SaaS has been around for decades, and during that time, buyers have been inundated with a constant stream of new workflow automation tools, ERP systems, and point solutions. Now, with the breakthrough of GenAI, things have become more complicated. It’s no wonder that conversations with CROs, PE/VC sales support leaders, and enterprise buyers all point to the same conclusion: landing new logos is tougher than ever, keeping customers is a bigger challenge, and maintaining a single source of customer truth feels nearly impossible.

These challenges aren’t isolated; they’re complex and deeply interconnected. The old sales tactics and approaches that worked for years don’t hold up anymore. In today’s environment, where buyers feel overwhelmed and unsure about the impact of AI, selling software requires new strategies, fresh skills, and a rethink of the entire sales funnel.

More Efficient and Less Obtrusive Demand Generation

One of the biggest challenges today is the oversaturation of outbound marketing efforts. The flood of personalized emails, commoditized lists, and advanced tech stacks has created a lot of noise, making it increasingly difficult to stand out. With reply rates plummeting from 4% to around 1%, it’s clear that the old tactics aren’t working. The focus needs to shift from sheer volume to quality and relevance.

The future of demand generation lies in leveraging smarter, more targeted approaches that engage prospects at the right time, with the right message, without overwhelming them. Imagine tools that prioritize genuine engagement over interactions (read: bombardment)—systems that learn from past interactions and external signals to reach decision-makers when they are most receptive. This approach not only reduces the clutter in inboxes but also increases the effectiveness of outreach, leading to better conversion rates and a more meaningful pipeline.

Unified and Actionable View of the Customer

Sales organizations, whether big or small, are all wrestling with the same issue: an overwhelming amount of unstructured data scattered across various systems, buried behind multiple logins and locked in silos that stifle operational efficiency and sales. The lack of a unified, actionable view of the customer is a major bottleneck.

A robust core data layer that connects all customer data can transform how businesses operate. By integrating data from various touchpoints, companies can create a seamless, 360-degree view of each customer, enabling more personalized and effective interactions. This unified approach allows sales teams to not only engage with prospects more effectively but also maintain stronger, longer-lasting relationships with existing customers.

One critical element in this utopian dream: no one likes to build infrastructure. There needs to be a fast time-to-value use case and/or the ability to integrate quickly for a unified data layer infrastructure start-up to see traction—sales leaders are very short-sighted right now.  But when you have a single source of truth, sales and marketing efforts become more aligned, driving better outcomes across the board.

Let’s Get Deeper into the Solutions

Tools are emerging across the RevTech stack that could turn the tide in the short term. These tools ingest system-of-record data to make it useful. In the long term, we believe the CRM as we know it will be fully replaced, likely by a more effective tool that earns real trust, drives impact, and proliferates with increased modules. In the meantime, here’s where we’re seeing exciting innovation right now:

Top of Funnel: Prospecting has gotten less manual and time-intensive over the years, thanks to tools that help with list-building and filtering tools. The downside? Prospects are bombarded with an avalanche of inbound emails, making it hard to stand out, which leads to lower response rates and engagement across the board.

Everyone uses ZoomInfo, and no one is thrilled about it.

However, new solutions are emerging that use external signals to reach decision-makers at just the right time and place. Think of leveraging real-time data signals-like executive appointments, recent funding rounds, and platform engagement data-to personalize communications and boost the chances of getting a response.

For example, Unify sends out 1:1 personalized emails at scale by using intent, enrichment, and Salesforce data. Valley takes it a step further by not only personalizing outreach but also booking appointments with minimal human intervention. Innovations like these transform the top-of-funnel from a numbers game into a more strategic, data-driven process, meaning sales teams can focus their efforts on high-potential prospects.

Finding the right prospects is just the first step. To really capture their attention, you need to tailor your messaging and demonstrate a deep understanding of their business. This is where data-enrichment tools come in. These tools pull in data from various sources, ranging from internal databases to web scrapes, to give you a comprehensive picture of your prospects. With this richer information, you can craft messages that really hit home…true sales enablement. We are seeing CROs repurpose SDRs to do research instead of interactions; this is that effort at scale.

It doesn’t stop there. During sales calls, AI note-taking systems can now capture and organize key details about leads, making sure nothing slips through the cracks. After the call, these systems even provide recommended action items and follow-ups, keeping the momentum going. Bluebirds allows you to create custom intent signals by combining factors like job postings, recent hires, and changes to the company’s tech stack to deliver ready-to-prospect leads. Meanwhile, Default speeds up the process by creating automated workflows that increase speed to lead, syncing with your CRM in real-time. Spara takes it a step further by prequalifying leads, prepping account executives, and even scheduling demos – all automatically.

