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Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation

Published: 13 July 2017 ID: G00315413

Analyst(s):
Tad Travis, Ilona Hansen, Julian Poulter
Summary

The sales force automation market grew 12.8% in 2016, to $5.6 billion. SFA vendors have made a significant move toward embedded predictive analytics. Our evaluation of 16 products from 15 vendors will help application leaders choose the solution that best meets their sales execution requirements.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2020, 30% of all B2B companies will employ artificial intelligence to augment at least one of their primary sales processes.

Market Definition/Description

This document was revised on 4 August 2017. The document you are viewing is the corrected version. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.

Sales force automation (SFA) applications automate the sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities for an organization's sales professionals.

SFA is a foundational technology that provides core sales execution capabilities: account, contact and opportunity management, sales forecasting, reports and dashboards, and mobile applications.

Additional noncore capabilities that are often part of SFA offerings include lead management, sales enablement (content management and guided selling), quote management, partner relationship management (PRM) and analytics. Because these noncore capabilities are so common to B2B and B2C selling, Gartner also evaluates vendors on these capabilities.

Gartner continues to see product innovation from SFA vendors in relation to opportunity predictive analytics, business process modeling functionality and vertical-specific functionality. These are not yet core SFA functionalities, but they are likely to be central to SFA products in the next two to five years.

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation

Source: Gartner (July 2017)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Aptean

Aptean remains a Niche Player, but has moved toward the Challengers quadrant as a result of strong customer references and product improvements. Aptean's primary CRM product is Pivotal CRM, which has solid SFA functionality and is suitable for midsize and larger companies with complex processes or rapidly changing requirements. It is a viable solution for application leaders looking for a flexible, customizable and functional offering, and for those wanting deep industry-specific capabilities. Pivotal CRM also has strong integration with Aptean's other ERP solutions. Aptean's investment in application enhancements is notable, as evidenced by the fact that it has completed the transition from a Windows client to the Pivotal UX responsive interface. Some advanced features present in the solutions of leading SFA vendors, such as artificial intelligence, are not yet available from Aptean. Aptean has a global customer base. Most of its customers are located in North America, but the majority of Aptean's newly closed deals are in Europe and Asia/Pacific.

Strengths

Platform capabilities: Aptean's reference customers identified Pivotal CRM's rich functional development environment as a strength. They gave Pivotal CRM high marks for its configuration and customization options, which reflects well on Aptean's investment in the Pivotal UX interface. Aptean's platform enables many different CRM use cases and business requirements to be personalized and modeled, and solutions to be deployed on the web and mobile devices with comparative ease.

Sales process customization: Aptean drew comparatively high scores from its reference customers for their satisfaction with its opportunity management processes. The same customers indicated that Aptean's platform is very customizable for client-specific sales workflows and sales processes and, as such, that it will work well for those with complex user requirements.

Industry-specific solutions: Aptean has a wider range of industry-specific solutions than most of the leading SFA vendors. It offers products for the financial services, insurance, professional and corporate services, and manufacturing sectors.

Cautions

Product offering: Aptean maintains a dual-client strategy with Pivotal UX (its new browser-based interface) and Pivotal Smart Client (the Windows interface for advanced sales operations). Pivotal UX still has some functional limitations, compared with the full Pivotal Smart Client product, but these mostly relate to advanced back-end configuration and setup functions. The Windows (Smart Client) version can be operated with a cloud-based hosted server, but users are unlikely to want to mix interfaces and functionality.

Capabilities: Aptean has not yet developed predictive analytics capabilities to increase the effectiveness of sales representatives. It is late to market in this area, compared with the leading SFA vendors.

Implementation partners: Aptean's reference customers identified more implementation concerns than did those of the leading SFA vendors. They identified issues with securing help from qualified implementers in order to design the product's capabilities to match their process requirements. They added that it is therefore best to work with Aptean's professional services team.

Base

Base is again a Visionary, based on its strong market understanding and product vision for improving sales execution. Base's SFA product is a mobile-first sales application that also features a user interface that simplifies manual data entry and automatically pushes sales activity insights to users. Base has improved its product vision for sales execution during the past 12 months. It released a limited general-availability version of its new prescriptive analytics product, named Apollo, in early 2017. Base has also enhanced its product's API repository, expanded its application marketplace, and improved its sales platform strategy. Base sells mostly to small businesses (the average number of users per client is four), but it has started to attract larger businesses, having acquired a few deals involving over 400 users during the past year.

