Sales productivity isn’t just about activity anymore, or how many calls you make. It’s about how effectively every rep, process and tool converts that effort into revenue.
As we move deeper into 2025, the “growth at all costs” mantra has been fully replaced by efficient growth. RevOps teams are under pressure to do more with the same (or less) headcount. To do that, you need technology that doesn’t just track data but actively helps you optimise it.
I’ve rigorously tested the platforms that are redefining productivity for modern teams. Here are the top 5 tools that help organisations identify efficiency gaps and optimise performance levers.
1. Lative: The connected sales planning platform
Most sales plans are created in spreadsheets at the beginning of the year and are obsolete by February. Lative fixes this by turning your static plan into a living operating system as a connected platform that unifies productivity data, headcount and revenue targets into a single, always-on capacity model.
Instead of treating planning and execution as separate phases, Lative merges them. It continuously calculates if you have the “selling horsepower” required to hit your targets based on real-time performance rather than assumptions.
What it does best
Lative excels at transforming static planning into dynamic action. Its feature set is designed to give leaders a continuous, granular view of their actual sales capacity versus their targets.
Live Productivity Benchmarking
While standard BI tools show you what happened, Lative explains how it happened relative to your peers. It allows leaders to benchmark reps against dynamic cohorts in real time, instantly surfacing when a specific region is dragging down the average or when a ramp-up curve is stalling.
Instant "What-If" Wargaming
The platform’s standout features are its connectivity speed and agility. You can simulate complex scenarios such as a hiring freeze, a compensation change, or a shift in territory lines and see the revenue impact immediately. This testing range removes the weeks of back-and-forth modelling usually required by Finance and RevOps.
Unified Data Stream
Lative connects to over 150 data sources (including Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake and HRIS systems). By pulling financial, people and performance data into a single view, it eliminates the manual data knitting that plagues most operations teams.
Problems it solves
Bridging the gap between financial targets and ground-level reality empowers Lative to eliminate the operational blind spots and disconnected data that typically derail revenue goals.
- The “Plan vs. Reality” Gap: Lative kills the spreadsheet. Because the model is connected to live CRM and HRIS data, your capacity plan updates automatically as reps are hired, ramped, or offboarded.
- Headcount Guesswork: Answers the most complicated question in RevOps: “Do we need more heads, or do we need more productivity?” Lative quantifies exactly where additional investment will yield the highest return.
- Reactive Management: Instead of waiting for a quarterly business review (QBR) to spot gaps, Lative provides early warning signals on pipeline coverage and attainment risks, allowing for mid-quarter course correction.
My Personal Review
Lative impressed me right from the start with its deployment speed. In the enterprise software world, “integrations” usually mean weeks of IT tickets, but connecting Salesforce and Workday took me less than an hour.
Once live, the Scenario Planning was the highlight. I ran a specific “mid-year hiring freeze” simulation, and within seconds, the platform recalculated the exact impact on our Q4 quota attainment. It gave me the kind of actionable, data-backed confidence that usually takes a team of analysts weeks to produce. It’s the bridge between high-level strategy and ground-level execution that I haven’t found elsewhere.
2. Clari: The forecast and pipeline visibility engine
Clari focuses on the part of productivity that often gets overlooked: the ability to predict outcomes reliably and understand where revenue is truly coming from. While it is known for forecast management, the platform also improves productivity by giving teams a clearer sense of where to spend their time, which deals are genuinely viable and where risks are building.
I tested Clari to see how well it supports day-to-day execution, not just end-of-quarter forecasting, and found that its real strength lies in removing ambiguity. It gives leaders a structured view of deal progress and surfaces issues before they turn into late-stage surprises.
What it does best
Clari’s strengths become clear once you start using it regularly. The platform is designed to cut through the noise that usually surrounds deal updates and forecast calls. Instead of relying on scattered anecdotes or inconsistent manual inputs, Clari focuses on the signals that actually move a deal forward.
