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ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Sales Performance Management Emerging Providers: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.
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.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of sales performance management emerging providers software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.
We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating sales performance management emerging providers offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.
The Buyers Guide for Sales Performance Management Emerging Providers in 2025 finds Forma.ai atop the list, followed by Pigment and infinitySPM.
Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.
The Leaders in Product Experience are:
- Forma.ai.
- infinitySPM.
- Pigment.
The Leaders in Customer Experience are:
- Forma.ai.
- Performio.
- CaptivateIQ.
The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:
- Forma.ai which has achieved this rating in five of the five categories.
- infinitySPM in four categories.
- Pigment in three categories.
- CaptivateIQ, Fullcast and Performio in one category.
The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.
Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle sales performance management emerging providers, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.
ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our sales performance management emerging providers blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.
You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.
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