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.
The 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 Salesforce 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.
Salesforce is an extremely popular tool for customer relationship management. It’s used by hundreds of thousands of companies, and IDC has recognized Salesforce as the leading CRM provider for 11 years. Because of Salesforce’s position in the industry, it makes sense to put Salesforce at the core of your tech stack and build outward with integrations.
As a result, you should think of your sales engagement strategy as a Salesforce sales engagement strategy. How do you build the most effective tech stack that works together with Salesforce as the central hub for your engagement data?
Betting on Salesforce is even more critical in light of last year’s news about Agentforce, the company’s tool for rapidly building and deploying 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 Agentforce has to offer. Siloed tools that can’t be integrated easily into the larger stack should be left behind in 2024.
Combine Highspot and Salesforce to enable the impossible
One of the best opportunities for sales teams to maximize value while consolidating tools is the Highspot Salesforce integration. Bringing these two tools together embeds content and engagement analytics directly into each user’s workflow, which makes it possible to deliver the right piece of content to the customer at the right time.
Integrating Highspot with Salesforce helps sales leaders answer that important question I mentioned earlier: how do you know what’s working and what isn’t? Connecting the two tools means you can always draw a clear line from sales activities to business outcomes, allowing you to repeat the behaviors that lead to wins.
Highspot and Salesforce also demonstrate what can be achieved when both sides invest in AI. Highspot Copilot+ is an AI solution that integrates with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Agentforce to provide instant answers, content recommendations, and share buyer engagement analytics from Highspot directly in Salesforce.The content and analytics are directly in the Salesforce UI, giving a seller AI-driven guidance on how to succeed in their flow of work. This combination is one example of what’s possible with a well-designed integration: not only does it maximize the value from each platform, but it lightens the workload for the human employees who would otherwise be bogged down in meeting reviews and coaching.
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 $0.8 trillion 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 any unnecessary baggage.