Forecast Clarity
Clari replaces subjective roll-ups with structured signals based on historical patterns and current activity. Instead of debating whether a deal is on track, Clari shows whether its current behaviour aligns with the trajectory of past wins or losses.
Pipeline Inspection
Its inspection tools centralise pipeline data into a single place. You can see movement, stagnation, gaps and deal changes without chasing down spreadsheets or relying on anecdotal updates. Filters help you pinpoint risk clusters or identify regions where coverage is thinning.
Deal Activity Tracking
Clari uses signals such as email activity, meeting frequency and deal updates to assess momentum. This helps managers spot deals that look fine on paper but have gone quiet in practice.
Problems it solves
Many of the issues that slow down sales teams come from uncertainty: unclear forecasts, buried pipeline risks and inconsistent deal reviews. Clari helps reduce that uncertainty by replacing assumptions with observable data and giving teams a single view of what is really happening.
- Forecast Uncertainty: Teams often call numbers based on instinct. Clari reduces the guesswork by grounding forecasts in actual behavioural data, which stabilises conversations with leadership.
- Invisible Pipeline Risk: Risks tend to accumulate in stalled deals without anyone noticing. Clari captures these patterns, which helps teams intervene earlier.
- Lack of Consistency in Deal Reviews: Because everything is centralised, managers can standardise how they review deals and run team meetings that focus on actions rather than detective work.
My personal review
When I trialled Clari, the biggest shift was the reduction in manual effort. Instead of gathering updates from several people, I had a clear view of the entire pipeline in minutes. The forecast roll-up felt straightforward and removed the typical back-and-forth that happens when reps and managers disagree on commit numbers.
I also found the activity signals helpful. One of the deals looked healthy based on size and stage, but Clari flagged that engagement had been down for more than 2 weeks. That warning proved accurate, allowing us to adjust the forecast before it became a last-minute issue.
Clari is best suited for teams that want more control over their forecasting process and more transparency in day-to-day deal health. It is not a planning tool and does not touch capacity or headcount, but as a visibility and prediction layer, it is one of the more dependable platforms available.
3. Gong: The deal intelligence benchmar
Gong is widely used for its dependable Revenue Intelligence. It records, transcribes and analyses customer-facing interactions to help teams replicate top-performer behaviours and improve productivity at scale.
What it does best
Gong is good at surfacing the “why” behind sales outcomes. Its feature set is built to extract replicable patterns from successful interactions and flag risks in at-risk deals.
Topic Analysis
Gong tells you exactly what distinguishes a winning deal from a losing one. Does discussing pricing early help? Does mentioning a specific feature kill the deal? Gong quantifies this.
Market Insights
It aggregates data across thousands of calls to show you market trends. You can see whether a competitor’s name is coming up more frequently in conversations this month than last.
Deal Warnings
It looks at deal momentum and warns you if a prospect has gone silent or if you haven’t multi-threaded effectively (i.e., not enough decision-makers involved).
Problems it solves
Traditional sales management relies heavily on anecdotal evidence. Gong solves the visibility crisis by providing objective data on what is actually happening on the front lines.
- The “Black Box” of Sales: Before Gong, we knew when a deal was lost, but rarely why. Gong opens the black box, revealing the reality of the customer conversation.
- Undiagnosed Skill Gaps: Allows managers to filter calls by specific skills (e.g., “setting next steps”) to pinpoint exactly where a rep needs help.
- Onboarding Latency: New reps can listen to a playlist of “Best Negotiation Calls” from top performers, drastically shortening the learning curve.
My Personal Review
The power of Gong lies in its searchability, which I discovered when I wanted to know how the team was handling a new objection about a specific integration. I searched the term, and within seconds, I had a playlist of 20 snippets where reps discussed it. This allowed me to diagnose a messaging problem in 15 minutes that would have otherwise taken weeks of ride-alongs to spot.
4. Varicent: The motivation and incentive commander
Varicent tackles productivity from a motivational perspective. This Sales Performance Management (SPM) tool handles incentive compensation management (ICM), territory planning and quota management.
