The Best Sales Force Automation: The 2025 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Data Bridge Market Research valued the global sales force automation software market at $12.8 billion in 2024 and expects it to reach $31.9 billion by 2032, growing at a compound annual rate of 12.1 percent. Growing demand for data-driven decision making, real-time analytics, and seamless integration with CRM platforms is positioning sales force automation software as a critical tool for businesses aiming to optimize sales performance, the firm says.

Sales force automation software, which includes tools for lead management, sales forecasting, order and invoices management, opportunity management, sales rep performance tracking, and more, is being greatly enhanced by artificial intelligence, which is enabling advanced data processing and analysis, providing deeper insights into sales performance, customer behavior, and predictive sales outcomes.

Also affecting the market growth are the growing adoption of cloud-based solutions, the rising need for real-time analytics, and the proliferation of mobile technology for sales reps on the go. Market challenges include the substantial initial investment required for software licenses, integration, and training and data security and privacy concerns.

The Top Five

As with most Microsoft products, Dynamics 365 Sales is part of a unified suite of products that share a common platform, data, model, intelligence, workflow, and tooling, but perhaps its greatest strength right now is its strong foundation in AI. Not only has Microsoft fully embedded Copilot into Dynamics 365 Sales, it’s also rolled out two sales AI agents. The product has seen tremendous growth in just the past year or so, largely due to the fact that sellers can work in office productivity tools and write the data back into the CRM.

Oracle has recently doubled down on its Fusion CX strategy and has turned around a sales product that now supports full lead-to-cash cycles, with streamlined lead management, advanced configure/price/quote, and digital sales that then extend into post-sale success, observes Kate Leggett, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. It now packs “strong workflows and orchestration of sales tasks across both buying and selling groups,” she adds.

Since its earliest days, Salesforce has enjoyed “first-mover advantage in cloud SFA” and continues to dominate the category, Leggett says, pointing to the vendor’s recent moves into other sales areas, including partner relationship management, sales performance management, incentives and compensation, CPQ, billing, and even point-of-sale solutions. It’s something that has caught the attention of Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir. “Salesforce continues to invest in its core SFA product as well as Agentforce sales agent capabilities and Slack Sales Elevate to increase both automated data entry and updating and enabling areas like sales coaching,” she says.

SugarCRM’s Sugar Sell product has really grown up recently, bolstered by the integration of its sales-i solution, which it acquired in mid-2024, with the Sugar Sell sales automation offering; it can guide sellers to hidden opportunities and identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities and changes in customer behaviors that might indicate a high churn risk. Sugar’s product has taken on such an important sales role that Leggett now calls SugarCRM a “sales-first CRM system,” with SFA being “the strongest part of the suite.” Beyond that, it has “good process management supporting complex sales workflows and advanced features like a pipeline inspection tool, customer journey visualization, and support for renewals and subscriptions,” she adds.

Zoho, Wettemann says, “delivers a highly usable core SFA as well as other leading sales-adjacent capabilities.” And, of course, as Zoho has done with all its other products, its sales products are being bolstered by the Zia AI assistant technology and new generative and agentic AI technologies that bring even greater automation to sales processes.

Niche Player

While AI has worked itself into every piece of the CRM puzzle, Spiro.AI was one of the first to offer AI-enabled sales coaching and continues to invest heavily in this area, according to Wettemann. In fact, the company was early to market with a sales platform having AI-generated content and smart modules, having released both capabilities as early as 2022.