Sales Performance Management Solutions

Sales Performance Management Solutions is the old name of this market, and its final edition, The Forrester Wave: Sales Performance Management Solutions, Q1 2019, is the last scorecard where the enterprise stacks led the field. The edition that followed narrowed the title to incentive compensation, and this article is about the scorecard under the wider name.

The final edition under this name: The Forrester Wave: Sales Performance Management Solutions, Q1 2019

The Q1 2019 Wave, authored by Mary Shea, evaluated eight providers against thirty five criteria: Anaplan, beqom, IBM, NICE, Optymyze, Oracle, SAP, and Xactly.

The field is the market's old structure in miniature. The enterprise stacks, IBM, Oracle, SAP, sold SPM as a module of the broader suite. The planning platforms, Anaplan, sold territory and quota planning as their entry point. The pure plays, Xactly, NICE, Optymyze, beqom, sold the compensation engine as the product. Thirty five criteria spanned all of it, because the 2019 definition of SPM still included the whole performance management stack, territories, quotas, compensation, and analytics.

The three business models imply three buying motions, and the 2019 scorecard graded them on one sheet. The suite buyer took SPM because the ERP vendor already held the data. The planning buyer took Anaplan because the finance team already owned the planning cycle. The specialist buyer took a pure play because compensation was the whole job. The scorecard's fairness to all three is its historical value: it recorded the market's structure before the narrowing, when each motion was a viable route to the same problem.

The Leader and what it was scored on

Xactly took a Leader placement, and its citation is a snapshot of the category's founding era. "With 14 years' experience as an SPM provider under its belt, Xactly brings deep subject matter expertise and a clear vision for the future of the category to its customers."

The scored evidence: cloud-based quota and territory planning, incentive compensation management, predictive analytics through its Xactly Insights platform, an eighteen percent of revenue research and development investment, and, the detail that dated the report instantly, a machine learning algorithm for predicting the probability of sales representative attrition.

Attrition prediction was the 2019 frontier: AI used to tell management who might quit. The category's AI ambitions have since moved from predicting who leaves to calculating what they are owed, and the distance between those two frontiers is the distance between this edition and the next.

The 2019 criteria and the market they defined

The thirty five criteria of the 2019 edition describe a market where SPM was the finance-and-operations backbone of the sales force: territory design, quota setting, compensation calculation, reporting, and the planning layer that connected them.

The buyer was a sales operations leader assembling a performance stack, and the scorecard graded the whole stack. That breadth is exactly what the next edition abandoned. The successor report narrowed to incentive compensation, and the planning and territory disciplines left for other categories, which is why the 2019 scorecard reads now like the last photograph of a wider market.

The thirty five versus twenty six criteria gap is the narrowing made numeric. Nine criteria left the scorecard with the wider name, the planning and territory columns, and the 2025 edition spends its twenty six on the compensation engine alone. The math is the market's own verdict on where the spending actually was.

Where the market went

The successor evaluation is The Forrester Wave: Sales Performance Management Solutions For Incentive Compensation, Q1 2025, published March 11, 2025, scoring twelve vendors against twenty six criteria. Its coverage is deep and current, and it is covered in its own articles in this series, under the narrowed name and under the platforms umbrella.

The essentials for this arc: the Leaders are now Varicent, with the only in-depth AI capability set in the field, and CaptivateIQ, the modern entrant, with Everstage and Forma.ai as Strong Performers. The 2019 field's enterprise stacks, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and the planning platform Anaplan, have not surfaced in the 2025 public record, and the 2019 Leader Xactly is silent too.

The wider name died because the wider market did. What remains is the compensation engine, and the scorecard follows it.

What the old scorecard still tells you

The honest limitation is the scope. The 2019 edition graded the whole SPM stack, and its placements describe capabilities that now live in several different categories, which means its tier column is not a current buying guide for any single purchase.

One Leader placement and the field's shape are publicly confirmed; the rest never surfaced. The old edition is best read as the roster document of the pre-narrowing market, and the field's roster is the useful part: eight vendors, three business models, one scorecard, a structure that no longer exists. The roster is also the benchmark against which every subsequent field should be measured, because the names that returned, and the names that did not, are the market's own story.

Three questions for the widened-market buyer

Which part of the old SPM stack are you actually buying: planning, territories, or compensation? The 2019 scorecard bundled all three, and the successor scorecard only covers one. Shop the scorecard that matches the part, not the vendor that still sells the bundle.

What happened to your incumbent's placement? The enterprise stacks led the 2019 field and have not surfaced in the 2025 record. Ask your incumbent where it stands in the current evaluation, and treat silence as an answer.

Which AI frontier does the vendor actually serve: attrition prediction or compensation accuracy? The 2019 frontier was predicting who leaves. The 2025 one is calculating what people are owed. The difference is the difference between an analytics feature and the product.

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

The natural next comparison is Sales Performance Management Platforms: this category's title has narrowed twice in six years while the product it scores kept widening, and the newest evaluation's own naming, adding the words for incentive compensation, is the market admitting which part everybody actually buys.