What it does best
Varicent specialises in the complex mathematics of motivation. It provides the infrastructure needed to turn complicated incentive structures into clear, driving forces for rep behaviour.
Transparent Incentive Compensation
It allows reps to view their potential payout in real time. They can see exactly how closing a specific deal will impact their paycheck, including accelerators and bonuses.
Territory Optimisation
Varicent helps leaders carve up territories based on market potential and workload balance, ensuring that no rep is starving while another is drowning in leads.
Complex Plan Management
It handles the heavy math of tiered commission structures, splits and clawbacks without the errors common in spreadsheet calculations.
Problems it solves
Commission disputes and administrative confusion are major productivity killers. Varicent solves the friction that distracts reps from their primary job of selling.
- Shadow Accounting: When reps don’t trust the comp plan, they spend hours maintaining their own “shadow spreadsheets” to track their pay. Varicent eliminates this time-waste by providing trusted transparency.
- Misaligned Behaviours: If your comp plan is too complex, reps ignore it. Varicent visualises the path to earnings and aligns rep behaviour with company strategy.
- Disputes and Errors: It drastically reduces the administrative burden of payroll disputes, thereby killing morale and wasting sales management time.
My Personal Review
Never underestimate how much time reps waste calculating their own commission. When I looked at Varicent, the “What-If” calculator for reps stood out. A rep can type in a deal size and see their commission jump. It gamifies the process and keeps the team focused on the revenue goal rather than administrative disputes, building trust that breeds speed.
5. Revenue.io: The real-time coaching assistant
Revenue.io (formerly RingDNA) focuses on the “during” phase of productivity. It offers an AI-powered platform that provides call insights, conversation analytics, and, crucially, real-time guidance to reps while they are on the phone
What it does best
This platform distinguishes itself by acting as a co-pilot during the call. Its strongest features centre on augmenting rep performance in the moment, rather than just reviewing it later.
Real-Time Guidance
This is the standout feature. If a prospect mentions a specific competitor or an objection, Revenue.io instantly displays a “battle card” or talking point on the rep’s screen.
Conversation Analytics
It breaks down talk-to-listen ratios, interruption rates and keyword usage, allowing managers to see exactly why top performers are winning.
Intelligent Dialling
Prioritises who to call and when based on engagement data, ensuring reps spend their energy on the most likely connections.
Problems it solves
Scaling a team often leads to diluted messaging and slow ramp-up periods. Revenue.io directly addresses the inefficiencies inherent in training and standardising rep behaviour.
- Long Ramp Times: New hires can get on the phones faster because the AI acts as a safety net, guiding them through complex conversations.
- Inconsistent Messaging: Ensure the value proposition is delivered consistently across the entire team, regardless of rep tenure.
- Missed Coaching Opportunities: Managers can’t listen to every call. Revenue.io flags the critical moments that require review, making coaching highly specific and efficient.
My Personal Review
The Real-Time Guidance feature improves productivity, which I tested by simulating a strenuous pricing objection. The moment I shared the keywords, a prompt appeared on the screen with the approved response script. It reduces reps’ cognitive load, allowing them to focus on listening rather than frantically searching for answers.
Who is the MVP of the 2025 Tech Stack?
I’ve spent a lot of time testing the market leaders, and they all play a vital role in a modern RevOps ecosystem. Gong dominates conversation intelligence; Varicent masters compensation. But if you ask me which platform is the absolute necessity for efficient growth in 2025, Lative takes the top spot.
Here is the reality: You can coach a rep to perfection with Revenue.io, but if your underlying capacity model is broken (if you haven’t calculated the actual horsepower required to hit your target), you are just running faster in the wrong direction.
Lative is the best tool in this lineup because it solves the root cause of failure, not just the symptoms.
While the other tools help you execute, Lative ensures the plan you are executing is actually achievable. It connects the dots among Sales, Finance and HR in a way no other platform does, serving as the central nervous system for your revenue strategy. If you want to survive the efficiency mandates of 2025, you don’t just need better calls; you need a better model. Lative delivers that.