How sales teams are rethinking their tech stacks post-COVID
Millions of Americans faced the prospect of a return to the office in recent years, and an end to the widespread remote work policies that defined working life during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That doesn't mean working life simply bounced back to its pre-pandemic normal. Companies have changed how they operate since leaving the office in 2020, and many individuals' attitudes toward remote work (and the nature of work itself) have shifted significantly.
That means it's time to think carefully about which aspects of pandemic working life will endure, and which ones will be consigned to the history books. ZoomInfo, the all-in-one AI GTM Platform, has seen its own sales team navigate these post-COVID workplace shifts firsthand. Here's where things stand, according to some key members of ZoomInfo's sales team.
Sales leaders say the focus on maximizing efficiency is likely to persist. Many companies expanded their tech stacks out of necessity during the early phases of the pandemic, with tools that once had limited utility becoming indispensable to a suddenly virtual workforce.
Steven Bryerton, a senior VP of sales at ZoomInfo, says tech tools that have demonstrated value for sales teams trying to meet demanding targets will survive the shift back to in-office and hybrid work.
Bryerton notes that call recording and conversation intelligence, core capabilities of Chorus, ZoomInfo's conversation intelligence product, was the only way to replicate some of the in-person coaching that sales teams relied on when they were working in the same place.
That tech will continue to be a part of the mix, but managers and individual team members also have to remember that new tools can create new responsibilities.
"An individual has to say, 'I'm going to spend time listening to my colleagues so I can get better.' Or your leadership team has to say, 'Hey, we're going to do some call review. Everybody take notes,'" Bryerton says.
Chorus feeds conversation context directly into ZoomInfo's GTM Context Graph, so the intelligence captured in every call becomes part of a unified reasoning layer. Sellers using GTM Workspace get that intelligence surfaced alongside verified contact data and AI-assisted workflows, which means the coaching value of call review compounds into better prospecting and deal execution over time.
Small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are also leveraging more tools to maximize efficiency and compete more effectively. Data from the Connected Commerce Council indicates that 40 percent of SMBs are digitally advanced, using 10 or more software tools to run their businesses, a trend that is likely to persist in today's rapidly evolving business landscape.
"The world where sellers and marketers had just a few tools to survive is gone," Bryerton says.
Building daily rhythms that keep hybrid teams aligned
Sales teams typically thrive in busy, collaborative environments. Remote work sapped that dynamic atmosphere and took away the overheard, incidental lessons that are hard to duplicate without shoulder-to-shoulder sales work.
To compensate, some sales teams adapted their daily workflows to increase communication. ZoomInfo introduced short morning briefings of about 15 minutes to review the previous day's progress and frame the near future.
That morning huddle, Bryerton says, gets the sales team on the same page from the outset and ensures that it's not simply left to each team member to check out the leaderboard.
"That's something that's not going to go away. That's a part of who we are now," Bryerton says.
Effective hybrid team rituals go beyond the morning briefing, though. Weekly pipeline reviews, async deal debrief threads, and structured one-on-ones create the connective tissue that keeps distributed teams coherent. Gallup has identified what it calls the "Manager Squeeze", managers caught between the expectations of senior leadership pushing for return-to-office and employees who have built their lives around flexible arrangements. Sales managers sit squarely in that squeeze, and the teams that navigate it best are the ones where managers have built deliberate rhythms rather than relying on proximity to do the work for them.
The engagement decline every sales leader needs to understand
Employee engagement in the U.S. fell to a 10-year low by 2024, reversing years of pre-pandemic improvement, a structural decline, not a cyclical dip, according to Gallup. For sales leaders, that number isn't an HR abstraction. It shows up in pipeline coverage, quota attainment, and rep turnover.
Gallup has named this pattern "The Great Detachment", the successor to The Great Resignation. Instead of leaving, employees are staying in their jobs while psychologically checking out. The workplace trends driving this shift are real and measurable, and the post-COVID workplace context makes them harder to reverse: the social bonds and ambient accountability that once kept people engaged eroded during the pandemic and haven't fully returned.
