The average B2B growth team now runs fourteen tools: a CRM, an outreach sequencer, a dialer, three analytics dashboards, and a long tail of point solutions nobody remembers buying. Every one of them made sense at purchase. Together they are why your pipeline reporting takes a week.
The instinct is to add one more tool to glue the others together. Resist it. The teams moving fastest in 2026 are doing the opposite — collapsing their stack around a small set of systems that own outcomes, not tasks.
Start with the workflows, not the tools
List every recurring GTM motion you run: outbound, inbound routing, expansion, renewal plays. For each one, write down every tool it touches. In our experience the median workflow crosses four tools — and every crossing is a risk.
Every tool crossing is a place where data gets stale, a workflow silently fails, or an owner goes missing.
Now invert the list. Any tool that appears in only one workflow is a candidate for the cut. Any tool that appears only as a pass-through — data in, data out, no decision made — is a strong candidate.
What survived the cut at 40 teams
Across the last forty stack-consolidation projects we ran with customers, the survivors converged on the same five systems: a CRM as the record of truth, one warehouse, one data enrichment source, a support desk, and one execution layer that runs the workflows between them.
Everything else — enrichment, scoring, routing, sequencing, triggers, alerting, reporting — moved into agent-run workflows. Not because it’s magic, but because outcomes need a single owner, and a stack of fourteen tools has none.
The one-week test
If you can’t trace a closed deal back through every workflow that touched it in under five minutes, your stack is telling you where the cut should start. Give the five survivors a week — and everything else a cancellation date.
