To understand the progress of sales tech in 2024, you just need to look at the evolution of AI value positioning. 2024 started with copilots focused on meeting needs of sellers and ended with agents looking to accomplish parts of the sellers’ jobs. While this may seem like a small differentiation, there is a clear shift in AI’s position to deliver value towards an end goal: Salesforce embraced agents and took mindshare from Microsoft and its copilots, and sales tech companies had to start thinking differently about their platforms; they are evolving from SaaS to AI companies that are moving beyond seller assistance and now doing part of the sellers’ jobs.
The blogs I’ve written over the course of the year plot the happenings in sales technology from the perspective of someone who is in constant conversation with sales technology leaders navigating these dynamics. The blogs below represent what I covered during the year and what this all means going into 2025:
- Understanding The Real-Time Revenue Execution Platform Landscape: In a digital buying environment full of distractions, converting a prospective customer is not a simple task. Companies use real-time revenue execution platforms to connect marketing campaigns to sales, make sure that the buyer is connected to the right seller, and ensure the best sales outcome by identifying engaged buyers and efficiently routing them to a knowledgeable seller.
- What Salesloft’s Acquisition Of Drift Means: This Drift acquisition by Salesloft is one of the first pure-play sales technology providers to expand into marketing use cases. While conversation automation solutions such as Drift have been focused on supporting marketing, generative AI has opened a door for sales to leverage this technology for some interesting use cases that add value for customers and better support the buyer journey.
- A New Supergroup For Revenue Technology Emerges: Revenue Orchestration Platforms: In the world of revenue technology, three distinct categories have converged to form a new supergroup of revtech capabilities. Convergence of functionality across the key providers in sales engagement, conversation intelligence, and revenue operations and intelligence platforms has evolved to the point that these three functionality categories can now be found in one platform that we refer to as a revenue orchestration platform.
- It’s Time For Sales Leaders To Coach Sellers Like Athletes: Until recently, sellers and sales managers didn’t have enough visibility into buyer interactions to do extensive coaching. Managers tried to make the most of each opportunity by coaching on everything they noticed. In addition, sellers didn’t have the visibility needed to identify and correct issues on their own and so required the coaches’ time. Nowadays, revenue orchestration platforms automatically capture interactions, providing the seller and manager with the visibility necessary to identify coaching moments. Sales managers need to use this technology to coach their sellers with the same rigor as athletes.
- When It Comes To Sales And Marketing Alignment, Data Needs To Come Before People: The biggest gap to realizing revenue alignment is not a lack of sales and marketing people working together; it’s the lack of data to analyze, visualize, and recommend the next step and each step in the prospecting and buying cycle. Data capture solves this data gap and enables revenue teams to optimize each buyer interaction.
- My Take On The Year Ahead For Sales Tech After Attending Three Key Events: Unsurprisingly, AI was at the center of all discussions during three key technology provider events I attended in September, with AI agents being the most prominent buzz as the next evolution of AI. Going a layer deeper, however, reveals a more nuanced strategy for each host vendor.
- Predictions 2025: GenAI As A Growth Driver Will Put B2B Executives To The Test: B2B leaders have spent much of the past year scrambling to take advantage of generative AI (genAI) technology and find new ways to differentiate themselves. In 2025, the true power of genAI as a growth driver will be tested. Marketing, sales, and product executives’ accountability will intensify as companies turn to these functions to steer their organization’s most impactful genAI initiatives.
- Double-Clicking Into The Compensation Capabilities Of Sales Performance Management: Optimizing sales compensation increases in complexity as companies grow and expand their products and sales structure, making it difficult to administer seller plans without the use of a sales performance management/incentive compensation management solution. While sales performance management (SPM) platforms represent a broader set of capabilities such as planning, territory design, and quota management, most clients engaging with Forrester to evaluate SPM platforms primarily focus on .
Next year promises many unexpected changes, with the acquisition environment likely to pick up while genAI expectations move from vision to reality. The market landscape will look much different at the end of 2025. Connect with me on LinkedIn to hear my perspective on the evolving sales technology market in 2025. It’s going to be a turbulent year.