Strengths

Product vision: With the introduction of Apollo, Base has established a compelling, market-leading vision for how big data and machine-learning technologies can be applied to sales execution. Apollo is a Hadoop-based technology that automatically collects and aggregates sales activities into a strongly typed, multidimensional analytics data store. Apollo supports structured and unstructured sales performance analysis, but, more significantly, it also drives a prescriptive analytics engine that surfaces natural-language recommendations.

Capabilities: Base's reference customers gave it very high scores for its ability to create and maintain opportunity processes, including process steps that match the selling process (such as stages). Base also scored very highly for its integration with Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, which supports sales activity tracking.

Postsales customer experience: Base has a strong vision for customer success and customer onboarding. Base assigns a customer success manager and an implementation manager to each customer deployment.

Cautions

Capabilities: Base's system lacks the quality and depth of core and near-core sales functions that the leading SFA vendors provide. Gaps include the ability to store, retrieve, and distribute sales content and documents, and account and contact deduplication. (Base did, however, release account and duplication capabilities after the cut-off date for evaluation in this Magic Quadrant.) In addition, reference customers gave Base the lowest scores for system administrator functions of any vendor in this Magic Quadrant.

Implementation partners: Gartner notes that because Base relies on its onboarding resources to assist with deployments, it has fewer partnerships with system integrators than do the leading SFA vendors. This is a consideration for midsize and large enterprises that need assistance with complex sales process redesign, application implementation best practices and change management.

Geographic presence: More than 50% of Base's customers are based in the U.S., with the next-largest number being in Europe. Customers evaluating Base's SFA product should investigate whether independent software vendors in their territory can fill the functionality gaps in Base's SAF product.

bpm'online

Bpm'online has moved into the Challengers quadrant for its second appearance in the Magic Quadrant (it was a Niche Player last year). This move is due to the vendor's 19% growth in SFA revenue, strong customer experience scores and overall product quality. Bpm'online provides a CRM platform that seamlessly connects marketing, sales and customer service applications. It also demonstrates strong business understanding by offering eight vertical-specific product offerings for the financial services, professional services, retail, telecom, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, real-estate and transportation sectors. Bpm'online has a handful of very large SFA implementations, but its SFA offering is currently implemented mostly by midsize businesses (those with between 50 and 500 users).

Strengths

Core SFA capabilities: Reference customers valued bpm'online's account and contact management, activity management, opportunity management and forecasting capabilities. Its product features native predictive analytics for lead and opportunity scoring.

Sales execution: Bpm'online's reference customers gave it the highest scores in this Magic Quadrant for its timely and complete responses to product questions. It also received very high scores for overall satisfaction with its product evaluation and contract negotiation processes.

Customization: Reference customers for bpm'online valued the ability to configure its platform for custom sales processes using custom fields and objects, and to create unique workflows and user interfaces. Bpm'online offers two application development methods, a traditional business process modeling toolkit, and a dynamic process framework that helps administrators build applications that guide end users to dynamically select the best actions to complete a sales process.

Cautions

Application marketplace: Although bpm'online's marketplace has grown, its range of sales-specific offerings is not yet as deep as the marketplaces of other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.

Geographic strategy: Although bpm'online has increased its number of employees and number of customers in North America in the past 12 months, most of its practice is still in EMEA.

Product releases and product investment: Compared with other SFA vendors, bpm'online allocates a low percentage of revenue to SFA research and development, and executes three releases per year.

CRMNEXT

CRMNEXT has improved its position on the Ability to Execute axis within the Visionaries quadrant, based on its improved sales execution, good client satisfaction scores, and opening of a sales and support office in North America. CRMNEXT has a wide range of core and near-core sales capabilities that are relevant to multiple industries. However, its main focus is on the financial services industry: banking, securities, insurance and asset management. CRMNEXT is best suited to enterprises with more than 500 end users. It supports complex user requirements across the whole customer life cycle, including marketing and service. CRMNEXT has a strong presence in Asia/Pacific and the Middle East, and it offers on-premises, hosted and hybrid deployment options. Although CRMNEXT recently opened a sales and support office in North America, it has few partners or certified consultants in this region.

Strengths

Product strategy: CRMNEXT has strong relevance for B2C financial services use cases, particularly given its capabilities for mapping the customer journey and for fully integrated CRM data integration, decision-making and prediction. It offers native predictive analytics for lead and opportunity scoring, and will release native predictive analytics for forecasting during 2017.

Enterprise scalability: CRMNEXT has some of the largest SFA implementations that Gartner has encountered. Several are for well over 50,000 users, and a recently announced deal is for more than 300,000 users.

