The reactions to last week's part 2, The inherited costs of the composable stack, revealed something important about Martech today. People disagreed with one another, yet they were all touching the same truth from different angles. Some pointed out that composable savings mostly show up in use-case velocity rather than infrastructure. Others argued that cloud costs are a black box, no matter what you buy. A few reminded us that the data warehouse remains the gravitational center regardless of whether your CDP is composable or packaged.
What everyone circled around, though, was the same underlying question: who holds the complexity?
That’s the starting point for every meaningful negotiation.
- A composable stack can empower your teams or overwhelm them.
- A packaged suite can simplify life or quietly slow everything down.
The list price is the least interesting part of the deal. What matters is where the ongoing work lands.
This series' initial article, CDP & CEP pricing strategies for the uninitiated, looked at what pricing says. The second part, The inherited costs of the composable stack, explored what pricing hides. In this last part, I will focus on what you can realistically negotiate once you understand how responsibility moves through your stack.
Negotiating ownership, not licenses
Most contract discussions begin with discounts, term length, or which modules to include, offset against the volume data you need to dig up. But long-term value rarely comes from these levers. The real negotiation is about ownership. Not legal ownership, but actual operational ownership. The question is simple (although the execution is challenging): who is responsible for keeping this thing alive?
Every system needs care. Care for when pipelines break, schemas get updated, integrations change versions, or models need recalibration. You are either paying a vendor to carry this work, or you’re absorbing it yourself. Once that becomes the framing, the rest of the negotiation opens up naturally. You can ask more grounded questions about maintenance expectations, integration health, monitoring responsibilities, and the level of internal expertise needed to keep things stable.
This is where the conversation becomes honest. You’re no longer negotiating features, but you’re negotiating where the weight of the system sits. The easiest metaphor I use in this case is buying a car versus leasing a car. One forces you to take on maintenance responsibilities, while the other shifts them elsewhere.
The warehouse reality
One of the most helpful perspectives raised after part 2 was that the data warehouse never left the picture. Even in the age of packaged CDPs, the warehouse has remained the anchor for identity, reporting, and analytics. With composable architectures, its influence continues to grow.
This is why negotiations should spend more time on the relationship between the CDP, your data model, and your warehouse. A vendor who aligns cleanly with your existing warehouse strategy will look very different from one who expects heavy restructuring. Some solutions depend on real-time warehouse freshness, while others assume ingestion into their own environment first.
The outcome of the negotiation depends on how well your data foundation supports the vision you’re buying into. If your warehouse is strong, you can lean into composability. If it’s inconsistent or fragmented, a packaged suite may absorb more of the instability. This isn’t about personal or HiPPO preference, or at least it shouldn't be. It’s about acknowledging the architecture you actually have, not the one you wish you had.
The velocity question
One comment that stood out was the idea that composable savings often come from speed. That’s true, but only when the organization can translate flexibility into delivery. It’s easy to say, “we’ll move faster”, but it's an entirely different thing to prove it.
This part of the negotiation becomes a conversation about patterns. Ask vendors how quickly teams typically activate their first real use cases, not just how fast the platform can theoretically move. Discuss the types of customer journeys that usually go live first, and how much vendor involvement is needed during the early months. Explore how integrations behave under pressure during peak campaigns.
Matthew Niederberger
If a vendor claims velocity is the value driver, they should be able to describe that velocity in stories, not slogans.
When definitions blur
Another important thread was the realisation that many debates happen because people aren’t talking about the same thing. Composable versus packaged is a spectrum, and yet we often treat it as a binary. Confusion emerges quickly when buyers and vendors use identical terms with different meanings.
A negotiation can fall apart simply because “event”, “connection”, or “active profile” means something different to each side. Instead of listing definitions, a clearer approach is to frame them through their impact:
| Term | Why it matters | What often goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Event | Drives cost for many CDPs | Vendors count ingested vs processed differently |
| Active profile | Basis for MTU/MAU billing | Anonymous users sometimes included unexpectedly |
| Connection / Destination | Indicates maintenance and effort | Often misinterpreted as one-click integrations |
The moment both sides agree on vocabulary, the rest of the negotiation becomes dramatically simpler.
The visible tip of the CX iceberg
A presales leader mentioned he keeps a slide titled “The Hidden Costs of CX”. The joke was lighthearted, but the point is serious in that everyone in Martech acknowledges hidden costs, they just highlight different ones depending on what they sell.
Your job during negotiation is not to eliminate hidden layers. It’s to understand where they sit and whether your team can absorb them. Vendors position their blind spots as benefits. Buyers often underestimate what will land internally. A strong negotiation bridges that gap.
The organisational dimension
One of the most thoughtful contributions came from a discussion about how composable architectures shape organisational behaviour. A composable stack rarely becomes the bottleneck itself, but the data and engineering support around it does. New segments, new journeys, new touchpoints -> all of it eventually routes back through resource queues that haven’t grown at the same pace.
This is where negotiations shift from technology to team design. A vendor might promise flexibility, but if your internal Martech and engineering capacity can’t support the amount of choice you’re buying, the architecture will feel slower, not faster.
So the negotiation becomes a conversation about cadence. Does your organisation move at the speed its architecture enables? Or will your architecture outpace your team’s ability to operate it?
A conversational negotiation framework
Instead of a checklist, the negotiation can be framed as a set of intertwined conversations:
- You’re clarifying who owns the ongoing work, not who has the cheaper feature.
- You’re establishing what the core terms actually mean, so billing doesn’t drift over time.
- You’re exploring how quickly real use cases can be delivered, not just promised.
- You’re understanding how tightly the CDP or CEP aligns to your warehouse, because misalignment adds effort immediately.
- And you’re mapping support expectations, both technical and organisational, to avoid surprises.
These conversations do more than protect you from a bad contract. They make it possible to get full value from a good one.
Some final thoughts
Negotiating Martech isn’t (always) a matter of squeezing vendors on price. It’s a matter of understanding the shape of your own organisation and how it carries responsibility. Every model, be it packaged, composable, or hybrid, comes with invisible obligations. The only question is whether those obligations match your capability and ambition.
So if part 1 taught us how to read pricing, and part 2 revealed what pricing hides, this left part 3 to be about navigating the reality in between, where decisions stop being about tools and start being about the people who run them.
In the end, the most important negotiation you will ever have is not with a vendor. It’s with your own capacity.
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