Digital salespeople need new tools to engage more knowledgeable and empowered prospects or risk looking like dolts. In the age of the customer, wooing prospects and crushing quota has never been harder. What new tools help digital salespeople? Which ones are no longer important?

“The Forrester Tech Tide™: Sales Technologies, Q4 2018” helps enterprises prioritize investments. Sales technology that leads to smarter engagement, from digital self-service to a full view of the customer’s journey to AI-infused customer insights, can turn sales laggards into leaders.

To start that journey, AD&D pros supporting sales organizations need to experiment with technologies such as interaction analytics, pricing management, relationship analytics, and sales virtual agents. Emerging technologies like sales engagement platforms, social engagement tools, and sales chat have shown their worth and make key investment opportunities for sales organizations.

Even tried-and-true sales technologies, such as configure-price-quote (CPQ) and sales force automation (SFA), still bring significant value to sales organizations despite their relative maturity.

Meanwhile, some legacy sales technologies have fallen by the wayside. For example, as personalized experiences and self-service rise, predictive dialing as a standalone purchase has largely been eclipsed or subsumed by customer relationship management (CRM) and sales engagement applications.

In this report, we (myself, Kate Leggett, Mary Shea, Jay McBain, Andrew Bartels, and Steven Casey) analyze and identify maturity, business value, and life-cycle cost for 17 sales technologies and include sample vendors for each. Read the report for a deep dive on which technologies you should be prioritizing in 2019. Set up an inquiry if you’re curious to learn more.

 

(Sarah Dawson contributed to this blog).