Succeeding in B2B sales in 2026 requires more than traditional skills like empathy, persistence, and relationship-building. Today's top-performing sales professionals combine these human strengths with AI-powered tools that provide real-time insights, automate routine tasks, and enable hyper-personalized engagement at scale.
The competitive advantage now belongs to sales teams who strategically leverage technology. Research consistently shows that sales professionals using modern sales tech significantly outperform their peers in productivity, win rates, and quota attainment.
In our comprehensive Best Sales Tools 2026 guide, we've identified fifteen essential software categories that every B2B sales and marketing professional should know. Whether you're building your first sales tech stack or optimizing an existing one, this guide will help you navigate the AI-powered tools transforming how successful teams sell in the era of intelligent automation.
Sales tools refer to digital tools that sales professionals use to make their work easier. The term "sales tool" is an umbrella term that encompasses several different technologies, including customer relationship management (CRM), sales intelligence and prospecting, sales acceleration, and data connectors and integrations, to name but a few.
In 2026, many of these tools incorporate AI capabilities that automate routine tasks, provide real-time insights, and help sales teams work more strategically.
Sales tools help salespeople understand which prospects are most likely to be successful with their product or service, when to reach out to those prospects, and what they should discuss with them. AI-powered automation eliminates tedious administrative tasks, enabling sales professionals to focus on what matters most: delivering value to people and businesses.
Another reason to invest in sales technology is that top sales talent now expects access to modern, AI-enabled tools. Companies relying on outdated sales methods risk losing deals to more tech-savvy competitors and struggle to attract and retain high performers. The data is clear: sales professionals using modern tools consistently outperform their peers, close more deals, and achieve higher quota attainment rates.
In a broad sense, sales intelligence refers to a wide range of technologies that help salespeople find, monitor, and understand information on prospects' and existing clients' daily business.
Sales intelligence helps salespeople know precisely who they should be talking with, what they should be talking about, and when they should reach out to them, and put all the relevant information in front of them when they're having that conversation. As a result, injecting data from a sales intelligence platform into your CRM can truly transform your sales process. A combination of company insights and a clean and tidy CRM has the potential to create a well-oiled sales machine that delivers relevance at scale.
What once required hours of manual research can now happen in seconds. AI has transformed sales intelligence from a data lookup tool into a proactive insights engine. Modern platforms use machine learning to analyze millions of data points, identify patterns invisible to human researchers, and automatically surface the most relevant prospects for your specific needs.
AI-powered sales intelligence platforms now predict which companies are most likely to buy based on behavioral signals, technographic data, and buying intent. Natural language processing extracts key insights from news articles, job postings, and financial reports, delivering context-aware alerts when prospects show signs of being in-market.
We're seeing innovative platforms like Planhat entering from the customer success space, bringing fresh perspectives on relationship management. The AI era has also sparked new entrants like Finnish startup Zero, which are reimagining what CRM can be when built with AI-first architecture from the ground up.
Sales managers and marketers are increasingly using data and insights from sales intelligence software to define and implement strategies. AI amplifies this by turning raw data into actionable intelligence automatically. The need to combine external and internal data makes integrations a critical characteristic of any sales intelligence platform worth its salt.
With the addition of new datasets, AI-powered trigger events are making prospecting more effective and specialized. Machine learning correlates these diverse data points to predict which signals actually indicate buying readiness.
Discover 16 Sales Intelligence and Prospecting solutions
As the name suggests, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software assists in managing your business's relationships with its customers. It helps you keep track of existing customers, enhance customer relationships, improve customer retention, stay on top of sales and marketing efforts, and automate communication.
For most companies, a CRM is the first investment in sales technology, and it remains the foundation of the modern sales tech stack. CRM systems are consistently rated as essential tools for sales success, serving as the central hub where customer data, deal tracking, and team collaboration converge.
In 2026, CRMs have evolved far beyond simple contact databases. AI-powered capabilities now provide predictive lead scoring, automated data entry, intelligent next-best-action recommendations, and real-time insights that help sales teams prioritize opportunities and personalize outreach at scale. Modern CRMs integrate seamlessly with the entire sales ecosystem, from conversation intelligence platforms to e-signature tools, creating a unified system where data flows automatically and insights appear exactly when needed.