These tools, and others like them, are shifting the sales process from a reactive, manual effort to a proactive, data-driven strategy. This enables teams to engage with prospects more effectively and efficiently, ultimately (the hope goes) driving higher conversion rates and shortening sales cycles.

Getting and keeping customers’ attention is only the beginning. To truly drive engagement, you need to leverage tools that not only capture interest but sustain it. Enter a new wave of Customer Intelligence tools transforming how businesses interact with prospects and customers. These tools offer personalized content delivery and automated follow-ups. For instance, attention management systems use AI to tailor content and interventions, capturing and maintaining customer interest in a way that feels natural, not forced.

Meanwhile, advanced scheduling tools and conditional logic are also automating the follow-up process, ensuring no opportunity is missed and that interactions remain consistent and relevant. Together, these tools foster deeper engagement, streamline workflows, and maximize the impact of customer interactions.

Clay, for example, automatically keeps the CRM updated, pulling data from 50+ built-in data providers, continuously enriching customer profiles. Docket AI, on the other hand, is a query-able knowledge base for SDRs that allows them to respond to buyer inquiries faster with the relevant information they are seeking.

It’s also worth noting that industry-specific vertical solutions are becoming increasingly important. In certain sectors, vertical-specific sales coaching platforms are emerging, offering user experiences tailored to the unique needs of those industries.

These platforms are particularly effective in traditionally lower-tech industries, where they help drive adoption and enhance sales coaching. We’ve seen this in restaurants, healthcare, fitness, and others.  One example is Sameday, which provides conversational booking solutions for home services, demonstrating how vertical solutions can lead to more efficient, effective customer interactions.

Long-Term Tools for a Fundamental Shift in Sales

While incremental changes will continue across the revenue operations lifecycle, enterprises will eventually need a central integration layer, or nervous system, to fully harness the power of their deployed solutions. For example, Seam unifies customer data from disparate sources and offers programmatic outbound, complete with pre-built connectors to seamlessly join datasets, data enrichment integrations as well as an AI assistant to generate queries.

Quilt provides a knowledge platform that syncs data, offers live feeds, and integrates with Slack. It also offers conversational updates to incorrect answers so the same mistake isn’t made twice. Vertify focuses on data integration and alignment across sales, marketing, and customer success, translating all organizational data into a unified “RevOps language” at scale. Dashworks consolidates information siloes, enabling queries across multiple data sources.

These innovations represent a meaningful first step. As integration layers mature, we see four emerging areas worth watching: sales executives driving strategy & micro-managing, improved cross-department communication and visibility, better data hygiene, and more targeted managed data governance:

Personalization + Executive Directives

Individuals will be able to store and analyze unstructured data across multiple apps in personalized ways. Imagine a future where your AI note-taker automatically converts key takeaways from meetings, like onboarding, into actionable tasks.

These could be sent as a draft email, in your voice, that you quickly review and send to your supervisor or seamlessly integrated into your CRM, with AI tagging and prioritizing the task using predictive algorithms.

This level of personalization will have a flywheel effect: spurring more usage to generate more data, driving further innovation. At the CRO level, we foresee the ability to create overarching rules and A/B test revenue strategies, with insights cascading down to the rep level.

Interconnectivity + Interoperability

As back-office systems become more unified, the ability for various Revtech solutions to communicate and exchange data will be crucial. The real potential of these systems will be unlocked when it is utilized not only by revenue teams but also by product, marketing, and finance departments.

By involving these additional teams, the system can provide comprehensive insights, streamline cross-departmental workflows, and drive better alignment across the organization.

Open Architecture + Observability

Integrating new data sources or solutions will become increasingly complex due to all interdependencies, but it will be essential. “No one vendor has enough coverage or accuracy,” said a leading CRO we spoke with – a sentiment we fully echo.

Furthermore, we know hallucination is a principal risk as it pertains to AI-based queries. Organizations relying on a unified source of truth across all functions cannot afford downtime or the potential widespread use of faulty information.

Transparency will be essential at the output level for querying. Users must understand what data sources contributed to an answer, flag and systematically remove inaccuracies, and implement robust validation and verification mechanisms to maintain a reliable, unified source of truth.

Data Security + Governance

Data security will require multiple layers of protection. While traditional access control, logging, and encryption remain key, implementing personnel-level data authorizations will be particularly tricky, especially with unstructured data.

It’s easy to imagine a scenario where a single contract contains redacted information accessible only to the legal team while specific financial terms are accessible only to the finance team. Tagging data fields with different permissions will be crucial to managing these complexities.

The world has changed for software sellers, and breaking through now requires new, data-driven strategies. The old approaches don’t cut it anymore, but that opens up exciting opportunities for those willing to innovate.

If you’re working on solutions that transform how we sell, manage data, or engage with customers, we’d like to chat.