Market Perspectives

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Sales Engagement: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research. This research is part of a portfolio of ISG Buyers Guides in CRM covering sales, customer service, partners, platform, digital commerce and sales engagement.

Sales engagement is an essential component that expands beyond customer relationship management (CRM), encompassing all interactions and touchpoints between sales teams and customers throughout the sales process. Its primary aim is to develop and progress opportunities by building strong relationships to effectively advance prospects through the sales and buying process. Sales engagement tools can enhance these interactions, making them more targeted, efficient and measurable.

ISG defines sales engagement as the set of digital activities and systems to manage and guide selling to reach its effective outcomes. The distinction between sales engagement and CRM in sales lies primarily in the focus and functionality of each system. CRM is fundamentally about data collection, serving as a repository for various types of information necessary for effective sales operations. This includes product details, account information, the sales organization hierarchy, individual salespeople's profiles and contact details at various accounts. CRM systems must also account for GDPR considerations and security issues related to personal information such as phone numbers and contact details. Essentially, CRM is as much about capturing and organizing data as it is about supporting the sales team.

On the other hand, sales engagement focuses on utilizing the data captured by the CRM. It is about using this data to streamline and enhance the interactions between salespeople and potential or existing customers. Sales engagement platforms cannot perform the functions of CRM because they do not handle all the data capture and organization aspects. Where CRM is concerned with the thorough and secure collection of sales-related data, sales engagement is dedicated to making the most of that data to optimize sales activities.

Sales engagement platforms integrate and streamline various communication channels within the CRM, such as email, phone and social media. This integration ensures that sales representatives can interact seamlessly with both prospects and customers. Automated workflows and sales activity cadences enable sales teams to follow up consistently and promptly, improving customer experiences and increasing conversion rates.

Enhanced personalization is another key element of sales engagement. Utilizing data stored in the CRM, sales engagement tools help tailor communications to meet individual customer needs and preferences. This level of personalization makes interactions more relevant, thereby increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.

Data-driven insights provided by sales engagement platforms play a significant role in refining sales strategies. These platforms offer analytics and tracking capabilities, revealing which interactions are most effective. Many sales engagement systems offer conversational analytics, engagement effectiveness and overall activity analysis to ensure that sales processes are continually assessed against achievement of sales and revenue objectives. By 2026, more than one-half of enterprises will recognize that modernizing processes and SFA systems will be needed to enable new data-driven features that aid in maximizing sales effectiveness to achieve revenue targets.

In addition, individual and team sales coaching and performance improvement are facilitated by sales engagement tools through conversational analytics and activity tracking to ensure adherence to formalized sales processes and sales methodologies. Managers can assess individual and team performance, using insights to coach sales reps and optimize their sales tactics. Sales engagement tools also aid in pipeline and opportunity management by monitoring deal progression and ensuring that no opportunities are neglected. ML and predictive analytics prioritize opportunities based on potential to close and provide guidance on next best actions.

Moreover, sales engagement platforms enhance judgement-based, opportunity-based sales forecasting by analyzing engagement data and historical trends to provide insights such as probability to close win. This helps sales teams and management make informed decisions, allocate resources effectively, and set realistic targets. Machine learning is also used to create both a computer derived aggregate opportunity forecast supplemented with estimation for sales and revenue for opportunities not yet opened and sales from sources such as self-service. Integration with CRM systems ensures that all engagement activities are logged and maintains a comprehensive record of customer interactions. This seamless integration allows for a holistic view of customer journeys, enabling better coordination between marketing, sales, and service teams.

When it comes to support for actually selling, CRMs have somewhat fallen short. Interestingly, the lack of real help for sellers or their management resulted in opportunities for start-ups offering add-on products to fill the sales engagement gap. One of the earliest examples is best classified as dialers or cadence platforms targeted at inside sales and sales development representatives with a defined structure or cadence to the activities. This includes so-called conversational analytics, where this analysis is used as part of sales coaching to improve individual performance and identify which messages resonate, and which do not. As a result, we assert that through 2026, to effectively manage critical presales staff, enterprises will look to vendors to provide data-driven technologies to help optimize resource allocation, or risk creating bottlenecks in the sales process.