A CRM is often a company's first investment in sales technology. The CRM space is crowded, yet there are clear leaders in different segments: Salesforce for enterprises, Pipedrive for small and medium-sized companies, and HubSpot for a full suite for growth.
Picking the right platform is an important decision since you will probably want to integrate it with other apps and platforms as you grow—make sure you pick one that won’t limit you down the road. Luckily, most vendors have seen UI facelifts in recent years, improving the user experience drastically compared to before.
We've identified fourteen vendors as strong options to make the choice a little easier.
Discover 14 smart CRM solutions
In a broad sense, sales intelligence refers to a wide range of technologies that help salespeople find, monitor, and understand information on prospects' and existing clients' daily business.
Sales intelligence helps salespeople know precisely who they should be talking with, what they should be talking about, and when they should reach out to them, and put all the relevant information in front of them when they're having that conversation. As a result, injecting data from a sales intelligence platform into your CRM can truly transform your sales process. A combination of company insights and a clean and tidy CRM has the potential to create a well-oiled sales machine that delivers relevance at scale.
What once required hours of manual research can now happen in seconds. AI has transformed sales intelligence from a data lookup tool into a proactive insights engine. Modern platforms use machine learning to analyze millions of data points, identify patterns invisible to human researchers, and automatically surface the most relevant prospects for your specific needs.
AI-powered sales intelligence platforms now predict which companies are most likely to buy based on behavioral signals, technographic data, and buying intent. Natural language processing extracts key insights from news articles, job postings, and financial reports, delivering context-aware alerts when prospects show signs of being in-market.
Interestingly, large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have emerged as valuable sales intelligence tools in their own right. Sales professionals are increasingly using these AI assistants for account research, competitive analysis, and preparing for conversations, democratizing access to intelligence capabilities that were once exclusive to enterprise platforms.
Sales managers and marketers are increasingly using data and insights from sales intelligence software to define and implement strategies. AI amplifies this by turning raw data into actionable intelligence automatically. The need to combine external and internal data makes integrations a critical characteristic of any sales intelligence platform worth its salt.
With the addition of new datasets, AI-powered trigger events are making prospecting more effective and specialized. Machine learning correlates these diverse data points to predict which signals actually indicate buying readiness.
Discover 12 smart Sales Engagement tools
We all have seen that transactional B2B sales is becoming more and more automated. Salespeople are allocating more of their time into larger opportunities where consultative approach, discovery meetings and tailored proposals play a bigger role. More people get involved, both from the buyers and sellers' side.
With these larger sales processes, customer-facing digital portals and microsites are gaining significant traction. Parties can share relevant materials, chat with each other and craft custom proposals with prospective buyers. The goal is to strengthen the relationship already before the contract is signed by removing any buyer friction.
AI is transforming digital sales rooms from passive document repositories into intelligent collaboration spaces. Modern platforms use AI to recommend the most relevant content for each stakeholder based on their role, industry, and stage in the buying journey. When a prospect views materials, AI can automatically surface related resources or suggest next steps to the sales team.
Generative AI now assists in creating personalized proposals, mutual action plans, and business cases directly within digital sales rooms. These AI-generated documents pull from successful past deals, automatically customize value propositions, and adapt ROI calculations based on the prospect's specific situation.
In an increasingly complex and competitive marketplace, where buyers expect a greater amount of involvement and personalization, salespeople need tools to ease the sales process and remove any potential points of friction. AI amplifies their ability to deliver this personalization at scale—generating customized content, surfacing relevant insights, and identifying friction points before they derail deals.
Considering the amount of deals that don't materialize due to buyer friction, it's in a business' interest to do what it can to counteract that. The sales enablement and digital sales room platforms we've listed do just that—removing friction and enabling your sales team to make more sales. With AI-powered features, these platforms now proactively guide both sellers and buyers through the process, making complex deals feel simpler and more collaborative.
Discover 10 Sales Enablement and Digital Sales Rooms tools
Every sale starts in one of two ways: the seller finds the buyer or the buyer finds the seller. Marketing automation and lead generation tools aim to encourage the latter.
B2B marketing automation tools are revolutionizing how businesses attract, nurture, and convert leads. These platforms enable seamless, multi-channel campaigns by automating workflows across email, social media, and paid ads, ensuring consistent messaging and engagement at scale.
