Lauren Carlson, CRM Analyst, Software Advice, blogged on December 14, 2011. Her premise is that 15 years ago, Sales force automation (SFA) systems hit the market and had a bad rep among sales teams. Fast-forward to now and most sales organizations are singing the praises of SFA. So, what changed? Her article highlights the four innovations that she thinks transformed SFA into a sales rep’s best friend and the tide is still turning. We didn’t even hit on social media / web 2.0 she points out. For me the impact of the web 3.0 and its semantic approaches to search, summarizing and customizing content, and combining data from different silos will also be interesting to see especially in the part of SFA that is called Sales Enablement. See her full blog post here.