According to ZDNet, sales teams are facing a massive productivity crisis caused by what Dropbox’s Maria Groeschel calls “business sprawl.” Reps are now navigating ten or more different platforms just to get a single customer view, spending valuable time manually searching across Slack, Salesforce, Google Docs, and Gong notes. SpiceWorks’ Jeff Gretler notes this fragmentation creates a “significant time tax” that pulls from high-value activities. The solution isn’t more heroic individual efforts but building scalable systems that connect existing tools rather than adding new ones. Companies are shifting focus from traditional metrics like pipeline growth to rep effectiveness, recognizing that modern buyers demand deeper personalization over raw speed.
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The tool overload epidemic
Here’s the thing: we’ve all been there. You’ve got customer data in one system, communication in another, notes somewhere else, and nobody can find anything when they need it. Gretler calls this “business sprawl”—and it’s killing sales productivity. Teams aren’t slow because they’re lazy. They’re slow because they’re spending half their day playing digital detective, piecing together customer context from a dozen different sources.
Think about it: how many times have you seen deals stall because someone couldn’t find the right information at the right time? This isn’t about working harder—it’s about working smarter. The constant context-switching between platforms creates what Groeschel describes as a “time tax” that nobody budgeted for.
Why hero culture is killing your sales team
Every sales org has that one rep who always saves the day at the last minute. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: that’s actually a sign of failure, not success. Gretler puts it perfectly—those herculean efforts are often just “getting you to a baseline” rather than achieving breakthrough success.
When you’re constantly relying on heroics, what you’re really saying is your systems are broken. Groeschel asks the key question: “Does it get us to a point where we no longer have to rely on heroics in the final hour?” If the answer is no, you’re building a fragile organization that can’t scale.
Connecting, not replacing
The smart approach isn’t to throw out all your existing tools and force everyone onto some magical new platform. That just creates more sprawl. Instead, companies like Dropbox are focusing on creating unified spaces that connect to applications reps already use. Tools like Dropbox Dash aim to bring context to sales tasks without forcing behavioral changes.
Basically, the goal is to make the path of least resistance also the most productive path. When reps can instantly see health signals from customer success or access the latest product positioning without switching contexts, that’s when real efficiency happens.
Effectiveness over activity
We’re finally moving beyond counting calls and emails as productivity metrics. The new focus is on what Groeschel calls “impact”—deals aren’t won in isolation, but when teams move together. The problem? Cross-functional alignment breaks down because teams aren’t working from the same context.
Marketing has their priorities, product has theirs, customer success is focused on something else entirely. When everyone’s reading from different playbooks, even the most heroic individual efforts can’t save the day. The solution is creating that shared space where all teams operate from the same up-to-date information.
So what’s the takeaway? Stop celebrating the firefighting and start fixing the fire hazards. Build systems that work together, measure what actually matters, and create environments where great work happens naturally—not through last-minute heroics.
