns; GPT-4o is faster for large team descriptions. Both handle multi-section audits well.
When to Use This Prompt
Use this prompt when you're preparing for a marketing tech or operations audit, planning an AI implementation roadmap, or justifying a process improvement initiative to leadership. It's especially valuable before investing in new tools or AI pilots—it ensures you're solving real bottlenecks, not adding more complexity.
The Prompt
You are a marketing operations strategist helping a CMO audit operational and technology debt across their marketing function.
## Context
Operational debt—coordination overhead, tool sprawl, approval delays, broken handoffs, and fuzzy ownership—silently drains team capacity and blocks AI implementation. Before adding new tools or AI, we need to identify where time is leaking and revenue is at stake.
## Your Task
Analyze the marketing function described below and produce a prioritized tech debt audit that surfaces:
1. **Friction Points**: Workflows where coordination, approvals, or tool switching consume >20% of cycle time
2. **Revenue Impact**: Which bottlenecks directly delay pipeline contribution, campaign launch, or customer engagement
3. **Tool Sprawl**: Redundant or underutilized platforms creating context-switching tax
4. **Ownership Gaps**: Processes where accountability is unclear, causing rework or delays
5. **Quick Wins**: Low-effort fixes that free up 5+ hours/week per team member
## Marketing Function Details
**Team Size**: [NUMBER] people
**Current Tools**: [LIST: e.g., HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, Slack, Asana, Google Workspace, etc.]
**Key Workflows**: [DESCRIBE: e.g., campaign approval process, lead scoring, content production, reporting, customer data sync]
**Pain Points (if known)**: [DESCRIBE: e.g., "Campaign launches take 3 weeks," "Sales and marketing data misaligned," "Manual reporting takes 2 days/week"]
**Team Sentiment**: [DESCRIBE: e.g., "Overwhelmed by tools," "Approval bottlenecks," "Unclear ownership"]
## Output Format
Provide a structured audit with:
- **Top 3 Tech Debt Issues** (ranked by time cost × revenue impact)
- **For Each Issue**: Root cause, team hours lost weekly, revenue risk, and one quick-win fix
- **Tool Rationalization**: Which tools are redundant or underutilized
- **Ownership Clarity**: Recommended process owner for each critical workflow
- **AI Readiness**: Which workflows are blocked by debt and would benefit most from AI once debt is cleared
## Tone
Be direct and specific. Avoid generic advice. Focus on measurable time loss and revenue impact.
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Tips for Best Results
- 1.Fill in specific tool names and workflow descriptions—generic inputs produce generic audits. The more detail on current pain, the more actionable the output.
- 2.Include actual time estimates if you have them (e.g., 'campaign approval takes 10 days'). This anchors the audit in reality and makes ROI calculations credible.
- 3.Ask the prompt to rank issues by 'time cost × revenue impact,' not just time. A 2-hour bottleneck that blocks a $500K pipeline opportunity ranks higher than a 5-hour admin task.
- 4.Use the audit output as a stakeholder document. Share the 'quick wins' section with your team to build momentum before tackling structural changes or new AI tools.
Example Output
## Marketing Tech Debt Audit: [Company Name]
### Top 3 Tech Debt Issues
**1. Campaign Approval Bottleneck (Estimated 8 hours/week lost)**
- **Root Cause**: Campaign briefs move between Asana, email, and Slack. Approval chain unclear—CMO, legal, and brand all review separately, causing 5-7 day delays.
- **Revenue Risk**: High. Campaign launches delayed by 1-2 weeks, missing market windows and compressing execution time.
- **Quick Win**: Consolidate approval workflow in Asana with clear roles (CMO approves creative, legal approves claims, brand spot-checks). Set 48-hour SLA per reviewer.
- **Weekly Hours Freed**: 6-8 hours
**2. Sales-Marketing Data Misalignment (Estimated 6 hours/week lost)**
- **Root Cause**: Lead scoring lives in HubSpot, but sales uses Salesforce. Manual weekly sync via CSV and email. Sales questions lead quality; marketing can't prove attribution.
- **Revenue Risk**: Critical. Sales rejects leads, marketing can't optimize, pipeline visibility broken.
- **Quick Win**: Implement native HubSpot-Salesforce sync (2-day setup). Establish single source of truth for lead scoring criteria.
- **Weekly Hours Freed**: 4-6 hours
**3. Manual Weekly Reporting (Estimated 5 hours/week lost)**
- **Root Cause**: Metrics scattered across HubSpot, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, and Marketo. One analyst pulls data manually every Monday, builds PowerPoint deck.
- **Revenue Risk**: Medium. Delayed insights, reactive decision-making, no real-time dashboards for leadership.
- **Quick Win**: Build single Looker/Data Studio dashboard pulling from all sources. Automate Monday email delivery.
- **Weekly Hours Freed**: 4-5 hours
### Tool Rationalization
- **Redundant**: Asana + Slack for project management. Consolidate to Asana; use Slack for notifications only.
- **Underutilized**: Marketo. Most workflows already in HubSpot. Recommend sunsetting within 6 months.
### AI Readiness
Once approval bottleneck is cleared, AI can automate brief generation and initial copy variations. Once data is unified, AI can power predictive lead scoring and campaign performance forecasting.
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Courses, workshops, frameworks, daily intelligence, and 6 proprietary tools — built for marketing leaders adopting AI.
Trusted by 10,000+ Directors and CMOs.