57% of the "Best" Marketing & Sales Software Is New This Year

"In the future, every app will have 15 minutes of fame."

That riff on an Andy Warhol quote popped in my head as I was reviewing the Top 50 lists for marketing and sales from G2's 2026 Best Software Awards released this week.

57% of the products on these combined "Best of" lists weren't there in 2025. There was 54% turnover on the marketing list, and 60% on sales.

Think about how crazy that is. It's like the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart more than a classic ranking of software.

But it aligns with data from Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index, which I covered last week. In 2025, organizations added 34% new tools to their tech stacks. Yet overall stack size grew only 11% — 305 total apps on average, up from 275. New apps came in as old ones churned out. (Zylo's report breaks out more precise app counts based on company size, from 152 for SMBs to 660 for large enterprises.)

Zylo measures procurement behavior. G2 measures user satisfaction. But both say the same thing: the stack is a river, not a lake.

Two trends in this year's winners point to where the energy is heading — and both lead back to ecosystem gravity.

The single biggest mover on either list is trumpet, a digital sales room (DSR) platform, which jumped 38 positions to #11 on the sales list. Aligned, another DSR, climbed 34 spots to #16. A year ago, both were clinging to the bottom of the rankings. Now they're in the Top 20.

Interactive demo platforms are surging in tandem: Consensus climbed 9 spots to #5 in sales. Navattic rose 11 to #18. Storylane jumped 12 to #23.

Five buyer enablement tools, all rising sharply, forming a distinct cluster in the Sales Top 25.

What unites them is a shift in who controls the sales process. DSRs replace the chaos of email threads and scattered PDFs with a single trackable workspace — a microsite for the deal. Interactive demos let prospects experience the product without waiting for a rep to schedule a walkthrough. Both shift the center of control from the seller to the buyer.

These tools also matter for the agentic AI conversation. DSRs and interactive demos are building the surfaces agents will operate on: structured, context-rich environments where an agent can engage a buyer, serve the right content, answer questions, and advance a deal within a governed, trackable space.

A couple of examples: trumpet's "Casey" AI provides in-context deal coaching based on buyer engagement signals. Storylane's "Lily" agent turns product demos into conversational experiences — demos that AI doesn't just generate but actively inhabits.

Gartner projected 30% of B2B sales cycles will be managed through digital sales rooms by 2026. Given the velocity in the G2 data, that looks conservative.

Partnership and ecosystem management tools are also clustering on these lists in a way they haven't before. impact.com appeared on both the marketing (#18) and sales (#32) lists. Awin surged 24 spots to #21 in marketing. PartnerStack and ZINFI debuted on the sales list.

The infrastructure of partner-led growth — co-selling, ecosystem-qualified leads, partner-sourced pipeline — is now showing up in user satisfaction rankings, not just on the marketing side but in the sales motion.

But the more telling signal — and this connects directly to the CaaS thesis I've been developing — is where the fastest-rising tools are choosing to live. The buyer enablement cluster isn't succeeding in isolation. trumpet, Consensus, Navattic, Storylane, and Aligned all integrate with both HubSpot and Salesforce. These tools didn't try to replace the platforms. They built on top of them, using CRM data and deal workflows as context, making both themselves and the platforms more valuable.

The same dynamic is visible across the broader lists. Many of the top-ranked sales tools maintain integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot's marketplaces. Many of the marketing tools that don't integrate with those platforms orbit other centers of gravity, such as Shopify for e-commerce.

The G2 data and the Zylo data point to the same conclusion: with 57% annual turnover in "best" tools and 34%+ annual stack churn, the stack is becoming less of a fixed monument and more of a fluid canvas, constantly recomposed, drawn to whatever delivers the most value right now.

Features are depreciating assets in this environment, especially as AI compresses time-to-build. What holds up better: context, ecosystem, and the trust that comes from deep domain expertise.

The platforms at the top of both lists — HubSpot, Salesforce — aren't there because of any single feature. They're there because they're the coordinating layer, the accumulated context that makes every other tool in the stack more coherent. The more the periphery churns, the more valuable the stable center becomes.

The fastest-rising new entrants reinforce the point. The buyer enablement tools succeed precisely because they embed in the ecosystem, using platform data as their foundation.

This is the direction I see behind what I've been calling context-as-a-service (CaaS) — platforms that focus less on any single capability and more on providing the coordinating context for a growing sea of apps and agents, commercial and custom alike. The G2 and Zylo data may not prove that thesis yet, but they certainly rhyme with it. The platforms at the center are valued for coherence, and the tools rising fastest are the ones that plug into that coherence rather than standing apart from it.

A year from now, these G2 lists will look different again. That used to feel like a problem — instability in a category that was supposed to be mature. But maybe maturity in martech doesn't mean settling down. Maybe it means getting better at moving.

The river keeps flowing.

Scott

P.S. Please take a few minutes to take our survey for the State of Martech 2026 on which marketing use cases you’re using AI in an existing SaaS product, using a new AI-native tool, or have built your own custom AI app or agent. Thank you!