AI-powered insights play a central role, analyzing customer behavior, content performance, and campaign data to optimize targeting and messaging in real time. Predictive analytics allow marketers to anticipate customer needs, delivering personalized content at the right time to boost engagement and conversions.
B2B marketing automation tools simplify and optimize complex marketing workflows, enabling businesses to scale personalized, multi-channel campaigns. These tools integrate capabilities like lead nurturing, segmentation, and behavioral tracking, helping marketers deliver timely and relevant content to drive conversions.
AI has transformed these platforms from workflow engines into intelligent marketing orchestrators. AI-driven insights, deeper personalization through generative content, and seamless CRM integration now provide a unified customer view. Marketing automation is also becoming more industry-specific, with AI models trained on vertical-specific data offering tailored solutions for niche markets.
Discover 10 smart Marketing Automation tools
Account-based sales and marketing tools are reshaping how businesses engage with high-value accounts. These platforms enable teams to identify, target, and nurture specific accounts with tailored strategies, ensuring more personalized and impactful outreach. By leveraging account intelligence, sales and marketing teams gain deep insights into company needs, decision-makers, and buying signals, allowing for hyper-targeted campaigns.
AI-powered account intelligence: AI has elevated account-based strategies from targeted outreach to predictive orchestration. Modern platforms use machine learning to analyze thousands of signals—from technographic data and organizational changes to web behavior and content engagement—to identify which accounts are actually in-market and ready to buy.
Account-based sales and marketing tools unify data, insights, and outreach to engage high-value accounts with tailored, multi-channel strategies. They integrate CRM, marketing automation, and account intelligence, aligning sales and marketing teams to drive personalized engagement.
AI is making these platforms exponentially more powerful—automatically identifying in-market accounts, generating personalized content at scale, and orchestrating complex multi-stakeholder engagement strategies. We're seeing solutions that are both holistic and industry-specific, with AI delivering deeper predictive insights, stronger collaboration through intelligent recommendations, and measurable growth for account-focused strategies.
Discover 10 smart Account-Based Sales and Marketing tools
Revenue Operations (RevOps) platforms transform how businesses align their sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive predictable revenue growth. These tools centralize data, workflows, and performance insights, breaking down silos and creating a unified view of the customer journey.
A core feature of RevOps platforms is data integration. Businesses can gain a holistic understanding of their revenue streams by consolidating data from CRMs, marketing automation, sales engagement tools, and customer success platforms. This enables teams to identify bottlenecks, forecast accurately, and optimize processes across the entire revenue funnel.
Moving forward, RevOps tools will become even more sophisticated, offering deeper integrations, AI-powered optimizations, and tailored solutions for specific industries, ensuring businesses can scale revenue operations seamlessly and efficiently.
Revenue Operations platforms integrate data, processes, and teams across sales, marketing, and customer success to optimize revenue growth. By automating workflows, centralizing data, and delivering AI-driven insights, these tools enable businesses to forecast accurately, streamline operations, and scale efficiently.
The future of RevOps lies in deeper integrations and predictive analytics, empowering teams to collaborate effectively and make data-driven decisions that drive sustainable growth.
Discover 14 smart Revenue Operations Platform tools
Customer success software is used by businesses to ensure customers achieve the outcome that they expect to achieve as they use the business’ product or service. In other words, optimizing customer relationships and ensuring that the customer achieves success. Customer success initiatives are vital for the preservation and expansion of revenue, as well as boosting customer advocacy and helping sustaining profitability and growth.
Modern customer success solutions leverage AI to provide businesses with sophisticated customer health scoring, predictive churn analysis, and automated intervention triggers. Machine learning algorithms now analyze behavioral patterns, usage data, and engagement signals to identify at-risk customers before issues escalate and surface expansion opportunities within healthy accounts.
With their wide range of features, customer success software makes it easy for businesses to centralize all of their customer data and develop a 360-degree view of them, helping to decrease customer churn, increase customer satisfaction, and increase upsell opportunities.
Through customer success softwares, businesses are able to accurately assess the satisfaction of their customers and take action if necessary. This helps to ensure that the business is able to do the thing that matters just as much, if not more than, capturing new customers—retaining those customers.