Implementation and deployment: CRMNEXT's customer references put it in the top 25% of vendors in this Magic Quadrant for ease of integration and ease of implementation.

Cautions

Application marketplace: CRMNEXT lacks an application marketplace for third-party sales applications. This is notable because the leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant all support marketplaces that offer several hundred sales applications.

Geography and sales execution: CRMNEXT has a very small business in North America and relatively few partners. Certified consultants are also relatively few, except for those from CRMNEXT itself.

Release quality: Some reference customers for CRMNEXT expressed concern about bugs in its product and poor support, particularly in relation to out-of-date on-premises versions.

Infor

Infor is again a Niche Player this year, but its position has improved, based on continued product enhancements and an improved product strategy. Infor's SFA product is part of Infor CloudSuite CX and is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It includes most of the sales capabilities that enterprises require, including master data management, PRM and lead management. During the past year, Infor improved its SFA product capabilities by releasing an integrated product suite spanning SFA, configure, price and quote (CPQ), and contract life cycle management. In early 2017, Koch Equity Development invested more than $2 billion in Infor to accelerate its product development and distribution. It is too early to measure the impact of that investment on Infor's SFA product roadmap.

Strengths

Marketing execution: Compared with other Niche Players, Infor scored highly for the number of capabilities released during the past year, and for the number of enhancements arising directly from customer requests.

Functional capabilities: Similarly to offerings from the leading SFA vendors, Infor's product integrates with a native predictive analytics system that offers likeliness-to-purchase scoring and product recommendations.

Business value: Infor's reference customers expressed higher-than-average satisfaction with its pricing model and overall product costs. Several noted that they selected Infor because of its attractive pricing.

Cautions

Sales execution: Compared with the leading SFA vendors, Infor has considerably fewer new customers, a smaller average deal size and fewer active implementations.

Product strategy: Reference customers for Infor expressed concern about the quality of the overall depth of its SFA capabilities and its pace of innovation, relative to other SFA providers.

Implementation: Infor's reference customers gave it comparatively low scores for ease of implementation. Both surveyed reference customers and Infor clients who have posted comments on Gartner's Peer Insights forum expressed comparatively low levels of satisfaction with Infor's contract negotiation process and with the value derived from its implementations.

Microsoft

Gartner's evaluation places Microsoft in the Leaders quadrant again this year with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. Microsoft has a deep understanding of the market, supported by a consistent marketing strategy and market responsiveness. It has improved its overall sales approach by addressing not only CIOs and other IT leaders, but also sales executives. Microsoft continues to increase its SFA customer base, and has demonstrated that it is selling to larger sales organizations than it has in the past. During the past year, Microsoft added the Dynamics CRM product to the Dynamics 365 product suite, aligning it with its ERP offering and the Azure technology platform. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales product is available as SaaS or on-premises, but prospective customers should note that the on-premises version is updated only once a year, whereas the SaaS version is updated twice a year. Microsoft has several relevant capabilities on its product roadmap. These include new machine-learning capabilities for automated customer insights based on psychographic insights, and improved portal capabilities.

Strengths

Customization: Microsoft's strength lies in its ability to create custom sales processes. Microsoft's reference customers gave it very high scores for the ability to customize its application with custom fields, custom objects, workflows and a customized user interface, which includes the ability to customize the user interface for desktop users.

Customer experience: Several reference customers noted that Microsoft has improved the quality of its customer engagement processes. They highlighted the quality of its postsales support and presales advisory services.

Product strategy: The Microsoft Dynamics value proposition includes integrated Microsoft Exchange, Office 365 and SharePoint capabilities, as well as an expanding set of Azure products, such as Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake and Power BI. Gartner clients have reported positively on this integrated product offering during inquiry calls with Gartner. Microsoft has also defined an effective product vision for how predictive analytics can support better sales execution.

Cautions

Functional capabilities: Microsoft's advanced analytics features were not rated highly by its reference customers, compared with those of other leading SFA providers. Reference customers' scores for Microsoft's quality of standard reporting and dashboard capabilities placed it in the bottom 25% in this Magic Quadrant, although Microsoft claims that the most recent version now includes embedded Power BI dashboards. In addition, Microsoft lacks the forecasting capabilities of other leading SFA vendors, such as the ability to create custom forecast categories.

Platform conversion: Existing and prospective clients with significant customizations should be aware that Microsoft is converting all Dynamics CRM Online services to Azure in mid-2017.

System performance: Microsoft reference customers indicated that the SaaS version of Dynamics 365 for Sales has significant performance issues, such as slow page-loading times and slow system response times.