For sales teams, a disengaged rep is a different kind of problem than an empty seat. A rep who has resigned gives you a vacancy you can fill. A rep who is physically present but mentally detached misses quota quietly, disengages from coaching, and is often the last person a manager realizes is at risk until the pipeline numbers make it undeniable.
Sales leaders who want to get ahead of this have three levers worth pulling:
Consistent one-on-one cadences that create space for reps to raise concerns before they calcify into disengagement
Clear quota-to-compensation transparency so reps understand exactly what hitting number means for their earnings and career trajectory
Conversation intelligence tools like Chorus to surface coaching moments before disengagement becomes visible in pipeline numbers, a rep who stops engaging with call review or whose talk-to-listen ratio shifts sharply is showing early signals worth catching
Productivity, trust, and the KPI conversation
Millions of knowledge workers doing their jobs from home experienced erosion of the line between their professional and personal lives. Their workdays became longer (SHRM, 2020) and setting firm boundaries is often more difficult.
While software tools may have allowed people to get more done from makeshift home offices, it won't be enough to simply put in more hours when employees return to the office. Karen Hor, an account executive at ZoomInfo, says knowledge workers, and sales professionals in particular, are going to have to work smarter if they hope to keep up.
But as workers move away from working primarily from home, companies should outline their productivity expectations in a way that doesn't abuse trust or create an environment of suspicion. Surfacing intent data signals to reps, showing which accounts are actively researching and which contacts have changed roles, shifts the productivity conversation from activity monitoring to outcome focus.
"A huge factor, aside from getting better quality data, is visibility into team productivity," Hor says. "Tracking productivity is always something that sales leaders want. But some people may feel like, 'Why are you micromanaging me? You hired me to do my job, so trust me.' That's why you have to have KPIs in place. There's always a human element to everything."
When reps have verified contact data and intent signals surfaced in their workflow, productivity metrics become less about surveillance and more about outcomes. The data does the qualifying, so managers can focus coaching on deal execution rather than activity counts.
AI as the next layer of post-COVID workplace disruption
AI isn't arriving into a settled post-COVID workplace. It's landing on top of unresolved tensions around hybrid work, manager burnout, and employee disengagement, and it's compounding each of them, for better or worse. Gallup's research frames this as a layered disruption, and the sales-team lens makes that framing concrete.
The first thing AI changes is what managers need to do. When AI agents in GTM Workspace handle research, outreach drafting, and account prioritization, the manager's job shifts away from monitoring activity and toward coaching on deal strategy and buyer engagement. That's a meaningful upgrade for managers who want to develop their reps, but it requires a deliberate shift in how managers think about their role. The manager who still measures success by calls-made-per-day will find AI tools frustrating rather than liberating.
The second thing AI changes is the engagement risk profile. Reps who feel surveilled by AI tools disengage faster than those who feel augmented by them. The difference isn't the technology, it's the question the technology is designed to answer. AI that surfaces insights helping a rep hit quota creates a different experience than AI that generates reports helping a manager monitor the rep. Sales leaders deploying AI tools should be clear about which one they're building.
The third dimension is workstyle. According to Gallup, roughly 50% of remote-capable employees are "Splitters" who prefer clear boundaries between work and personal time, and 50% are "Blenders" who prefer fluid integration throughout the day. AI-assisted workflows that accommodate post-COVID workplace trends should serve both groups, not impose a single working pattern. GTM Workspace's AI agents work on the rep's schedule: a Splitter can run their prospecting block in a structured two-hour window; a Blender can engage with account research and outreach drafting across the day in shorter bursts. The rep controls the rhythm; the AI handles the research overhead either way.
What the post-COVID workplace means for how sales teams use ZoomInfo
The exec-versus-employee tension on return-to-office is most acute in quota-carrying roles. Data from the Future Forum Pulse survey suggests that 44 percent of executives currently working remotely on a full-time basis want a full return to in-office work, compared to just 17 percent of non-executive knowledge workers. Similarly, 75 percent of executives want to work in the office three to five days per week, compared to just 34 percent of their employees.
