Gartner releases the Magic Quadrant for B2B Sales Force Automation
Business-To-Business (B2B) sales leaders will find some interesting reading in this Magic Quadrant from Gartner. The reviews and scoring focus on the productivity of sales teams, starting with the core capabilities of account, contact and opportunity management. Add-ons such as sales configuration, incentive compensation and territory management are also considered, as are mobile and deployment options for CRM.
This summary highlights some of the more interesting findings. You can download the entire Magic Quadrant here.
New entrants
CRMnext, Pivotal, SAP and Swiftpage have made the list. These companies have some interesting differentiators:
CRMNext is definitely worth considering if you do business in India and Asia/Pacific. Their service record and ability to support large deployments offsets their relative youth and gaps in non-core capabilities. The same software stack is available both SAAS and on-premise.
Pivotal has a strong Microsoft-centered offering, which should be appealing to Redmond fans considering an alternative to Dynamics. The tight fit with the Microsoft stack can be seen in their embedded SharePoint technology and integration with Outlook. Companies looking for quick adoption may get a boost from the perceived ease of use and broad functionality in the core offering.
Swiftpage graduated from their Marketing Automation niche with the purchase of Act! and SalesLogix. The new ownership is delivering management and resources, which were challenges for the former owners. Act! and SalesLogix have millions of satisfied users, so the company seems to have made a strong offering for them with email marketing, social media marketing and mobile capabilities.
SAP makes the list with Cloud for Sales, which naturally has tight integration with SAP ERP, NetWeaver Business Intelligence and HANA for Big Data analysis. The broad range of mobile devices and wide CRM feature set are strong selling points. On the other hand, the enterprise-class strength of SAP means that installations and integrations can be complex, expensive and IT focused.
Market Leaders
There is new information about the CRM market leaders, too:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM has improved the user experience with a new process user interface. Microsoft has also announced Smartphone, iPad and Windows 8 tablet releases. With the Microsoft Polaris release, customers can buy additional instances for testing or development in the cloud. Microsoft enables customers to develop on-premises locally.
Oracle Sales Cloud is taking the lead from the premise based Oracle Sales product, which has the same feature set. The acquisition of Eloqua marketing automation has given Oracle the ability to manage the entire process of finding, nurturing and closing customers. Although most Sales Cloud customers have other Oracle applications, the combination of Eloqua and Sales Cloud can deliver important features such as analytics-based territory management, mobility and the Application Extensibility Framework.
Salesforce.com continues to lead with their strong feature set, innovation and proven track record. Now that they have acquired Exact Target, they can offer a complete solution for integrated marketing automation and CRM functionality. The depth of third party solutions built on Force.com gives customers a wide variety of vertical market and specialty solutions.
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