Sales engagement is the support and management of field sales. These particular add-on applications offer a thorough process of data capture, organizing information, ensuring data security, administering user access and managing reporting hierarchy structures. This includes detailing who reports to whom, the organization of product structures and how these products are aligned with pricing lists, and comprehensive oversight of various aspects, from user administration to structured roll-ups. These opportunity pipeline management views are aligned with different reporting hierarchies that are ranked or scored using ML based on what a successful sale historically looks like versus unsuccessful opportunities. But most CRM providers are yet to have an integrated sales performance management to ensure leadership can manage sales teams, including territory and quota planning, and sales incentive compensation management.

In contrast, sales engagement primarily concentrates on what happens once a lead transforms into an opportunity. It focuses on the activities and strategies to advance that opportunity through to the negotiation phase and beyond. Sales engagement effectively manages the critical phase where potential sales are developed and progressed to close, ensuring that interactions are optimized for successful outcomes.

But CRM providers are not blind to what is happening. Many large providers have accelerated the development of pipeline and opportunity-management functionality. Applications to enhance sales forecasting incorporate machine language-based predictive scoring to complement opportunity-based sales forecasting. These systems also can aid in revenue forecasting by capturing non-opportunity tracked sales, deals not yet in the pipeline, and can utilize historical data to better predict product and service mix. Some providers add dialers and cadence-based playbooks to support the inside sales teams. Automatic capture of calls, meetings and messages from common personal productivity tools improves ease of use and ensures timely and accurate data collection.

More recently, providers have increased their focus on functionality that improves the buying experience, aids sellers in suggesting next best action and helps in navigating the buying organization. Providers are also making better use of data to deliver personalized metrics and self-learning skill improvement. These developments coupled with the adoption of GenAI point to the future evolution of CRM. We assert that by 2026, one-quarter of sales organizations will replace current applications with those that use AI to optimize sales and revenue performance to maximize outcomes.

CRM systems will continue to add sales engagement functionality and, if innovative, will develop a truly next-generation engagement platform offering digital collaboration across revenue teams, prospects and customers. Some providers have already introduced collaborative configure, price and quote features, while others have digital mutual action plans between buyers and sellers.

Many sales teams lack an effective, unified omnichannel selling environment with which to engage and motivate buyers purchasing products and services. With more commerce moving to a digital, omnichannel engagement, GenAI will play a larger role, not just to improve outreach or emails, but as discovery tools to better match buyers’ needs with sellers’ offerings. In industries using technical demonstrations as a proof point of the sales process, generative and predictive AI could bring a more automated and focused initial engagement. Support could include self-assessments pointing to a focused and tailored message or discovery answers to those engaged with the prospect.  

Sales engagement is indispensable with CRM, enhancing communication, personalization and overall sales performance. By integrating sales engagement tools, businesses can refine their sales strategies, improve customer experiences and drive growth. CRM systems are increasingly incorporating advanced functionalities, powered by analytics and GenAI, to stay relevant in a digital, omnichannel landscape. To remain competitive, businesses must ensure their CRM systems evolve to meet changing needs, integrating advanced tools and technologies. Through continuous alignment and innovation, CRM systems will continue to be powerful tools for managing customer relationships and driving business success.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sales Engagement evaluates software providers and products based on specific evaluation sections including sales engagement support to coach and guide selling, help navigate selling into accounts, and ensure the support of deal rooms with sales enablement and the technical or pre-sales processes. It also must include forecasting, pipeline management, analytics and insights, business collaboration, roles and preferences to the support of the evolving use of AI and machine learning. To be included in this Buyers Guide, products must include digitally focused sales engagement capabilities.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of sales engagement as we define it: Apollo.io, Aviso, Clari, Gong, HubSpot, Mediafly, Microsoft, Oracle, Outreach, People.ai, Revenue Grid, SalesDirector.ai, Salesforce, Salesloft, SAP, Xactly, Zoho, and ZoomInfo.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of sales engagement software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating sales engagement offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for Sales Engagement in 2024 finds Oracle first on the list, followed by Salesforce and Zoho.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• Oracle
• Salesforce
• Zoho

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• Salesforce
• HubSpot
• Oracle

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• Salesforce, which has achieved this rating in seven of the seven categories.
• Oracle in six categories.
• HubSpot in five categories.
• Aviso, SAP and Zoho in one category.

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle sales engagement there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our sales engagement blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.