Top 5 Trends That Will Impact Sales Operations in 2026
- SalesOps
- 12 min
- Updated: July 23, 2026
Sales operations spent the last two years absorbing AI into an already-complex stack. 2026 is the year that absorption gets tested for real: Gartner’s research finds over 60% of sales teams now use generative AI, but only about one in three report genuine productivity gains from it. That gap, between adopting AI and actually getting value from it, is the thread running through every trend below.
Gartner’s own framing for sales operations leaders heading into 2026 is blunt: the operating model that worked in the past is no longer relevant. Salesops has to reassess where it invests, moving away from generic tool rollouts toward sales transformation, real data analytics, and disciplined AI utilization. That’s a meaningfully different mandate than “add more tools” or “get buy-in for the tech stack,” which is roughly where this conversation sat a few years ago.
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What is Sales Operations (SalesOps)?
Sales operations is the function responsible for removing friction from the sales process so reps can sell faster, more predictably, and with less manual overhead. It’s the team that builds and maintains the sales tech stack, designs process and territory structure, and increasingly, according to Gartner’s own research, supports five or more groups across the business while allocating roughly 68% of its time to nonclient-facing work. Sales ops has a direct line to revenue, and it’s become a more cross-functional, more analytically demanding role than the “keep the CRM running” job it used to be.
The 5 Trends Shaping Sales Operations in 2026
1. AI Moves From Experimentation to Governed Execution
The headline number for 2026 isn’t adoption. Adoption is already high. It’s the gap between adoption and results. With most sales teams now using generative AI in some form but only a third seeing real productivity gains, the sales ops mandate has shifted from “get AI deployed” to “figure out where it’s actually working and govern the rest.” Gartner names this directly as the top 2026 priority for chief sales officers: building a sales-centric AI portfolio roadmap tied to specific commercial outcomes, rather than a scattershot rollout of whatever tool looked impressive in a demo.
What this looks like in practice: sales ops leaders auditing which AI use cases are tied to a measurable outcome (forecast accuracy, time saved per rep, faster deal-risk detection) and which ones are running on faith. The tools that survive that audit tend to be the ones grounded in real, complete data rather than inference, since an AI feature working from gaps produces confident, wrong output rather than a cautious one.
2. GTM Motions Get Rebuilt Around Buyer Preference, Not Rep Convenience
The number of B2B buyers who’d prefer a rep-free purchase experience is at 67%, and buyers now weigh an average of seven information sources before a rep is meaningfully involved. But the same research found 69% of buyers still come back to a human rep specifically to validate AI-generated insights before finalizing a decision. The rep’s role hasn’t disappeared. It’s moved from primary information source to the point of confidence and validation at specific moments in the journey, and sales ops is the function responsible for redesigning the GTM motion around that shift rather than the old linear funnel.
You don’t necessarily need a salesperson anymore. You need a sense maker. Someone who can help buyers make sense of all the data and information available to them.
Practically, this means fewer generic top-of-funnel touchpoints and more investment in the specific moments that Gartner’s research shows still require a human: complex objection handling, contract negotiation, and validating a buyer’s own AI-assisted research. Sales ops teams that keep measuring rep activity the old way (call volume, email sequences) are optimizing for a motion buyers are actively moving away from.
3. Sales Ops Becomes the Data-Readiness Function for Agentic AI
Clean data has been a Salesops priority for years. What’s different in 2026 is why it matters. MuleSoft’s 2026 Connectivity Benchmark found that half of enterprise AI agents currently operate in isolated silos, and Gartner projects 60% of AI projects will be abandoned through 2026 specifically because the underlying data wasn’t ready for AI to use. That reframes data quality from a hygiene task IT or RevOps handles in the background to a direct precondition for whether any of the AI investment in trend #1 actually pays off.
The practical shift: Salesops teams auditing CRM completeness before, not after, rolling out an AI feature on top of it. A stage field that’s wrong, a stakeholder who was never logged as a contact, an activity that never made it into the opportunity record, these used to just produce a slightly-off forecast a manager could catch. Fed into an AI agent acting on that data directly, the same gaps produce a wrong output at machine speed, with nobody reviewing it first.
4. Buying-Group Intelligence Becomes a Formal Discipline, Not a Best Practice
Multithreading has been “good advice” in sales for years. In 2026 it’s closer to a measurable operating requirement, because the buying committees it’s meant to cover have kept growing. Gartner puts the average B2B deal at 6 to 10 stakeholders, with enterprise deals frequently reaching 17 or more, most of whom never get added as a CRM contact unless something automatically catches them.
