Constellation ShortList™ Sales Engagement Platforms

About This Constellation ShortList™

Sales engagement platforms are designed to drive both seller productivity and a more seamless interaction experience between buyers and sellers. These platforms focus on the mechanics of a seller crafting profitable 1:1 customer engagements: what to say, when to say it, where to send it and how to focus on the impact of lasting relationships.

These tools must either reside within core sales systems such as sales automation/ CRM, or integrate seamlessly with them – both to draw critical sales and customer data but also to write important sales cadence and customer preference data back to the CRM. Reporting and analytics is required to better understand how sellers are engaging, and what sales actions are having the most impact. Recently, the addition of AI-based tools has amplified sales engagement platform’s ability to boost both productivity of sellers and the likelihood of converting buyers. These new features include AI-powered virtual assistants, which can aid sellers in crafting more contextual, relevant and timely emails and offers, selecting the right message and/or sales content and collateral. In addition, chatbots can be deployed to capture prospect inquiries and nurture buyers prior to seller-assisted interactions.

The future of sales engagement platforms lies in its integration with broader customer experience (CX) technologies. We can expect these platforms to connect even more seamlessly with customer data platforms (CDPs), marketing automation engines, and service-driven experience tools, to better assist sellers at various stages of the customer journey. As AI matures, we’ll likely see more specialized offerings tailored to specific industries, company sizes, and seller behavior/maturity levels. Additionally, with a focus on holistic customer journeys, we might see consolidation within the vendor landscape. Marketing and service solutions might integrate their engagement hubs with these systems, creating a unified platform for orchestrating and optimizing the entire customer lifecycle.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

• Email, collaboration and calendar integrations
• Integrated sales communications channels including email, phone dialer, text and social
• Automated, programmable email cadences
• Prioritized actions and guided next steps for sellers
• Actions and responses triggered by customer behaviors
• AI chatbots and live chat (native or via seamless integration) to engage and nurture prospects across digital properties
• Integrated activity capture in CRM
• Security and governance controls to ensure data security and compliance
• Improved deal visibility, outcome reporting and analytics to optimize results
• Increased pipeline and forecasting accuracy
• Sales best practice identification and sharing
• AI/ML applied for smart lists, segmentation, communication recommendation and analytics
• Generative AI copilots automate message creation and engagement orchestration to best align with buyer intents and signals
• Integrations across key sales solutions including CRM, productivity, coaching, intelligence, chat, collaboration, communications (telephony and video), security and account based selling tools

Constellation evaluates around 20 solutions categorized in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research.

• Conversica Revenue Digital Assistant
• Clari Revenue Platform
• Freshsales
• HubSpot Sales Hub
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
• Outreach
• Qualified
• RevenueGrid
• Salesforce Sales Cloud
• SalesLoft
• Sugar Sell