NetSuite

NetSuite has moved from the Challengers quadrant to the Niche Players quadrant because it received comparatively low Ability to Execute scores from both Gartner and NetSuite's own reference customers. Aimed at midsize organizations with relatively complex requirements, NetSuite CRM Sales Force Automation covers the entire lead-to-cash range of functionality with a SaaS-based solution of integrated ERP, CRM, digital commerce and professional services automation. NetSuite will be attractive to small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and to business units that want a "single version of the truth." It will also be attractive to customers requiring complete industry solutions for the financial services, retail, wholesale, nonprofit and service sectors. NetSuite was acquired by Oracle in late 2016 and now operates as a separate global business unit. NetSuite enhanced its CRM products during 2016, but most of the changes and improvements did not relate to SFA functionality.

Strengths

Customization: Reference customers gave NetSuite above-average scores for its ability to build custom sales processes using configuration settings. They also highlighted the depth and quality of its application system administrator functions.

Product breadth: Of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant, NetSuite has one of the broadest sets of native sales capabilities — they range from core SFA functions to noncore functions such as territory management, quote management and PRM.

Platform: NetSuite's solutions are built on its SuiteCloud platform, which means that its SFA offerings integrate easily with other NetSuite capabilities, such as billing, order management, HR and incentive compensation. In addition, complex applications can be developed by user organizations. Reference customers mentioned the benefits of having a single version of the truth — one set of data used across a business unit.

Cautions

Functional capabilities: NetSuite's reference customers gave it comparatively low scores for forecasting, content management and lead management.

Customer experience: Compared with the leading SFA vendors, NetSuite's user interface looks dated. In addition, NetSuite received low scores for access to data and reporting, and several of its reference customers and other customers stated that NetSuite did not implement requested SFA features.

Application marketplace: Although NetSuite provides an active and well-populated application store as part of its SuiteCloud platform, it offers few applications related specifically to sales functionality.

Oracle

Oracle has move from the Visionaries quadrant to the Leaders quadrant, based on its Oracle Sales Cloud product strategy, the number of new customers it has acquired and its customer experience outcomes. The Oracle Sales Cloud product offers a strong value proposition for IT leaders and sales leaders, as it features a broad set of core and near-core SFA capabilities for B2B and B2C processes. Oracle Sales Cloud is central to Oracle's unified customer experience offering, which includes products for CPQ and marketing automation. Oracle has the deepest set of native core and near-core SFA capabilities of the leading SFA vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Oracle has continued to deliver a strong product vision, featuring improved mobile capabilities, industry-specific products and predictive analytics capabilities. Oracle Sales Cloud now features native predictive analytics capabilities for white-space analysis, next-best-action recommendations about opportunities, and content recommendations.

Strengths

Market responsiveness: Oracle's reference customers scored it highly for its ability to implement functionality and enhancement requests — in this regard, Oracle is in the top tier of vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Oracle has also significantly expanded the number of sales-specific applications in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

Functional capabilities: Reference customers gave Oracle high scores for its core SFA capabilities, such as forecasting, and near-core capabilities such as content management, PRM and quote management. Oracle has made improvements to its mobile platform during the past year.

Customer experience: Oracle's customer satisfaction scores from its reference customers have improved. It received better scores for overall customer experience, for support by the customer success organization, and for overall satisfaction with the product offering.

Cautions

Release quality: Several reference customers noted that Oracle had problems meeting its original Release 12 release dates. They also reported several product quality issues in that release.

Contract negotiation and sales execution: Reference customers gave Oracle average scores for pricing and contract flexibility, and expressed concerns about its focus on closing new business every quarter. They also noted gaps in how Oracle helps prospective customers match Oracle product offerings to their project requirements and scope.

Customer service and support: Reference customers gave Oracle comparatively low scores, compared with other leading SFA vendors, for customer support. They pointed to issues with getting consistently high-quality assistance from its support resources.

Pegasystems

Pegasystems has improved its position in the Niche Players quadrant, based on its strong B2C market understanding and strategy, its geographical reach, and its product offering. The Pega CRM product is built on the vendor's traditional business process modeling platform, Pega, which provides integrated marketing, sales, and customer service and support functionalities. The combination of model-driven business process modeling and CRM core technologies establishes Pegasystems' relevance for highly complex use cases and business-rule-intensive industries. Cloud, mobile, web and on-premises deployment options are available for Pega CRM.

Strengths

Direct and indirect sales models: Pegasystems provides comprehensive management support for B2C and B2B2C sales organizations. Customers can manage both sales models from within the same platform, with support for both direct sales and indirect sales through partners. The platform has comprehensive end customer analytics for all sales use cases, which combine data provided by direct sales teams with sales partners' end customer details.

