How to Close Sales: Building a Winning Sales Tech Stack

A sales tech stack is the set of software tools a sales team uses to find prospects, engage buyers, manage pipeline, and close deals, all connected to a CRM that serves as the system of record. A winning sales tech stack takes repetitive, manual work off sellers so they spend more of their week selling, and that is how it helps teams close more deals. In this guide, Jake Dunlap, founder and CEO of Skaled, covers what to avoid when building one and which tools belong in it.

The sales tech market has exploded over the past several years, and teams struggle to keep up with the number of tools available.

Automating scheduling, reminders, basic back and forth with buyers, pulling qualified prospect lists, and making our lives easier with data aggregation: you name it, the tool exists.

Many sales leaders and salespeople have been around the block and learned to do many sales activities manually. But the world has changed, and the activities that took time away from selling, while necessary, can now be done faster and better.

If you want to close more deals, you need a winning tech stack that takes manual work off sellers and lets them spend that time selling.

Remembering to follow up with people, logging emails, updating information: there’s an app for that.

Skaled’s survey of more than 600 sales professionals found that 52% spend 10% to 30% of their time on operational and technical tasks. Salesforce’s 2026 State of Sales report found that the average seller spends 40% of their time selling.

This is why sales technology, specifically the right technology, is so important to your organization. By removing repetitive, manual tasks, sales tech lets Sales focus on closing more deals.

What Should You Avoid When Implementing a Sales Tech Stack?

Before covering the tools to include in your winning tech stack, here is where teams fail and end up wasting time and money instead of optimizing their time and generating more revenue.

When buying a new tool or a set of tools, teams don’t think enough about change management and formulating a plan beforehand.

If you’ve ever heard of the technology hype curve, Skaled has put its own spin on it based on what it has seen across the sales teams it works with. It’s common to buy a new tool, generate excitement around the benefits and what it can do for the team, run an initial training, and then set it and forget it.

[Image: Skaled’s technology hype curve, showing research, evaluation, demo (free trial), acquisition and implementation, resistance to change, inertia, leadership change, and churn]

When it comes to implementing a winning tech stack, continuous optimization of your sales tech needs to be a prominent part of the plan.

Because most sales tech is now SaaS, you can expect your tools to update frequently with new features, integrations, and more.

Initial deployment and training is step zero. You have to help sales teams become power users, integrate the tool into their daily tasks, provide ongoing training as your team grows and features are added, and continually optimize tools to fit into and improve the sales process.

What’s in a Winning Sales Tech Stack?

Every company’s needs are different, but this section covers the tools Jake Dunlap rates highest for sales teams today and the most important ones to the typical sales process.

SalesIntel

A social network profile tells you a limited amount about a buyer, and the buyer has to be active on the platform. That’s why you need a data source, preferably one that provides contact data, intent data, and data enrichment in one place, like SalesIntel, a pipeline generation platform for GTM teams.

You also want to verify the accuracy of your data source. SalesIntel, for instance, provides AI+Human-verified contacts with 95% accuracy, including direct dial and mobile numbers.

A data source helps you build, enrich, and target a list of prospects within your ICP.

Outreach.io

In Dunlap’s view, Outreach is the strongest sales engagement platform, with the best reporting, UI, and data, and the best system for creating “activity holders.”

If we’re talking about the best tech, we don’t want a tool that’s built for mass sending alone. Outreach creates a workflow of activity holders so your team never has to remember whom to follow up with and when. It has features to create templates and snippets per buyer persona and campaign, and it lets sales teams customize their messaging at scale.

InsightSquared

InsightSquared is not a platform you look at retrospectively each month. It’s a platform that helps you make data-driven decisions and optimize your processes and messaging.

You’ll be able to better manage your sales pipeline with activity capture, guided selling, interactive reporting, and AI-driven forecasting.

Gong.io

Gong is a conversation intelligence tool and a leading sales coaching platform. It’s an AI-powered tool that helps sales teams understand what sets their top performers apart so other reps can replicate them.

In Dunlap’s assessment, Gong has the best natural language processing technology for phone calls to measure efficiency and coach calls.

Sendoso

If direct mail and gifting are part of your sales outreach (and they should be), Sendoso is one of the strongest platforms for options and easy integration into sales workflows and tools.

Sendoso keeps adding to its offerings, so you’ll always find something to break through the noise and catch your prospect’s eye. One example is its addition of Cameo as an option to send to prospects.

Seismic

Seismic is a sales enablement platform. Buyers expect personalized experiences and relevant content. Seismic is a one-stop shop for managing, automating, and distributing all of the content sales needs to close deals.