Salesops teams are increasingly treating buying-committee coverage as a trackable metric, not just a coaching point: how many contacts are actually mapped per opportunity, how engaged each one is, and where coverage has gone stale. That requires detecting stakeholders from actual email and calendar activity rather than relying on a rep to remember to add them, which is a data-capture problem as much as a sales-process one.
Dan Jiao
VP RevOps & Strategy, Signifyd
By far the most impactful tool to understand our buyers and their influence. Almost immediately we got the visibility we needed for a long time
5. Sales Managers Become the Priority Investment, Not Just Sellers
Gartner names this trend explicitly as one of the top three CSO priorities for 2026: maximizing the impact of sales managers, since organizations have historically invested heavily in seller effectiveness while underinvesting in the managers responsible for developing sellers day to day. The redesign Gartner recommends is specific: hire and develop managers for a distinct set of coaching-oriented competencies rather than simply promoting the top individual performer, and close the gap between a manager’s formal job description and what they actually spend their time doing.
For sales ops, this shows up as a shift in where enablement and technology investment goes. A manager trying to run a real, individualized coaching program across a team needs the same kind of complete, real-time deal and activity data a rep needs, arguably more, since they’re trying to diagnose patterns across many reps at once rather than one deal at a time.
Sales Operations Trends Compared
|
Trend
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What's driving it
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What Sales Ops should do
|
|---|---|---|
|
AI moves to governed execution
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High adoption, low measured ROI
|
Audit AI use cases against specific outcomes before scaling
|
|
GTM rebuilt around buyer preference
|
67% want rep-free experience, 69% still want human validation
|
Redesign the motion around validation moments, not volume
|
|
Data readiness for agentic AI
|
50% of AI agents run in silos; 60% of AI projects abandoned
|
Fix CRM completeness before layering on AI
|
|
Buying-group intelligence formalized
|
Buying committees now 6-17+ stakeholders
|
Track coverage and engagement as a real metric
|
|
Sales managers become priority investment
|
Historic underinvestment in manager development
|
Redesign manager role and enablement, not just rep tools
|
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What is the biggest sales operations trend for 2026?
The gap between AI adoption and AI results. Most sales teams have adopted generative AI in some form, but Gartner’s research finds only about a third see genuine productivity gains, which is pushing sales ops toward disciplined, outcome-tied AI governance rather than broad tool rollouts.
Q. How has B2B buyer behavior changed for 2026?
Buyers are doing more independent research before engaging a rep (Gartner puts preference for a rep-free experience at 67%), but the majority still return to a human specifically to validate AI-generated insights before deciding. The rep’s role has shifted from primary information source to validator at key decision points.
Q. Why does data quality matter more for sales operations now?
Because a growing share of CRM data now feeds AI agents that act on it directly rather than a person reviewing it first. Data gaps that used to just produce a misleading report can now produce a wrong automated decision, which raises the stakes on data readiness specifically ahead of any AI rollout.
Q. Is multithreading still relevant given how buyer behavior has changed?
More relevant, not less. Buying committees have grown to 6 to 10 stakeholders on average and 17 or more on enterprise deals, which makes systematic buying-group coverage a bigger factor in deal outcomes than it was when multithreading first became common sales advice.
RevOps Continues to Absorb Sales Operations Into a Broader Function
The direction Nektar and most of the industry have pointed to for a few years now continues: sales operations increasingly operates as part of a broader revenue operations function spanning sales, marketing, and customer success rather than as an isolated department. A 2026 survey of over 1,200 B2B companies found 78% now have a dedicated RevOps function, up from 48% in 2023, a real acceleration rather than a plateau.
RevOps does everything sales ops does, plus keeps marketing and customer success aligned to the same data and the same goals. For sales ops leaders, the practical implication of the five trends above is the same one running through all of them: the AI roadmap, the buyer-aligned GTM motion, the data readiness work, the buying-group tracking, and the manager-enablement redesign all work better when they’re built on a single, shared source of truth across revenue functions, not a sales-only view of the business.
Get a free CRM scan to see how ready your own pipeline data is for the AI layer sales ops is being asked to build in 2026, or subscribe to The Revenue Lounge podcast for ongoing conversations with operations leaders navigating this shift firsthand.
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