Enterprise scale: The Pega platform is made for large deployments in industries such as health insurance, financial services and communications. It covers SFA capabilities, and also has components for marketing, real-time decision support and dedicated customer support. The largest B2B2C deployment has over 670,000 users and more than 47,000 independent insurance agencies.

Predictive analytics: The latest release of the Pegasystems customer decision hub, a core part of its SFA offering, provides customers with insights for modeling, predicting and reacting to customers' behavior in real time.

Cautions

Vertical specialization: Pegasystems' presence in traditional B2B sales environments is limited to only a few instances. Most implementations to date are for B2C and B2B2C industries: healthcare, insurance, life sciences and financial services.

Implementation: Reference customers for Pegasystems indicated that customization and configuration of Pega CRM requires more time than for simpler SFA packages. They also stated that finding third-party resources for integration is challenging.

Functional capabilities: Pegasystems' reference customers gave it comparatively low scores for the ability to undertake advanced analysis with standard reporting capabilities, such as trend analysis and custom calculations. They gave it similar scores for the overall quality of its standard reporting and dashboard capabilities. Furthermore, the ability to score and segment leads also scored lower than average.

PipelineDeals

PipelineDeals is again a Niche Player, as its offering has less depth and comparatively few implementations, compared with those of the leading SFA vendors. PipelineDeals' offering is available only as SaaS running on AWS, and is built specifically for SMBs (those with revenue of less than $50 million) in the software, construction and advertising industries. PipelineDeals' offering is an economical, easy-to-deploy B2B and B2C SFA solution with account, lead and opportunity management capabilities. It will be most attractive to sales organizations that require representatives to manage the entire prospect life cycle, from lead acquisition to deal close. In the past year, PipelineDeals has taken its first steps to move upmarket. It has imposed a minimum number of licenses per contract and plans to raise prices on its renewal deals during 2017.

Strengths

Licensing flexibility: PipelineDeals is one of only two vendors in this Magic Quadrant to offer month-to-month SFA contracts. This is an attractive option for prospective customers that do not want to commit to the multiyear deals commonly offered by other SFA vendors.

Functional capabilities: PipelineDeals offers helpful pipeline management functions, such as automated indicators of at-risk deals, and sales acceleration capabilities for sales development representatives (SDRs).

Customer service and support: Reference customers for PipelineDeals gave it very high scores for quality of customer support, quality of peer user community and online training materials. These capabilities are very meaningful to SMBs that lack internal support resources.

Cautions

Functional gaps: PipelineDeals has a lengthy list of product improvements on its roadmap, but most are foundational sales execution capabilities that are already available from the leading vendors.

Forecasting: PipelineDeals lacks deep forecasting capabilities, such as forecast categories, guided selling functions, and predictive analytics for opportunity health scoring.

Product releases: PipelineDeals' reference customers expressed concern about the pace at which the company deploys new capabilities, particularly capabilities such as account hierarchies that bring PipelineDeals closer to parity with the leading SFA vendors.

Salesforce

Salesforce maintains its position in the Leaders quadrant, based on the strength of Salesforce Sales Cloud's functionality, the quality of improvement to Sales Cloud, and the growth of its installed base. Sales Cloud is a SaaS-only SFA solution that provides a broad range of sales automation capabilities. Salesforce offers Sales Cloud for core SFA capabilities, but also offers add-on products for CPQ, lead management and digital commerce. In 2016, Salesforce released Sales Cloud Einstein, which provides predictive analytics for lead and opportunity processes. It also released a sales acceleration product for SDRs. In addition, Salesforce has upgraded several sales functions to Salesforce Lightning: these include forecasting, person account, opportunity product, account hierarchy and record deduplication functions. Salesforce also launched a Lightning adoption program in early 2017.

Strengths

Artificial intelligence: In late 2016, Salesforce released its predictive analytics platform, Sales Cloud Einstein, which includes predictive lead-scoring and opportunity-specific selling recommendation capabilities. The Einstein roadmap includes functions such as platform capabilities and user-specific predictive modeling.

Functional capabilities: Reference customers gave Salesforce high scores for the ability to create and maintain opportunity sales processes, for the ability to maintain account and contact life cycles, and for the quality of its system administrator functions.

Customer experience: Salesforce received comparatively high overall customer experience scores from its reference customers and from respondents on Gartner's Peer Insights portal for this Magic Quadrant. Reference customers specifically expressed satisfaction with the positive impact Salesforce's system has had on their ability to automate their sales processes and the quality of customer support.

