How to Make Sense of a Complex SalesTech Landscape

A few weeks ago, we published the industry’s first comprehensive SalesTech landscape infographic. Other landscapes have been published on sub-sets, like the inside sales landscape on VP Profiles and the SalesTech start-up landscape by Bowery Capital. But nothing yet that attempted to display the entire SalesTech marketplace.

As you look at the infographic, the first thought seems to be, “How on earth is anyone to make sense of this? There are too many tools.”

I agree, it’s complicated. In fact, I resisted publishing a landscape all these years because I wasn’t convinced it would actually help people.

Now that we’re up to 400+ SalesTech solutions, there simply isn’t a way to make sense of them all without putting them on a map. Granted, it won’t help you decide which solutions to buy, but it will help you understand what types of sales tools are out there, and where they all fit.

The hardest part of this exercise was to categorize solutions. And I’ll explain our categorization in a second. First, let me explain where the cut-off is between MarTech and SalesTech.

Scott Brinker’s annual MarTech landscape was released last month with over 5,000 solutions.

We don’t cover the MarTech space. That being said, we do cover technologies Marketing buys that are closely tied to Sales—Sales Enablement is a good example.

Other categories are less clear cut. The best way I can describe our cut-off is with Marketing Automation. We don’t cover that on our landscape. We do, however, cover Marketing Automation-like tools that sales might request.

While a sales team would not likely be able, nor should they try, to implement and run a marketing automation system, they could ask their marketing team to add a small piece of code to the website so that respondents to email campaigns would automatically show up as leads in a salesperson’s dashboard (SalesWings is the example I’m thinking of here).

It’s a bit arbitrary but the line has to be drawn somewhere and that’s an example of why we drew it where we did.

Some have argued that MarTech should not be separated from SalesTech, that companies should instead, be more aligned and call the entire space RevTech. I’ve always liked the term RevTech because it symbolizes a culture of commonality of goals and objections and a commitment to optimizing the entire customer journey.

Organizations should commit to being more aligned behind one mighty objective.

However, to suggest that the industry is ready for a RevTech focus from a technology perspective is way premature. The SalesTech space is still in its infancy. 

More than that, companies would need to make major changes to their culture and organizational structure. I agree that now is the time to begin the hard work of transforming to a holistic Revenue (not RevTech) focused culture. But then that’s not even good enough.

Shouldn’t we strive to be a Customer-focused culture? In that case, the argument would be for a CustomerTech (CTech?) landscape that includes marketing, sales, and customer success. A worthy goal indeed, but one that is still a decade or more away.

After all, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was introduced 30 years ago and it still doesn’t do a great job of focusing an organization around the customer.

And now to our categorization

No vendor wants to be put into a bucket (regardless of what it sells). SalesTech vendors are no different. Without buckets, buyers can’t quickly understand where the solution fits within other offerings or, perhaps most importantly, their current technology stack.

As with any burgeoning market, the SalesTech space is like a lava lamp with categories coming together, morphing into new shapes and sizes, in near constant movement.

In the case where categories are merging, we’ve chosen to group them in one big box (like Sales Enablement, Sales Prospecting & Engagement, and Outreach Email Workflow). 

In those instances where a vendor is in more than one category, not because they have more than one product, but because they have multiple functionality in one solution we’ve chosen to list them in each distinct category. Reply.io which offers Lead List building within their Outreach Email Workflow solution is an example of this.

Even though you can’t buy the lead list building functionality from Reply by itself, they do offer that within their core outreach product so the landscape needs to reflect that.

With all the complexity of categorization, only around 10% of vendors are in multiple categories.

The best way to understand our categorization is with our Revenue Hierarchy model. The revenue hierarchy is part of our sales-stack-building model which organizes the needs of sellers based on which are the most fundamental to survival (as in Maslow’s Hierarchy). These are the “Super-Categories” and they’re noted in red at the top of the landscape.

Who to Sell to and Why

Nothing else matters as much as knowing who you should be selling to and why. Figuring that out is the first thing any new company or salesperson should do.

1. Who is interested: web visitor tracking, and call-back web lead capture
2. Who should be interested: account targeting & predictive scoring, installed tech stack
3. What are the specific personas like industries and job titles: lead list building and predictive scoring
4. Is our prospect database current: database cleanse and append and email reply mining
5. Do we have complete market coverage: lead list building

Now would be a good time to thank Michael Levy of GZ Consulting for generously contributing to the Sales Intelligence portion of our landscape.

How to Engage & When

Of course, it’s not good enough to know who to sell to and why, salespeople need a way to break through the noise and engage with those prospects. There are 16 product categories in this level of the Revenue Hierarchy with varied approaches ranging from phone dialers, to video selling, to tactile selling.

Fully more than half of the solutions are aimed at the first two levels of the hierarchy which makes sense as they are the most fundamental to success. Moving right on the landscape, you’ll see the next four hierarchy levels are squished together, meaning there are fewer solutions. Watch these spaces for more product introductions as venture funding shifts from a more crowded space to one that is more emerging.

The four emerging SalesTech super categories are:

1. Why Should They Buy & From You
2. What to Do to Close
3. How to Up/Cross-Sell and Renew
4. How to Manage, Compensate, Train, Onboard, Reinforce, Coach

Within these super categories are varied solutions like Value Selling, Buyer Consensus, Proposal and CPQ, Skills Developmenet & Reinforcement and Quota & Territory Management.

I haven’t mentioned underlying technologies like AI, Machine-Learning, and Predictive Analytics. That’s because they aren’t solution types. They are used to create solutions that either add to productivity by eliminating manual tasks or that perform analysis humans simply can’t do manually helping us make better decisions and take better actions.

Examples are Conversica’s AI powered virtual assistant which automates email conversations with every lead, CallidusCloud's Datahug solution which analyzes forecasts and predicts accuracy (among other things) and Aviso which uses AI to predict outcomes, understand risks, and improve the ability to hit targets.

How to leverage this landscape

Download a PDF version of the Current SalesTech Landscape

Right off the bat, the landscape should help you know where to focus. If you want to get better at targeting the right people and accounts, at the right time, you’ll want to look at technologies to the far left of the chart.

If your funnel is full and you want a higher close rate then you’ll want to look at the technologies to the right of the chart.

What questions to ask yourself

If you want to take a systematic approach, then use our 3-Step Guide to Building a Sales Stack. We’ve included a list of questions, or challenges for each level of the hierarchy that will help you identify your biggest pain points and therefore, where you might get the biggest return on your investment.

What’s missing

You might notice a glaring gap on this landscape.

Where are the CRM solutions?

We’ll be publishing a separate CRM landscape in the weeks ahead. Why separate them?

CRM is its own world. It’s usually the foundation on which your sales stack is built (but not always). CRM is the system of record that often stitches these disparate solutions together. It offers a single platform for salespeople to access the various tools they use to perform their job. Although some could argue (count me in that group) that CRM should not be the main interface salespeople use, it remains firmly entrenched as the most fundamental SalesTech of them all.

The SalesTech space is certainly a crowded market. It’s complex and confusing and it will become more, not less, confusing for the foreseeable future. I don’t see a consolidation happening any time soon (5 years out). Sure, there will be acquisitions (like Marketo’s acquisition of ToutApp) and failures (like the recently shuttered KiteDesk). None-the-less, the SalesTech lava-lamp will continue to morph. How large will it grow and how fast? Will it hit the 5K MarTech milestone and when? We’ll continue to report on this space to answer those questions and more.

Additional resources:

3-Step Guide to Building a Sales Stack

SalesTech Video Reviews

On-Demand SalesTech Webinars

Top Sales Tools of 2020 Guide