Market Description
Sales force automation (SFA) solutions focus on documenting and addressing the entirety of the sales process—automating and recording the specific stages, actions, and outcomes of the process as a means to improve productivity of the sales force. Modern SFA tools are extending core SFA competencies such as lead, contact, account, and opportunity tracking to also include tools that impact usability and adoption, including data enrichment and platform extensibility.
Sales force automation solutions historically have been fraught with low adoption rates, because sellers have seen these tools not as providing value but rather as “productivity drains” due to the tedious, data-entry-focused legacy user experience. Over the past several years, that paradigm has shifted, as artificial intelligence (AI)-powered “copilots” (or virtual assistants), sleeker user interfaces, and data enrichment features have improved the value proposition for adoption of sales automation solutions. Today, a well-deployed, data-rich sales automation solution can provide insights to sellers that they could not surface themselves—optimizing their daily sales actions as well as highlighting paths to quota with the least amount of effort, identifying deals most likely to close by use of AI/machine learning (ML) analytics.
Vendors included in Constellation’s ShortListTM for SFA are also closing the gap when it comes to configuration and integration with other critical front-office systems. Leveraging additional low-code customization and cloud connectors to more seamlessly integrate and manage data flows between systems and third-party data sources drives shorter deployment times and creates a data-rich, more bespoke system more likely to be seen as valuable by sales users. Low-code environments are especially appealing for smaller businesses that might lack the resources for third-party services but still require strong workflow automation and integration with other systems.
