Competitive and market intelligence tools allow organizations to track, collect, store, analyze, and disseminate information and insights about competitors, markets, and customers collected from internal and external sources, including but not limited to social media, websites, product information, and financial filings. Such tools provide a centralized platform for all market and competitive intelligence, which can be utilized by a range of stakeholders within the organization for their specific needs.
Gartner defines SFA platforms as tools that natively support (not via third-party add-ons and solutions) automation and capture of sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities for organizations’ sales professionals. They also support initiation, engagement and capture of buyer-seller interactions through multiexperience and channel-agnostic approaches and devices, and dissemination of actionable insights to improve sales contact management, pipeline management, opportunity management, guided selling and forecasting process execution. The optimal desired experience for sales users (leadership, managers and sellers) are not limited to internal use cases, and can be scaled to support buyer-seller intermediation and shared experiences with prospects and customers.