Discover 10 Customer Success tools
In 2026, the average B2B organization uses dozens of specialized tools across sales, marketing, and customer success. While this tech stack diversity drives innovation, it creates a critical challenge: data silos that prevent teams from getting a complete view of their customers and operations.
Data connectors and integration platforms solve this problem by enabling seamless data flow between your systems. As AI becomes central to business operations, the ability to connect and unify data across platforms isn't just convenient anymore. It's essential for powering the intelligent automation and insights that modern teams depend on
The category itself is evolving toward workflow-focused automation. Popular new alternatives like n8n, make.com, and Gumloop are shifting the paradigm from simple data connectors to intelligent workflow builders. Perhaps most intriguingly, we've included Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) in this category—a technology that allows AI agents to interact with other software without requiring traditional integrations, potentially reimagining how systems connect in an AI-first world.
Even when businesses have access to all of the data and tools that they could possibly require, they run headfirst into another challenge—that data is scattered across numerous platforms and solutions. This decreases usability and makes it more difficult to access in real time.
If that’s a problem that your organization has encountered, data connectors and integrations, like the ones listed, could be worth looking into, as they make it easy for businesses of all sizes to centralize the wide range of tools and data that they have access to and avoid drawn-out and expensive data projects.
Discover ten smart Data Connector and Integration tools
Configure, price, quote (CPQ) software helps companies automate the quoting and proposal process lifecycle, starting with the moment a customer supplies their needs in a company’s offering and ending with sending a detailed quote to the customer or prospect.
CPQ software is used in sales departments to accelerate sales while improving quote accuracy and customer relations. These software products allow companies to determine a customer’s needs and provide custom quotes that best fit them. Products are typically built on an existing CRM software product or designed to integrate with one (or more) CRM tools.
As companies and their product/service lists grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage product pricing, identify great upsell opportunities, and keep track of deals being offered by your competition. Sales reps aren’t given up-to-date pricing information on their products, leading to lost opportunities and slower quote times. Configuring a quote can be a time-consuming task, especially when critical data is not easily accessible in real time.
CPQ software eliminates these problems. Sales cycles are faster, pricing data is far more accurate, and opportunities to upsell and bundle are captured more frequently. At the same time, a company can prepare orders faster without increasing the potential for error. And lastly, because pricing data is more streamlined, workflows are streamlined, time is saved, and more sales can be made.
With businesses generally offering an increasing amount of personalization in their product catalogs, buyers increasingly having particular specifications for their purchases, and sales representatives not necessarily having the required access or knowledge to create quotes effectively, CPQ software is a boon.
Through automation, businesses can make the quotation process faster and more accurate and make it easier for their sales teams. This simplifies their sales process and frees up time for them to focus on a more important aspect of sales: customer interaction.
Conversation intelligence has become essential infrastructure for high-performing sales and customer success teams in 2026. These AI-powered platforms automatically record, transcribe, and analyze every customer interaction, transforming conversations into actionable intelligence that drives revenue and improves team performance.
Modern conversation intelligence goes far beyond basic call recording. Advanced natural language processing and machine learning algorithms analyze the nuances of customer conversations in real time, detecting sentiment shifts, identifying buying signals, flagging competitive mentions, and surfacing critical pain points that sales reps might miss in the moment.
Even in this increasingly competitive category, innovation continues with intriguing new entrants, such as Swedish startup Garba, founded by experienced SaaS entrepreneurs who are bringing fresh approaches to conversation analysis and sales intelligence.
Conversation intelligence tools capture and analyze customer calls and meetings to provide actionable insights. By leveraging AI, they uncover trends, improve coaching, and enhance sales performance.
Seamlessly integrating with CRMs, these tools optimize messaging, highlight key opportunities, and streamline follow-ups. As they evolve, real-time recommendations and advanced analytics will further empower teams to drive engagement and accelerate revenue growth.
Discover 10 smart Conversation Intelligence tools
E-signature technology has transformed from a nice-to-have convenience into a mission-critical sales tool. In 2026, paperless workflows are the standard, and modern e-signature platforms have evolved into intelligent document management systems that accelerate deal velocity and provide real-time insights into buyer engagement.