Cautions

Contract negotiation: Gartner frequently speaks to existing and prospective Salesforce clients who are unhappy with Salesforce's aggressive sales practices and licensing inflexibility, or who are dissatisfied with its contract negotiation techniques. Respondents on Gartner's Peer Insights portal for this Magic Quadrant gave Salesforce very low satisfaction scores for its contract negotiation processes.

Business value: In reference customer surveys and inquiries with Gartner, Salesforce clients regularly identify issues with deriving value from their Salesforce implementations. Some clients object to the price paid, relative to the business results delivered by the system, and some object to the amount of customization needed to automate complex sales processes.

Salesforce Lightning: Gartner clients, surveyed reference customers and respondents on Gartner's Peer Insights portal for this Magic Quadrant expressed concerns about upgrading to Lightning, based on functionality gaps or the extent of the resources needed to implement it.

SAP (CRM)

SAP again appears in the Challengers quadrant with SAP CRM on the strength of its sales execution within the SAP S/4HANA installed base and its number of new implementations. SAP CRM is SAP's traditional SFA solution. An on-premises-only solution, SAP CRM is built on a different technical architecture to SAP Hybris Sales Cloud, but SAP has added capabilities to link SAP CRM with parts of its Hybris CRM technology. SAP CRM will be rolled into SAP S4/HANA in 2017, thereby ensuring it is maintained and has a roadmap for the next few years, but most research and development spending will focus on SAP Hybris Cloud applications.

Strengths

Mobile capabilities: Reference customers for SAP CRM showed higher-than-average satisfaction with the SAP Fiori mobile app and with the integration with SAP S4/HANA systems. Mobile sales capabilities for SAP CRM are primarily provided via Fiori, HTML5-based apps for core sales functions such as account, contact, opportunity and pipeline management. SAP now offers a SAP Hybris Sales Cloud mobile app as a mobile front-end user interface for its SAP CRM clients.

Sales model capabilities: SAP CRM supports both B2B and B2C use cases. It also offers native capabilities for managing individual/consumer accounts, which is not common with other SFA vendors.

Vertical capabilities: SAP CRM offers functional capabilities for several process-intensive industries, such as consumer product goods, banking, life sciences and telecommunications.

Cautions

Migration to SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer: Gartner's discussions with SAP CRM clients and evidence from SAP's reference customers indicate that SAP is not providing enough information to clients about how to migrate to SAP Hybris Sales Cloud.

Innovation: SAP's innovation roadmap lags behind those of the leading SFA vendors. Application leaders should be aware that the most significant roadmap capabilities for SAP CRM involve increased integration with SAP Hybris components. The roadmap for native SAP CRM components contains few transformative capabilities.

Forecasting: SAP CRM offers comparatively few functional forecasting capabilities, compared with the offerings of leading SFA vendors. For example, forecast categories can only be managed using SAP BI.

SAP (Hybris Sales Cloud)

SAP is again a Visionary with SAP Hybris Sales Cloud, based on SAP's improvements in terms of mobile functionality and marketing strategy. SAP Hybris Sales Cloud is a SaaS-only SFA product. SAP continues to improve the value proposition of this product by making Fiori-based mobile sales apps and SAP Hana-based predictive analytics central to its messaging and value proposition. SAP has improved its sales execution during the past year, and increased its overall number of clients. SAP's sales execution differs from that of other leading SFA vendors, because it generally markets its services only to large enterprises, and only those that already use other SAP technologies. During the past year, SAP has also improved its integration with Microsoft Outlook and enhanced its native order and quote management capabilities by adding mobile offline-ordering capabilities.

Strengths

Functional capabilities: Reference customers gave SAP Hybris Sales Cloud strong scores for lead, account and opportunity management functions.

Product strategy: SAP has improved the overall scope of its sales technologies and the availability of third-party applications that integrate with SAP Hybris. SAP Hybris features predictive analytics for relationship intelligence and white-space opportunities.

Product enhancements and innovation: Reference customers noted the ability to deploy new capabilities rapidly on SaaS infrastructure and SAP's commitment to release new capabilities frequently.

Cautions

Customer experience: SAP received comparatively low satisfaction scores from its reference customers, who noted issues with customer support, overall experience and perception of value attainment, which are not common to other leading providers in this Magic Quadrant. Gartner has heard similar concerns from SAP clients during recent inquiry calls.

Capabilities: Reference customers gave SAP comparatively low satisfaction scores for sales forecasting, sales content and report/dashboard capabilities. They also expressed concern about the quality of integration with client-side Microsoft Outlook.

