CROs are investing in tech stacks that aren’t solving their problems, survey finds

Sometimes, more technology means more problems.

That’s certainly the case for 500 revenue leaders surveyed for a new report from software company SciFin. The report found that CROs and their direct reports are investing in upgrades to their tech stacks that just aren’t paying off. And it’s costing them more than just money: Revenue leaders said they’re in over six hours of meetings per week just to figure out deal status, and the survey found that an average of 7.6 team members have to spend at least half their time on manual data-revenue work.

“We were piecing together our CRM, Slack, and call transcripts just to run the forecast,” respondent Surojit Chatterjee, the founder and CEO of agentic employee company Ema, told SciFin.

The culprit, according to the report, isn’t actually the technology itself—it’s how revenue teams are using it. A majority of respondents said that they buy new technology to signal innovation, to avoid acknowledging that other technology isn’t working, or because their competitors did so. Less than a quarter of respondents said that “every new tool solved a distinct problem that existing systems could not address.”

“Every tool we added meant more fragmentation and a bigger bill,” Bryan Smith, CEO of cloud services company Expedient, told SciFin, “not better decisions.”

Because revenue professionals are adding to their tech stacks irrespective of a specific need, the software isn’t actually able to deliver them deal forecasts. More than 75% of respondents said they rely on outside sources of information to “understand what is happening.” This is what SciFin calls the revenue context gap: “the distance between the information an organization possesses and the understanding required to make a decision.”

All that confusion can have serious business consequences: Nearly 80% of respondents said that a deal fell through even though their tech stacks indicated it was “on track,” and almost 75% said they lost customers.

So what’s the solution? Revenue leaders told SciFin that when clients and deals are at risk, they need “earlier warning, more time to act, a clearer understanding of performance, and less need to move between systems.”

“In this hyper-growth, we need information quickly,” Reid Conklin, VP of sales at Bridge IT Consulting and a respondent to the survey, told SciFin. “And we need to be able to make decisions very quickly.”