Executive Summary

Sales Performance Management Emerging Providers

Emerging providers capture the innovation frontier of the sales performance applications market, where newer entrants and niche providers strive to balance breadth with distinctive approaches to sales organizations. These solutions focused on territories, quotas and incentives often address the same foundational needs as established providers but differentiate through their usability and reimagined user experiences and in many cases using AI. For those enterprises exploring alternatives to incumbent application suite providers, this segment offers options that can accelerate time to value or introduce capabilities that challenge the status quo.

ISG Research defines emerging providers within sales performance management (SPM) as coordinated set of management and operational activities, processes and applications that enable organizations to plan, execute and guide selling activities to achieve customer, product and revenue targets. The path to sales performance management is a proven one that can encompass all sales channels in a comprehensive manner and support business, financial and operational needs in sales-related activities.

Sales Performance Management (SPM) has evolved beyond traditional separate incentive compensation management and territory and quota planning, which served sales operations and leaders. Today, emerging software providers with SPM are innovating through new methods to manage core needs for sales organizations and examine new methods through use of automation and AI, but also through the experiences in using the sales applications.

Enterprises are moving from traditional sales models to integrated sales teams that unite sales, marketing, customer success, partnerships, and digital channels. Sustainable growth now relies on sales applications that connect strategy, processes, and data. By integrating applications systems, organizations can better understand customer value and design smarter territories, quotas, and incentives. Emerging and modern platforms use automation, real-time insights, and fair incentives to drive predictable revenue, collaboration, and data-driven growth.

To manage sales effectively, organizations need connected, intelligent platforms that support continuous optimization and agile decisions. These sales applications help guide and align people, processes, and performance by automating planning, linking pay to results, and enabling real-time data-driven adjustments. Balanced territories, fair incentives, and shared accountability help drive predictable revenue and teamwork. Leading enterprises treat revenue performance as a unified system powered by insight and technology to ensure every customer interaction fuels growth.

Enterprises that invest into dedicated applications for sales performance management are able to be more agile and guide the activities to best expected outcomes. Traditional CRM and SFA tools track accounts and opportunities but don’t provide the visibility into the entirety of sales performance. Their reports focus on past results and lack real-time insight into quotas, incentives, or current progress. In contrast, revenue performance management (RPM) platforms offer dynamic, forward-looking guidance and the flexibility to engage everyone involved in generating revenue.

AI and machine learning are reshaping sales applications by turning data into actionable insights. They can score deals, predict churn, find upsell opportunities, and recommend next-best actions to sellers. When combined with traditional forecasting, these insights make revenue predictions more accurate and reliable. AI also helps improve team performance and retention by identifying top talent and those at risk of leaving. In fact, we assert that through 2027, software providers will be utilizing AI to provide plan templates and optimization to both speed time-to-value and help enterprises deploy performance plans using best practices. 

Enterprises should examine these emerging sales performance management systems that unify planning, forecasting, and execution across all teams and channels to build predictable, data-driven operations. Examine how they support leaders and operations teams quickly adjust territories, incentives, and SPIFFs while integrating with ERP, CRM, HR, and finance systems. Aligning all sales functions and continuous improvement enables greater agility, coordination, and growth.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Emerging Sales Performance Management evaluates products based on innovative methods to help in territory and quota planning, incentive compensation planning and execution, sales forecasting, and the use of data and analytics for insights to identify process improvements. The evaluation identifies capabilities that enable organizations to plan for and execute against objectives by aligning and incentivizing all those involved in supporting sales to improve.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of emerging sales performance management as we define it: CaptivateIQ, ElevateHQ, Forma.ai, Fullcast, infinitySPM, Performio and Pigment.

Buyers Guide Overview

ISG Research has conducted market research for over two decades across vertical industries, business applications, AI and IT. We have designed the ISG Buyers Guide™ to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business and IT requirements. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research provide a comprehensive approach to rating software providers and rank their ability to meet specific product and customer experience requirements.

The 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sales Performance Management Emerging Providers is the distillation of continuous market and product research. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for sales performance management software. The Value Index methodology is structured to support a request for information (RFI) for a request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. The ISG Buyers Guide evaluates customer experience and the product experience in its capability and platform.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. It can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of sales performance management software can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on opinions or historical biases.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of existing and potential new software providers and products is a critical strategy for the adoption and implementation of sales performance management software. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating sales performance management software and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

Key Takeaways

Emerging Sales Performance Management providers are moving beyond point solutions to unify territory and quota planning, incentive design, forecasting, and analytics on modern platforms powered by AI. Enterprises expect connected systems that automate plan execution, surface real-time insights, and integrate with CRM, ERP and HR to guide revenue outcomes. Success depends on balancing governance, security and scalability with intuitive user experiences that engage all roles in the revenue engine. These offerings aim to deliver predictable growth through continuous optimization and shared accountability.

Software Provider Summary
The research identifies Forma.ai, Pigment and infinitySPM as overall leaders, with Forma.ai ranking first overall on the index. Classification placed Forma.ai, Performio and Pigment in the Exemplary quadrant, while Fullcast and infinitySPM were categorized as Innovative. CaptivateIQ was placed in Assurance, while ElevateHQ was categorized as Merit. The research assessed providers on Product Experience and Customer Experience to highlight strengths and areas for improvement.

