Sales Force Automation

Forrester has declared the end of Sales Force Automation as a tech category, and the final Wave under this name, The Forrester Wave: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023, is the scorecard this article is about. The name died of success: the category outgrew itself into three different markets, and the analyst said so out loud.

The final edition under this name: The Forrester Wave: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023

The Q3 2023 Wave scored ten providers against thirty eight criteria, the third edition under the SFA name after Q2 2017, thirty five criteria, and Q2 2021, thirty seven. The criteria count grew across all three editions, which is the category's death certificate written in advance: an SFA scorecard that keeps adding criteria is a category that no longer fits one scorecard.

Two placements from the final edition surfaced publicly. Microsoft took a Leader placement for Dynamics 365 for Sales, with the highest possible scores in Vision, Innovation, and Roadmap, the same category it had led back in the Q2 2017 edition on its analytics vision.

Creatio took a Strong Performer placement with the highest possible scores in eleven of thirty eight criteria, including guided selling, digital sales, next best action, customer success, mobile, industry support, extensibility, adoption, and pricing flexibility and transparency, on Forrester's note that its no-code approach to automating sales processes of any complexity is "a strategy that few SFA vendors pursue."

What three editions of SFA recorded

The editions trace the category's whole arc. The Q2 2017 Wave scored the classic SFA suite, with Pegasystems taking the top-ranked Current Offering on opportunity management, sales process support, role-based sales support, territory and quota management, and product catalogs, and its business process management pedigree.

The Q2 2021 and Q3 2023 editions added the newer disciplines as criteria: role-specific experiences for emerging sales roles, inside sales representatives, customer success managers, sales development representatives, AI-driven recommendations and next-best actions, and app marketplaces and ecosystems.

The 2023 edition's own criteria count tells the ending. Thirty eight criteria is an unusually large scorecard, and every addition records a market that had stopped being one product. Guided selling, next best action, digital sales, customer success, industry support, each criterion is a discipline that now has its own category, its own vendors, and in some cases its own scorecard elsewhere in this series. A category that contains everything ends up containing nothing distinctive, and the analyst's conclusion followed the criteria count.

The trend list from those editions is the category's obituary in three lines. Role-specific experiences meant SFA was no longer one tool but many. AI recommendations meant the interesting decisions moved into the models. Ecosystems meant the platform's value lived in third-party apps. Each trend pushed the category toward the split that ended it.

Where the market went

Forrester's announcement that it will no longer evaluate SFA as a category distributes the old name's capabilities into three successor markets, and the distribution is the buyer's new map.

Core CRM data management takes the leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities, the system of record. Extended sales tech takes CPQ, territory and quota management, incentive compensation, and sales content management. Revenue orchestration platforms take the unified seller experience, combining sales engagement, conversation intelligence, forecasting, and pipeline management, the same category Forrester scored for the first time in Q3 2024, covered in its own article in this series.

The announcement's sharpest warning is for buyers: unconscious bundling of sales technologies inside CRM licenses drives up cost, limits adoption, and reduces effectiveness. Forrester's advice is to decouple the CRM decision from the sales tech decision and evaluate each capability on its own scorecard.

That decoupling advice is the practical legacy of the name's death. For two decades, buying a CRM meant buying an SFA bundle by default, and the bundle's unused modules were the tax. The successor scorecards exist so that each capability is priced and scored separately, and a buyer following the analyst's advice will assemble the stack from three scorecards instead of one bundle, which is the end of SFA in procurement form.

What the last SFA scorecard still tells you

The honest limitation is the timing. The Q3 2023 edition scored the final version of a category the analyst retired immediately after, and its tier placements describe a market definition that no longer governs the procurement. Microsoft's Leader placement and Creatio's Strong Performer scores are historical records of the old definition, not current guidance.

Ten providers, two public placements, and a criteria framework that has since been disassembled into three other scorecards. This article names what the record supports and nothing beyond it. The last SFA Wave is best read as the category's closing argument: the thirty eight criteria are the list of everything SFA had become, which is precisely why it had to stop being one category.

Three questions for the post-SFA buyer

Which of the three successor markets is your actual problem: the record, the extended tools, or the orchestration layer? The old category bundled all three, and Forrester's own advice is to stop bundling. Shop the scorecard that matches the problem, not the vendor that bundles all three.

What are you paying for inside the CRM license that you never adopted? The announcement's warning is specific: bundling drives cost and limits adoption. Audit the license for unused sales tech, because the vendor's bundle is not your roadmap.

Where does your next-best-action capability live now? The old SFA criteria scored AI recommendations. The successor scorecards, real-time interaction management and revenue orchestration, score them separately. Decide which engine owns the recommendation, because buying it twice is the legacy of the old category's name.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

A close neighbor in Forrester's own coverage is Revenue Orchestration Platforms For B2B, where this is the first scorecard ever published for a category assembled from three older markets, sales engagement, conversation intelligence, and revenue operations, and all four Leaders arrived at the top from a different one of those three starting points.

The nearest existing coverage on this site is Customer Relationship Management Software: the Forrester analyst who has covered CRM for over a decade says the category's core problem is its own product: too much capability, badly enough integrated that the value gets lost on the way to the user.