Implementation: SAP's reference customers and users of Gartner's client inquiry service voiced concerns about the level of effort needed to implement SAP Hybris Sales Cloud. They also expressed concern about their ability to secure help from SAP when defining their change management strategy.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM remains a Visionary, as a result of continued product improvements to its core SFA functionality. SugarCRM is the only vendor in this Magic Quadrant with an offering based on an open-source technology stack. SugarCRM will appeal to midsize and large enterprises with B2B sales models that require a flexible and customizable platform which can meet the sales requirements common in midsize and large enterprise implementations. SugarCRM has continued its move upmarket in recent years by building a product that appeals to large enterprises. It is winning bigger deals (including one enterprise implementation of over 70,000 seats), but these are still relatively few. SugarCRM has continued to enhance its product, with the notable introduction of customer journey manager and additional workflow capabilities.

Strengths

User experience: SugarCRM has accurately thought through the sales user's experience on browsers and mobile devices, and has integrated contextual insight and intelligence panels throughout the user interface, making it attractive and easy to use.

Configuration: Reference customers gave SugarCRM strongly positive scores for application configurability, published APIs and technical architecture. In addition, SugarCRM offers multiple deployment options: public cloud, private cloud and on-premises.

Implementation partners and application marketplace: SugarCRM has comparatively large numbers of ecosystem partners and add-on apps in its app store, SugarExchange. This reflects its background as a provider of an open-source platform.

Cautions

Capability gaps: Reference customers gave SugarCRM comparatively low scores for opportunity forecasting, content management and PRM. Some expressed concerns about the depth of its APIs and standard reporting functions.

Product innovation: Integration with third-party data sources and social media vendors is not as strong in SugarCRM's offering as in those of other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Although SugarCRM's product has been improved, this has been at a slower pace than for many other vendors.

Predictive analytics: Automation of the customer life cycle with the application of predictive capabilities and sophisticated marketing automation is possible only with third-party add-on products. As a result, expected functions, such as lead scoring, are more difficult to obtain.

Xiaoshouyi

Xiaoshouyi makes its debut in this Magic Quadrant as a Niche Player, based on its success selling SFA solutions in China and the scope of its CRM capabilities. Xiaoshouyi offers a mobile-first SFA system that provides core-native SFA capabilities such as account management, opportunity management and forecasting. It also offers near-core capabilities, such as content management, CPQ and order management. Like other leading SaaS providers, Xiaoshouyi has a platform-as-a-service solution, which provides capabilities for application development and customization. This vendor is notable for the success it has had selling to customers in China, where it has added over 2,000 clients and 50,000 end users during the past five years, primarily in the manufacturing and life sciences sectors.

Strengths

Product offering: Xiaoshouyi offers an attractive set of SFA capabilities for B2B and B2C sales processes. It contains China's leading firmographic datasets, and offers native integration with WeChat and Weibo, applications that are frequently used for B2C selling in China. Xiaoshouyi also offers a full CRM suite, spanning marketing and customer service functions.

Implementation: Reference customers gave Xiaoshouyi positive scores for its consultative approach during the sales process and for its commitment to partnership after implementation.

Market responsiveness: Reference customers gave Xiaoshouyi scores in the top 25% for market responsiveness, particularly its ability to deliver enhancements requested by clients.

Cautions

Limited geographic reach: Xiaoshouyi markets and sells its services only in China at the time of writing.

Capability gaps: Xiaoshouyi lacks the forecasting capabilities and record-sharing rules that are common to the leading SFA vendors in this Magic Quadrant. In addition, it has not yet released predictive analytics for opportunity scoring. Its application supports multiple languages, but many system administrator functions are displayed in Chinese only.

Product quality: Reference customers for Xiaoshouyi expressed concern about system performance and issues with product quality.

Zoho

Zoho is again a Niche Player. Zoho provides a comparatively low-cost, easy-to-install SFA product as a component of its overall CRM offering. Its SFA product displays strong capabilities for inside-sales teams and SDRs, and it is valued in industries such as banking, communications, media and telecom, education and government, as well as by healthcare providers. Zoho sells primarily to small B2B organizations. It offers overall 35 CRM-dedicated applications, including Blueprint (a sales process builder), Zia (an artificial-intelligence-powered sales assistant) and SalesSignals (which sends notifications when customers engage with the organization).

Strengths

Pricing: Zoho provides a flexible pricing plan, including monthly contacts, which can be adjusted by the customer to meet budget requirements. Zoho offers a "freemium" product, as well as a free trial for up to three users. Customers can upgrade to a paid monthly plan or simply continue using the free trial for up to three users.