Product Experience Insights
Product Experience represented 80% of the overall evaluation, weighted across Capability at 55% and Platform at 25%. Forma.ai, infinitySPM and Pigment led overall in Product Experience. In Capability, Forma.ai, infinitySPM and Fullcast excelled, while Pigment, infinitySPM and Forma.ai led in Platform. Leaders demonstrated breadth of functionality and enterprise-grade platform robustness, including strong technology architecture and support for performance management execution.

Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience accounted for 20% of the overall evaluation, focused on Validation and TCO/ROI. Forma.ai, Performio and CaptivateIQ led by demonstrating commitment to customer success, strong roadmaps and clear value narratives. Providers that fell short often lacked sufficient tools and documentation to calculate TCO or demonstrate ROI and showed gaps in scalability and API breadth that can limit enterprise confidence in adoption.

Strategic Recommendations
Treat Sales Performance Management as a strategic investment that unifies planning, execution and measurement across all revenue teams. Prioritize providers that combine strong Capability with adaptable Platform foundations, proven integrations and AI that drives measurable ROI. Seek audit-ready governance, automation and role-based usability to speed deployment and sustain adoption. Use this Buyers Guide to align shortlists to organizational goals, agility needs and long-term value.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to assess existing approaches and software providers or establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes in the most efficient manner.

1. 1. Define the business case and goals.
      Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technological efforts.
   2. Specify the business and IT needs.
      Defining the business and IT requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
   3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
      Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the enterprise from executives to frontline workers and determine the needs of each.
   4. Outline the project’s critical path.
      What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan.
   5. Ascertain the technology approach.
      Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your enterprise’s requirements.
   8. Establish software provider evaluation criteria.
      Utilize the product experience: capability and platform with support for adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation.
   9. Evaluate and select the software provider and products properly.
      Apply a weighting the evaluation categories in the evaluation criteria to reflect your enterprise’s priorities to determine the short list of software providers and products.
   10. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
       Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources.
       
       

Using the ISG Buyers Guide and process provides enterprises a clear, structured approach to making smarter software and business investment decisions. It ensures alignment between strategy, people, processes and technology while reducing risk, saving time and improving outcomes. The ISG approach promotes data-driven decision-making and collaboration, helping choose the right software providers for maximum value and return on investment.

The Findings

The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.

An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Forma.ai atop the list, followed by Pigment and infinitySPM. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Forma.ai has done so in five categories; infinitySPM in four; Pigment in three and CaptivateIQ, Fullcast and Performio in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.

Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Forma.ai, Performio and Pigment.

Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Fullcast and infinitySPM.

Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The provider rated Assurance is: CaptivateIQ.

Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The provider rated Merit is: ElevateHQ.

We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (55%) and Platform (25%). Forma.ai, infinitySPM and Pigment were designated Product Experience Leaders.

Capability of the Product

The Capability criteria is designed to assess the products and features across a broad range of sales performance management capabilities that support revenue operations, performance planning, management, forecasting, insights and use of AI.

ISG Research evaluated seven different function points to assess the full scope of sales performance management capabilities. It also examined the investment by the software provider. The research weights Capability at 55% of the overall rating. Forma.ai, infinitySPM and Fullcast are the Leaders in this category. While not a Leader, Pigment was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise capability requirements.

The Capability evaluation framework for sales performance management provides a framework for enterprises. Software providers that have more breadth and depth and support the entire set of needs fared better.

Platform of the Product

The Platform category evaluates the underlying requirements of a platform and examines how well a software product meets enterprise needs across business and IT. It measures how effectively the product can be managed and configured and integrated into enterprise environments, how efficiently it can be governed and secured, how reliably it performs and scales, and how intuitively it supports users across varied roles and skill levels. The platform category in the ISG Buyers Guide examines specific requirements for adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability.

The grading of the underlying platform focuses on a software product’s overall robustness and the flexibility of a provider’s software foundation. Adaptability measures a product’s ability to be customized and integrated across systems and data, while manageability focuses on governance, security and compliance. Reliability considers performance and scalability across environments, and usability assesses how intuitive and accessible the product is through design, use of AI and ongoing provider investment.

ISG Research evaluated 16 function points in 5 sections to assess the full scope of platform capabilities . The research weights Platform at 25% of the overall rating. Pigment, infinitySPM and Forma.ai are the Leaders in this category.

Platform is an essential evaluation category as it indicates the strength and resilience of a software provider’s product architecture. A well-designed platform ensures secure and compliant operations, dependable scalability and uptime, and a unified, intuitive experience for range of usage personas. It also reflects the provider’s capacity to enable deployment models while maintaining flexibility for enterprise demands.

Software providers that performed best in the Platform category were those that have support for the breadth and depth of needs across business and IT supporting adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. Providers with lower performance were challenged in one or more of these areas or did not demonstrate a cohesive, enterprise-grade approach. The underlying platform for a software provider’s products is essential in any evaluation. 

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.

The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are Forma.ai, Performio and CaptivateIQ. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Sales Performance Management Emerging Providers, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $5 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 20 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.

A provider must have a product that provides sales performance-specific applications supporting manager, sales and operations capabilities in standalone form or as part of a suite of applications. The provider must provide products that support SPM and sales processes in sales operations, sales performance planning covering territory, quota, incentive and variable compensation, capacity

The Emerging Providers segment highlights innovative, niche, or newer entrants that provide reasonable coverage across the breadth of Sales Performance Management (SPM) capabilities. These platforms generally demonstrate solid functionality in territory, quota and incentives and analytics, but not yet completely providing the entire suite of applications. The intent of this segment is to spotlight promising alternatives that could appeal to buyers looking for balanced but more accessible or innovative solutions.

Products Evaluated