Sales are at the core of any business yet technology in support of such imperative operational departments has lagged in sophistication and integration. As ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence functionality becomes intuitively accessible in the cloud, organizations have shifted their focus towards vertical SaaS applications which leverage these capabilities within end-to-end process ecosystems. However, most of the SaaS solutions, which enable integration and automation of specific sales operations activities are merely splintered and offer limited or no cross-application process workflow and data support.

Recent advances in integrated intelligent enterprise applications with a vertical focus natively bundle multiple key sub-processes into a single unified application platform. These applications capture rich data by covering broad, deeply connected process areas, which serve as a foundation for superior embedded intelligence. With this approach, SaaS vendors bring sales functionally-specialized applications onto an integrated platform architecture, help organizations cross the process trenches while driving integration amid the increasing process specialization. However, the approach circumvents the limitations of horizontal multi-departmental enterprise applications for business change and dramatically accelerates organizations’ revenue growth while enabling finance control and bottom-line profitability.

This is especially relevant for the sales function espoused by companies today with the desire to accelerate revenue growth. Despite technology’s long and storied adoption to support sales, the intelligence today is often limited to just process automation and embedded coaching. Application vendors have made incremental progress modernizing with collaboration capabilities. But, with the anticipated second wave of sales performance technology adoption on the horizon once customer adoption of AI for sales expands, often incremental enhancements wouldn’t be enough. Increasingly disparate capabilities across point solutions, and disparate processes and data from tools already used, will aggravate the difficulty of deploying product intelligence and process automation, creating new challenges for a sales organization’s operations.