For sales teams, that gap has a direct retention implication. Forced full-time office presence without the right tools is a post-COVID workplace strategy that trades short-term visibility for long-term attrition. The reps who leave are often the ones with options, which tends to mean your best performers.
The more durable answer is a tool stack that removes the location dependency entirely. An eagerness to return to the office may correlate to a person's place in the org chart, but a rep's ability to hit quota shouldn't. Sellers who have verified contact data, intent signals, and AI-assisted workflows available in GTM Workspace can be productive in any work arrangement, at their desk, on the road, or working from home.
ZoomInfo's approach to this starts with data: 500M contacts, 135M+ verified phone numbers, and 200M+ verified business emails, continuously refreshed so reps aren't chasing stale records regardless of where they're working. The GTM Context Graph sits on top of that data layer, processing 1.5B+ data points daily to surface not just what's happening in an account, but why, fusing contact data with conversation intelligence, CRM signals, and behavioral patterns into a unified reasoning layer. GTM Workspace is the access lane that brings all of it to the seller's daily workflow, whether they're in a structured office block or working across a distributed day.
That combination is what makes location irrelevant to productivity. Seismic saved 11.5 hours per rep per week using GTM Workspace, with a 54% productivity gain and 39% of pipeline attributed to ZoomInfo signals, results that hold regardless of where those reps were sitting.
The new world of sales doesn't care whether your team is in the office or not. It cares whether your team has the data, intelligence, and workflow to execute. Request a demo to see how ZoomInfo's AI GTM Platform supports hybrid sales teams.
Frequently asked questions about the post-COVID workplace
How has the post-COVID workplace changed sales team productivity?
Remote and hybrid work forced sales teams to replace incidental, in-person coaching with structured digital workflows, morning huddles, call review sessions, and async communication cadences. Teams that built these habits deliberately saw productivity hold or improve; those that didn't saw engagement and pipeline suffer. Tools like Chorus conversation intelligence made remote coaching possible by capturing call intelligence that managers could review asynchronously, so coaching wasn't limited to in-person observation.
What tools do sales teams need for hybrid work?
Hybrid sales teams need tools that work regardless of location: verified contact data so reps aren't chasing stale numbers, intent signals to prioritize which accounts to work, conversation intelligence for async coaching, and a unified workspace that reduces context-switching between platforms. The goal is fewer tools with deeper integration, not more point solutions.
How do sales managers coach remote and hybrid teams effectively?
Effective hybrid sales coaching requires three shifts: move from activity-based monitoring to outcome-based coaching (track pipeline coverage and conversion rates, not login times); use call recording and conversation intelligence to review deals asynchronously, so coaching isn't limited to in-person observation; and build structured team rituals, daily huddles, weekly pipeline reviews, that create the incidental knowledge-sharing that used to happen naturally in an office. The manager's role post-COVID is more deliberate and less ambient.
What KPIs should sales leaders track for hybrid teams?
For hybrid sales teams, the most meaningful KPIs are outcome-oriented: pipeline coverage ratio, opportunity conversion rate, average deal cycle length, and quota attainment by rep. Activity metrics (calls made, emails sent) are less reliable in hybrid environments because they measure effort, not effectiveness. Pairing outcome KPIs with intent data signals, which accounts are actively researching, which contacts have changed roles, gives managers a more accurate picture of where reps should be focusing. Seismic's productivity results, a 54% productivity gain and 11.5 hours saved per rep per week, show what outcome-focused tooling looks like in practice.
Is remote work here to stay after COVID?
Hybrid work has stabilized as the dominant model for knowledge workers, including sales teams. Gallup data shows that hybrid work preferences have held steady since mid-2022 despite return-to-office mandates from many large employers. The more relevant question for sales leaders is not whether remote work persists, but whether their teams have the tools and workflows to perform consistently regardless of where they work.