Although sales technology has never been easier to buy, teams struggle to use it. All of a sudden, your salespeople have a powerful new AI tool at their fingertips but then you check the data usage and almost no one is touching it.
No, it’s not just your team. According to Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, 46% of SaaS licenses are underutilized or sitting completely unused. Nearly half of the software companies are paying for is collecting dust.
Not only does that mean the money is wasted, but the promise of what the tool can do is never realized. It is a double hit to your performance.
The tool’s capabilities were never in question
When I talk with executives both with the companies buying sales software and the companies building it, I tell them the same thing. These tools are far more disruptive to a salesperson’s routine than anyone expects going in.
They are capable of doing so many things for your team, but they are also forcing your teams to operate in new ways. The software does what it promises, but the people need to make adjustments to the way they operate to see value of from it.
I recently got a note from a sales leader who’d been checking in with his frontline managers to see how they were doing with their new AI tool. Their usage had not been great, so he was shocked that nobody was asking for more training.
He was told that people understood what the tool did and they understood how they were supposed to use it. The gap wasn’t knowledge; it was lack of routine. The struggle was getting the tool woven into their rhythm of the day, every day, until using it felt automatic.
That’s the part nobody budgets for.
Most rollouts plan carefully for training with different dashboard and workflows. That’s useful and necessary. But training only answers “how does this work?” It never answers the question your salespeople are actually asking: “Why would I change what I’ve been doing for years to use this?”
Salespeople are human so they are naturally creatures of routine. They’ve built a process that earns them a living. When you ask them to drop a step they trust and swap in a tool they don’t trust yet, and you’re asking them to change their behavior in the middle of a job they’re measured on every single day.
It’s a hard ask and it’s exactly where most rollouts quietly stall.
Plan ahead with an adoption strategy
Before you add the next tool to your team’s repertoire, ask a sharper question. Not just “how do we train them on it?” but “what do they actually need to adopt it?”
In practice, that looks like a few things working together. Coaching from frontline leaders who reinforce the new behavior in real customer conversations, not just in a kickoff session. Building the tool into your existing sales process so it’s part of how the job gets done, instead of one more task bolted onto an already-full day. And lastly, giving people the room to build confidence and momentum until the new way is simply the way they work. That takes time, so make sure your launch plan has enough runway!
It’s rarely the tool that drives ROI on sales technology. It’s how well the company manages the shift to using it.
Including change management in your roadmap is usually the difference between software that transforms your team’s performance or one that becomes another cautionary tale in that 46%.
