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20% ROI Gains: Why AI Is No Longer Optional for Sales Teams in 2026
Amy Osmond Cook
April 28, 2026
20% ROI Gains: Why AI Is No Longer Optional for Sales Teams in 2026
In Today’s Email
The 2026 Benchmarks Report is here!
The Top 10 Sales Stories of the Week
Tip of the week
And more!
The 2026 Benchmarks Report State of GTM is finally here!
This year’s benchmark is our most comprehensive yet. It’s built with data from $78 billion in pipeline value, 361,000 opportunities, and 2,500 revenue reps.
Inside the report, you’ll see:
ICP misalignment can reduce win rates by up to 75%
Balanced pipelines convert 57% higher than overloaded ones
Expertise-based routing can increase win rates from 5% to 40%
Click here to get the comprehensive report today!
The Top 10 Sales Stories This Week
We are a third of the way through 2026. The gap between teams using AI effectively and those still running manual playbooks is showing up directly in the pipeline.
Here’s the good news: Companies using AI in their sales processes have seen revenue increases of 3% to 15% and sales ROI improvements of 10% to 20%. Here’s why small improvements in conversion rates, deal velocity, and average deal size compound into substantial top-line growth.
Revenue goals must be dynamic, not locked in January and ignored until December. Here’s why.
Yet for all that spending, organizations across industries still cannot answer a basic question: are these programs actually driving revenue? Let’s get better acquainted with SPIFF.
When the vast majority of reps miss their number, you have a system problem. Fixing unrealistic targets and unbalanced territories restores team confidence.
Manual commission math drains operational bandwidth and erodes trust. Software cuts errors and keeps your reps focused on closing deals instead of shadow-accounting.
6. 57% of employees say working for commissions or bonuses motivates them to perform better at work.
That means more than half of your team is actively looking to their compensation plan for direction. When you get it right, you unlock extra effort and strategic focus. When you get it wrong, you incentivize the very behaviors that erode margins and customer trust.
High adoption does not guarantee high effectiveness when your territory plans live in spreadsheets, your forecasts rely on subjective judgment, and your commission calculations trigger disputes every pay period. The problem is not effort but fragmentation.
Short-term incentives work best when tied to specific outcomes like competitive displacements or new product launches.
Annual planning cycles leave teams misaligned before the quarter even starts. Dynamic platforms let you adjust territories and quotas in real time.
Tool sprawl creates dangerous data silos. Consolidating into a unified RevOps platform connects your planning, execution, and compensation data beautifully.
Sales Tip of the Week: Fix your foundation before layering on AI
Everyone says they want AI in their GTM strategy. Few can explain what that actually means. AI amplifies your existing processes. If your territory design is broken, AI just helps you execute a bad plan faster.
Before you invest in predictive deal scoring or automated outreach, centralize your data. Connect your planning directly to your execution and compensation systems.
Data is the easy part. Turning it into a plan your team actually follows is the hard part. If your strategy looks great on a spreadsheet but breaks the moment a territory shifts, you lack a real plan. You just have a rough draft.
The Sales Strategy Map
The industry’s top summits for optimizing territory planning, sharpening forecasting, and hitting targets.
SaaStr Annual 2026 - 10,000+ B2B and AI executives, founders, and VCs will come together for the world's largest B2B + AI community event.
Date: May 12–14, 2026
Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
SAMA Annual Conference - The premier event for forward-thinking strategic account management professionals. Find the insights, tools, and community to help you deliver tangible results.
Date: May 18–20, 2026
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference 2026 - Designed for CSOs and sales leaders. Discover innovative frameworks, actionable insights and proven strategies to build resilient, agile and high-performing sales organizations that thrive in the age of AI.
Date: May 19–20, 2026
Location: Las Vegas, NV
Jake Fackrell: AI Won’t Fix Healthcare. But It Will Expose What’s Broken
In this episode of the Go-To-Market Podcast, host Amy Osmond Cook sits down with Jake Fackrell, COO at Savvos Health, for a conversation that challenges one of the most entrenched—and broken—systems in the U.S. economy: healthcare payments.
Jake shares how his early ventures by structuring raw real estate data and building near real-time obituary and death record systems, laid the foundation for tackling healthcare’s biggest inefficiencies.
Jake explains that while most companies try to improve claims processing, Savvos Health asks, what if claims processing didn’t exist at all?
Instead of adding features to a broken model, Jake explains how Savvos Health is doing something far more disruptive:
Eliminating claims processing altogether
Replacing reimbursement cycles with real-time payments
Creating transparent, pre-negotiated pricing before care is delivered
This conversation illustrates what happens when you apply data thinking—and now AI acceleration—to one of the most inefficient financial systems in existence.
Did you hear? Fullcast published a book!
The RevOps Advantage reveals how the best revenue teams operate like world-class pit crews—driving alignment, executing seamless handoffs, and making every move data-driven.
Co-authors Ryan Westwood, Dr. Amy Osmond Cook, and Bala Balabaskaran break down why nearly half of RevOps leaders are investing in AI for sharper insights, and how you can use automation to deliver the accelerated growth your board needs.
 | Amy Osmond Cook, PhD Cofounder and CMO at Fullcast
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