Sales has never been an easy job. But for sales reps using a growing number of tools, things are becoming increasingly complicated – with no end in sight.
Your typical sales tech stack could include more than a dozen point solutions, covering everything from sales engagement to productivity to forecasting. Sales teams are also introducing new AI solutions, adding another set of tools to master while managing a web of customer relationships and trying to meet quota.
The tools we use are supposed to make our jobs easier, but this fragmentation is causing more harm than good for sales teams. Paying for 10 or more services is expensive, and those disparate tools make it hard to get a high-level picture of what’s going on in your organization. Tool fragmentation is also making it harder to succeed with AI: according to Salesforce’s recent State of Sales report, sales ops say that the best way to prepare for AI is to consolidate tools and tech stacks.
In 2025, sales organizations need to master their use of AI to succeed. Here’s why strategic integrations and tool consolidation are crucial for making that happen.
It’s Time for Tool Consolidation
Each of those individual sales tools might provide some degree of value to your sales team. But when you put them all together in a complex tech stack, they add up to something less than the sum of its parts. There are three key reasons why sales teams benefit from integrating their tools and simplifying their stacks:
Improved visibility and cross-team alignment – When different go-to-market teams are targeting different KPIs and using different tools to reach them, your organization as a whole will be inefficient. Fragmented toolsets lead to poor visibility; as a result, the organization lacks the data it needs to make confident business decisions. Simplifying the tech stack makes it easier for multiple teams to get on the same page and meet their revenue goals.
Better understanding of customer engagement – At a basic level, you want to understand what works and what doesn’t. Sales teams need to be able to tie customer engagements and activities to actual business outcomes. Otherwise, how do you know what’s moving the needle and what isn’t? Identifying the tools that work well together makes it easy to draw those connections, while a smattering of siloed tools does the opposite.
Strong, privacy-safe foundations for AI growth – With AI top of mind for every sales leader, you need to do everything you can to set the stage for rapid growth. The fewer tools your sales team has to keep track of, the more nimble they’ll be when augmenting their activities with AI. Limiting your tech stack to a small number of enterprise solutions also makes it easier to secure customer data — a growing challenge with the emergence of AI and rapidly expanding datasets.
Put your CRM At the Center of Your Revenue Engine
So how do you decide which sales tools you need for the long term and which ones you can leave behind? The key is to start by building out from the center of your tech stack.
The sales tech landscape is constantly evolving and expanding. New tools for conversational intelligence, RevOps, communications, and even calendar management are all designed to make your life easier. But the most fundamental asset for any sales team should be customer relationship management (CRM).
A good CRM will serve as the single source of truth that works together with and underpins the other tools in your tech stack. Because of this importance, it makes sense to put the CRM at the core of your tech stack and build outward with integrations. How do you build the most effective tech stack that works together with your CRM as the central hub for your engagement data?
Betting on your CRM is even more critical as leading vendors invest in AI, particularly tools that allow you to build and deploy AI agents throughout the sales process. With an eye toward an AI-enabled future, you’ll want to choose the integrations that maximize the value that agents have to offer. Siloed tools that can’t be integrated easily into the larger stack should be left behind.
Deploy AI in Your Future-Proof Sales Stack
What does AI look like in the context of your sales tech stack?
When deployed successfully, AI should deliver two benefits simultaneously: it should help your sales teams move more quickly, and it should allow them to focus on work that delivers the most value.
Generative AI tools for sales – trained on the data in your CRM – accelerate the process of engaging and following up with prospects across email and social platforms. AI tools allow you to jump into a task that’s already in progress rather than starting from zero; the more tightly AI is integrated into your tech stack and datasets, the further it can take you.
By automating many of the most mundane and repetitive tasks of engagement and follow-up, AI tools free up sales reps and managers to focus on strategic work. Instead of spending valuable time drafting emails and social messages, you can focus more on “why” and “how:” What is a prospect’s specific pain point and how can you help them overcome it? The better you understand the prospect and the more precise your solution, the faster you’ll be able to move through the sales cycle.
Get Set for AI Acceleration
Sales teams are on the verge of a revolution. A recent McKinsey article predicted that AI could open up an incremental $800 billion to $1.2 trillion in productivity across sales and marketing. Organizations that establish a strong plan for their AI transformation will reap the rewards of that productivity growth.
To win in the AI-enabled future, you need to choose the right tools for the job. A streamlined, well-integrated tech stack leads to more productive sales teams and more predictable revenue. When you’re ready to fly, you don’t need unnecessary baggage.
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