At its core, e-signature software enables secure digital signing of contracts, proposals, and agreements. But today's platforms offer far more than a digital pen. They've become sophisticated sales enablement tools that help teams close deals faster, track document engagement, and automate contract workflows from creation to renewal.
Real-time engagement tracking
Modern platforms provide instant notifications when prospects open, view, or share documents. Sales teams can see exactly which pages prospects spend time on, how many times they've reviewed the document, and when they forward it to other decision-makers. This intelligence allows reps to follow up at precisely the right moment with relevant context.
E-signature platforms in 2026 have evolved into comprehensive document intelligence systems. Beyond capturing signatures, they now offer AI-powered engagement tracking, automated workflow orchestration, and predictive analytics that help sales teams understand buyer intent and close deals faster. Real-time collaboration features, including in-document chat and multi-stakeholder coordination, ensure the entire signing process happens seamlessly within a single platform.
As data privacy regulations continue to evolve globally, leading vendors have built robust compliance frameworks that balance engagement insights with privacy requirements, allowing sales teams to track document interactions while respecting regional data protection laws like GDPR.
Discover 10 smart E-Signature and Document Tracking tools
In 2026, AI agents will have become autonomous teammates for sales organizations. These intelligent systems independently execute complex sales tasks, make decisions, and drive revenue outcomes with minimal human intervention.
AI agents operate autonomously; prospecting for leads, conducting outreach, qualifying prospects, scheduling meetings, and handling initial discovery conversations. They do the work, freeing human sales professionals to focus on high-value relationships and strategic deals.
AI Agent platforms represent one of the newest and most dynamic categories in sales technology. The market includes major players launching AI layers within their existing platforms—like HubSpot's Breeze and Salesforce's Agentforce—alongside specialized providers like 11x and Artisan that offer dedicated AI workers for specific sales functions. We're also seeing modern AI agent suites from companies like Sana and Vainu Agents that are building comprehensive platforms designed specifically for the agent-first era
AI agent platforms are reshaping how sales teams operate, moving beyond simple automation to intelligent collaboration. These systems combine large language models with CRM and sales data to identify intent, suggest next actions, and provide real-time insights during customer interactions.
The result is a new level of sales intelligence where agents act as co-pilots, helping professionals focus on strategy and relationships instead of manual work.
Discover 10 Sales Productivity & Copilot/AI Agent tools
Compensation management tools redefine how organizations design, track, and optimize sales incentive plans to drive performance and motivate teams. These platforms automate commission calculations, ensuring accuracy and transparency while reducing manual errors and administrative burdens.
Real-time visibility into earnings and performance empowers sales reps to track their progress toward quotas, aligning their efforts with business goals. Leaders can leverage insights to design smarter compensation structures that reward behaviors driving revenue growth and retention.
Modern compensation platforms solve challenges through automated AI-powered calculations that handle even the most complex commission structures with perfect accuracy, eliminating payment disputes and reducing administrative overhead.
In a nutshell
Compensation management tools streamline commission calculations, reduce errors, and provide real-time visibility into earnings and performance. By aligning incentives with company goals, these platforms motivate sales teams and boost productivity.
AI-powered insights help organizations design, model, and optimize compensation strategies as they evolve, ensuring smarter incentives that drive revenue growth and team success.
Discover six Compensation Management tools
Partner ecosystem platforms transform how businesses manage and leverage partnerships to drive growth. These tools enable companies to collaborate more effectively with partners by sharing data, identifying joint opportunities, and streamlining co-selling efforts. By centralizing partner relationships, businesses can optimize workflows, increase visibility, and accelerate revenue from their ecosystem.
A key feature of these platforms is data integration. By securely connecting CRM systems and other sales tools, they identify overlaps in accounts and opportunities, helping teams prioritize and coordinate efforts with partners. Additionally, automated workflows streamline partner onboarding, enable deal registration, and track performance across the ecosystem.
Partner ecosystem platforms will be essential in driving scalable growth, creating deeper collaboration, and ensuring businesses maximize value from their partner networks.
Partner ecosystem platforms centralize partner relationships, align data, and streamline workflows to optimize collaboration and co-selling. By integrating with CRMs and sales tools, they uncover account overlaps, track performance, and measure partner contributions.
As AI and predictive analytics evolve, these platforms enable smarter partner strategies, driving scalable growth and deeper ecosystem collaboration.