Sales Readiness Solutions

Forrester scored this market once, and then merged it out of existence. The Forrester Wave: Sales Readiness Solutions, Q4 2023, published October 4, 2023, was the category's first and only edition, and within a year the market had been absorbed into the combined revenue enablement category, where it lives today.

The one and only edition: The Forrester Wave: Sales Readiness Solutions, Q4 2023

The Q4 2023 Wave, authored by principal analyst Eric Zines, evaluated eleven vendors against thirty one criteria, using questionnaires, live product demos, and reference customer surveys.

The definition is worth keeping, because it is the category's reason for existing: sales readiness vendors deliver "advanced capabilities and integrations that empower enablement teams to correlate sales results data with learning program information to determine which efforts have a real business impact."

Learning programs tied to revenue results. That sentence is the market's entire value proposition, and the scorecard graded how honestly each vendor could make the correlation.

The correlation is the category's hardest technical problem, and the report's second finding says even the Leaders had not fully solved it: out-of-the-box reporting needed work, and reference customers repeatedly asked vendors to "tighten up reporting." The pattern is the market's honest state: every vendor could deliver the learning, and few could prove the learning moved revenue, which is precisely the gap the merged revenue enablement category was built to close.

Zines's three findings double as the category's state of the art. First, creative AI adoption: every evaluated vendor was shipping AI for learning and development, generative modules and pathway outlines, AI-driven pitch practice partners, rep pitch scoring, automated quizzes. Second, out-of-the-box reporting needs work: even the highest-rated vendors struggled to make learning-metric reporting simple, and "tighten up reporting" was the reference customers' common refrain. Third, service really matters: vendors investing in customer success saw higher satisfaction.

The three Leaders and their different theses

Showpad took a Leader placement, one of only three, on its enablement operating system concept integrating content management, sales readiness, buyer engagement, and analytics, positioned for "enterprise customers with a global footprint who support hybrid sales teams," with a "superior vision" around responsible generative AI introduction.

Mindtickle took a Leader placement with the top Strategy score, cited for a "robust feature set that exceeds expectations in standard readiness functionality" and "best-in-class visibility" for measuring learning program effectiveness.

Allego took the third Leader placement with the highest possible scores in nineteen of thirty one criteria, including innovation, adoption, end-user experience, coaching recommendations, mobile support, and customer success, and one distinction that previewed the merger: it was the only readiness Leader also named a Leader in the Sales Content Solutions Wave, Q4 2022.

Three Leaders, three theses. The operating system, the measurement engine, the adoption engine. The category's only scorecard held all three, and the seams between them were already showing.

The field that was about to merge

The eleven-vendor field named the merger before the analyst did: Bigtincan, Seismic, Highspot, SalesHood, Salesforce, Accent Technologies, WorkRamp, and Appinium sat alongside the three Leaders.

Half of those vendors sold content management as their core, and the other half sold learning, and the customers kept asking for both in one platform. Forrester's own forward note in the 2023 materials pointed at the conclusion: a landscape and Wave on sales enablement automation was coming, focused on combined sales readiness and sales content management.

Where the market went

The successor evaluation arrived in Q3 2024 as The Forrester Wave: Revenue Enablement Platforms, Q3 2024, which merged this category with sales content management and described the result in a single image: "this former Venn diagram is now a circle." That edition, covered in its own article in this series, scored twelve vendors on thirty two criteria, with Seismic, Mindtickle, and Showpad among its confirmed Leaders.

The 2023 readiness Leaders carried into the merged category almost intact, Mindtickle and Showpad on the merged Leader rung and Seismic, the 2023 field member, on top of it. The readiness market did not die. It was re-scored as half of a bigger circle, and its vendors' placements traveled with them.

What the one-edition scorecard still tells you

The honest limitation is the timing. A single-edition scorecard has no track record, and this one was superseded within a year, so its tier placements are historical documents of a market that no longer has its own scorecard.

The durable part is the criteria framework: thirty one criteria built around correlating learning to revenue, the definition that survived the merger and became the effectiveness half of the combined category. A buyer shopping enablement today should read the 2023 criteria as the readiness half of the merged scorecard, still current, just no longer scored alone, and the merger itself as the market's verdict that the half was never enough on its own.

Three questions for the readiness buyer

Which half of the merged circle is your problem: learning or content? The 2023 scorecard answered the learning half. The merged category averages both. Name the problem before the tier, because the merged scorecard will not.

Can the vendor correlate learning to revenue in your CRM? The category's entire definition is that correlation, and the 2023 finding says even the Leaders struggled with reporting. Demo the correlation on your data, and treat a missing dashboard as the finding.

Did the vendor's placement survive the merger? The readiness Leaders carried into the merged category, mostly. Ask your shortlisted vendor where it sits in the current Revenue Enablement Platforms Wave, and read the answer against its 2023 history.

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 Solutions: this is the final scorecard Forrester published under the wider Sales Performance Management Solutions name, before the market narrowed entirely down to the incentive compensation engine that decides what sellers get paid.