Salesforce

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool is the backbone of any sales organization. A CRM like Salesforce can be a single source of truth for lead, contact, and account data, opportunity and pipeline management, activity tracking, and reporting and dashboards.

You cannot run a successful sales organization without a CRM platform, especially as CRMs have become the central integration hub that all of your other pieces of sales tech connect to.

Newoldstamp

Newoldstamp is an email signature generator that lets businesses create, customize, and deploy professional email signatures across the entire organization. A well-designed email signature turns every email you send into a chance to start a sales conversation.

With Newoldstamp, salespeople can insert promotional banners into their email signatures, along with calls to action to catch the recipients’ interest and make their sales emails stand out.

Having standardized email signatures helps you stay memorable and keep prospects engaged. Newoldstamp also comes with built-in email signature analytics that let sellers track the effectiveness of different CTAs and banner campaigns.

How Do the Tools in a Winning Sales Tech Stack Work Together?

Put together, a winning tech stack is integrated into your sales processes and optimizes each step your reps take.

• Tools like Sales Navigator and SalesIntel build your lists and give you information about your buyers.
• Outreach.io gives you a way to put those lists into action and start connecting with buyers.
• Gong helps you have better conversations and replicate your best reps.
• Seismic puts more information into your reps’ hands that buyers want.
• Sendoso makes a lasting impression.
• InsightSquared provides data on your process and pipeline and helps you optimize everything faster.
• Salesforce stores all of your information and activities.

Accurate lists, faster engagement, better conversations, and more information: that’s how you’re going to close more deals with a winning tech stack.

What Are Common Questions About Sales Tech Stacks?

What is a sales tech stack?

A sales tech stack is the set of software tools a sales team uses to find prospects, engage buyers, manage pipeline, and close deals, all connected to a CRM that serves as the system of record. A typical stack includes a CRM, a data source such as SalesIntel, a sales engagement platform, conversation intelligence, sales enablement, and pipeline analytics.

What tools should be included in a sales tech stack?

Most sales tech stacks include a CRM such as Salesforce as the system of record, a data source such as SalesIntel for verified contacts and buying signals, a sales engagement platform such as Outreach, conversation intelligence such as Gong, sales enablement such as Seismic, pipeline analytics such as InsightSquared, and direct mail and gifting such as Sendoso. The right mix depends on your sales process, team size, and budget.

Why is a sales tech stack important?

A sales tech stack takes repetitive, manual work off sellers so they spend more of their week selling. Salesforce’s 2026 State of Sales report found that the average seller spends 40% of their time selling, and Skaled’s survey found that 52% of sales professionals spend 10% to 30% of their time on operational and technical tasks. The right stack, including a data source like SalesIntel, gives that time back to selling.

What is the most important tool in a sales tech stack?

The CRM is the most important tool in a sales tech stack, because it is the system of record and the hub every other tool connects to. After the CRM, the data source matters most, because every other tool depends on accurate contacts and accounts. SalesIntel provides AI+Human-verified contact data with 95% accuracy that feeds the CRM and the rest of the stack.

How do you successfully implement a new sales tool?

Plan for change management before you buy: set goals, assign an owner, and decide how the tool fits each step of your sales process. Treat the initial training as step zero, then run ongoing training, track adoption, and adjust how the tool is used as features are added and your team grows. Skaled’s technology hype curve shows that tools that are set up and then forgotten end in churn. The same applies to a data source like SalesIntel, which delivers the most value when it is built into reps’ daily workflow.

How do you choose the right tools for your sales tech stack?

Start with your sales process and find the steps where reps lose the most time, then pick tools that remove that work and integrate with your CRM. Compare data accuracy, ease of use, integration options, and the vendor’s support and update cadence. For data, choose a source that verifies its records, such as SalesIntel, which combines AI automation with human verification.

How is AI changing the sales tech stack?

AI is taking over more of the manual work in a sales tech stack, including prospect research, email drafting, call analysis, and forecasting. Salesforce’s 2026 State of Sales report found that 54% of sellers have used AI agents and nearly 9 in 10 plan to by 2027. SalesIntel combines ICP modeling, buying intent signals, and buying committee activation so AI agents can automate prospecting while your team builds relationships.

Author Bio: Jake Dunlap designs repeatable, sustainable sales models and processes that outperform industry standards. As the Founder and CEO of Skaled, Jake helps executives around the world accelerate business growth with data-backed sales strategies. Before building Skaled, he held the roles of VP of Sales at Nowait (acquired by Yelp), Head of Sales + Customer Success at Chartbeat, and VP of Sales at Glassdoor (acquired by Recruit Holdings for $1.2 billion in 2018).

Connect with Jake Dunlap