For almost 15 years, the corporate world has been using customer relationship management (CRM) as a critical tool to drive sales and income growth. It is an approach to managing a company’s interaction with current and potential customers, using data analysis about their history with a company to improve business relationships, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth.

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While this remains a critical tool in the sales playbook, corporate spending on newer innovative sales technologies appears to be growing. Terry Tillman, the lead software analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, and his team see a new software adoption cycle spurred on by the new era of innovative sales technologies. They said this in their report:

While operational systems such as CRM and marketing automation will remain critically important to providing a single source of truth related to sales and customer dynamics, we believe increased technology spending will gravitate to sales technology tools with a quick hard-dollar return-on-investment around increasing lead flow, sales rep productivity and engagement with sales targets, and ultimately closing more business. There are a variety of newer technologies we see sales leaders and marketers investing in across sales enablement, sales engagement, go-to-market intelligence.

While the analysts have plenty of stocks rated Buy in the software arena, here we focus on four well-known companies that they feel have 30% or more growth potential. It is important to remember that no single analyst report should be used as a sole basis for any buying or selling decision.

Coupa Software

This is a recognized leader in what is called sourcing applications. Coupa Software Inc. (NASDAQ: COUP) provides a unified, cloud-based spend management platform that connects organizations with suppliers globally. The company offers spend management cloud applications that are pre-integrated. The platform offers consumerized financial applications.

The Coupa Software platform offers consumerized financial applications. Its spend management suite includes procurement, invoicing, expenses, sourcing, inventory, contract lifecycle management, budgeting, analytics, open business network, supplier information management and storefront.

The platform offers features, such as procure-to-pay solution; online invoice management, and inventory management and tracking software system. Its solutions for business needs include financial compliance and mobile productivity. The company’s solutions for enterprise resource planning include Oracle and NetSuite. Coupa offers solutions for industries, including financial, health care, oil and gas, retail, technology, and food and beverage.

The SunTrust price target for the shares is $240, and the Wall Street consensus target is $282.36. Coupa Software stock closed trading at $277.04 on Tuesday.

Everbridge

Investors may not be fully aware of this company, but its shares have big upside potential. Everbridge Inc. (NASDAQ: EVBG) is a cloud provider of critical communications and enterprise safety applications, including emergency notification, incident management, information technology alerting and secure messaging. The core emergency mass notification system enables organizations to communicate with employees, law enforcement, suppliers and other third parties over secure, reliable infrastructure across multiple communication channels (phone, text, email) in the event of local or organization-specific disasters.

Everbridge enterprise customers use its IT alerting solution to streamline incident response and accelerate resolution in order to reduce unplanned IT work and downtime and increase IT efficiency. It is leveraged as an enterprisewide solution, helping organizations break down the silos between responder teams to ensure the quickest resolution to business disruptions.

SunTrust has a $143 price target, but the consensus target was last seen at $174. Shares ended trading on Tuesday at $138.36.

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Q2

This is a smaller cap play for aggressive inventors. Q2 Holdings Inc. (NYSE: QTWO) provides cloud-based digital banking solutions to regional and community financial institutions in the United States. The company offers Q2 Digital Banking and Transactions, a browser-based digital banking solution that delivers branded digital banking capabilities; Q2mobility App, a mobile and tablet digital banking solution; Q2mobile Remote Deposit Capture, a partnered solution that allows remote check deposit capture; and Q2 Person-to-Person Payments, a partnered integrated person-to-person payments solution.

Q2 Holdings also provides Q2 Business Solutions, a digital banking solutions to commercial end users; Q2 Sentinel, a security analytics solution; Q2 Patrol, an event-driven validation product; Q2 SMART, a targeting and messaging platform; and Q2 CardSwap that allows account holders receiving newly issued cards to automatically change their payment information with existing subscription and digital point-of-sale services.

The $108 SunTrust price objective is well above the $96.33 consensus target. Shares closed most recently at $85.79.

Zoominfo Technologies

This recent smoking hot IPO has had some wild trading swings. Zoominfo Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: ZI) operates cloud-based go-to-market intelligence platforms for information and insights on the organizations and professionals in the United States and internationally.

Its platform helps sales and marketing professionals to identify the target customers, pinpoint the right decision-makers, obtain continually updated predictive lead and company scoring, monitor buying signals and other attributes of target companies, craft the right message, engage via automated sales tools and track progress through the deal cycle.

Zoominfo customers operate in various industry verticals, including software, business services, manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services and insurance, retail, media and internet, transportation, education, hospitality, health care and real estate, as well as global enterprises, mid-market companies and small and medium-sized business.

SunTrust has set a $60 price target. No consensus target was available. The last trade on Tuesday came in at $51.03 a share.

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Software is a remarkable efficiency tool for business, and there is every reason to think that the innovation is still at an early stage. All four of these stocks provide aggressive growth investors with big upside potential, and while they could be volatile, those with long-term horizons could see some big gains over the next 12 to 18 months and beyond.

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