Product extensibility: Zoho offers inside-sales or SDR-relevant capabilities, such as notifications when a customer engages with a sales organization. Its SalesSignals platform allows for real-time alerts through its integration with popular applications such as SurveyMonkey, Adobe Sign, DocuSign, Zendesk and MailChimp. Furthermore, the application provides structured content management features that are of great value to sales agents in supporting fast and easy access. Call and email analytics provide insights for sales agents and managers to measure against their activity goals.

Functional capabilities: Reference customers rated Zoho highly for maintaining record access and record privacy rules; this is appreciated by sales organizations that have very structured forecasting processes or that need to limit access to opportunities. Zoho also received high scores for the ability to convert leads into accounts, contacts and opportunities. Its flexibility in creating custom sales processes using custom fields, custom objects, workflows and user interfaces was recognized as superior.

Cautions

Outlook integration: Reference customers noted issues with integration with Microsoft Outlook Exchange, and with Microsoft Office 365. This is a consideration for sales organizations that track their sales activities in Microsoft Outlook.

Customer service and support: Reference customers gave Zoho the lowest scores in this Magic Quadrant for customer support; they highlighted its response times to customer service requests.

Implementation partners: Reference customers with complex automation needs stated that they had difficulty finding quality third-party resources. Zoho has increased its partner network to approximately 500 partners, but mostly for selling purposes. Prospective customers needing implementation support should assess the availability of resources — both from Zoho and within its partner ecosystem.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added

Xiaoshouyi.

Dropped

Bullhorn: This vendor does not appear in this Magic Quadrant because it no longer sells to multiple industries.

Microsoft (Dynamics CRM): In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner evaluates Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales as a single product offering, whereas previously we evaluated Microsoft's SaaS and on-premises products as distinct products. We have therefore combined all feedback for both products into a single Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales evaluation.

Sage: This vendor does not appear in this Magic Quadrant because it is no longer actively marketing its SFA product.

Tour de Force: This vendor does not appear in this Magic Quadrant because it did not meet several of the inclusion criteria.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, vendors had to have:

A technology solution that automates core selling processes, including but not limited to account, contact, opportunity and sales activity management.

A solution that provides opportunity pipeline reporting and sales forecasting.

SFA customers in at least three industries, with at least 20 active customers across those industries.

Revenue from SFA software and services of at least $5.5 million during the calendar year 2016.

Made multiple releases with significant functional improvements during the 12 months from April 2016 to March 2017; a new or acquired offering from an established vendor in this market was also considered, if Gartner established that offering was being sold to customers.

At least five new, named customers (not unique new contracts sold to an existing client) that had actively deployed its SFA functionality during the 12 months from April 2016 to March 2017.

Demonstrated corporate business viability through business performance, new customer adoption and strategic partnerships over multiple years.

An SFA system that supports B2B inside, field, and indirect/partner sales models, and/or supports B2C long-cycle sales processes via direct and indirect sales.

Evaluation Criteria

Ability to Execute

Different sales organizations require different levels of depth and complexity in terms of capabilities. Vendors that support a wide range of complexity have greater market potential and are rated accordingly. This is a cross-industry Magic Quadrant; therefore, the evaluation of a provider's offering is focused on the ability to serve several broad industry sectors, not to provide industry-specific solutions.

In many cases, an SFA application will combine several functional components, some of which require third-party vendors. A key evaluation criterion is how well the SFA vendor's application integrates with third-party products and customer data sources. This is measured primarily by the number and complexity of data and application integrations, as demonstrated by live customer deployments. Vendors that have fostered an ecosystem of value-added application suppliers and partners will score well in this regard.

Product or Service: The overall vendor product/service functionality score is developed by evaluating specific SFA functionality, mobile access and architecture (in terms of, for example, openness, flexibility, usability and workflow), and sales reporting and analytics. The overall vendor product/service functionality score is developed by evaluating specific SFA functionality, mobile access and architecture (for example, openness, flexibility, usability and workflow), and sales reporting and analytics.

Opportunity management capabilities are weighted more heavily than other SFA application building blocks. This reflects the demand for SFA functionality by sales organizations. To score well, the vendor must have a stable product development team for each product module that it sells. Increased emphasis is also given to the value that SFA applications provide directly to salespeople.

Overall Viability: Key aspects of this criterion are the vendor's ability to ensure the continued vitality of its product, including support for current and future releases, as well as a clear roadmap for the next three years. The vendor must have sufficient cash "on hand" and consistent revenue growth during four quarters to fund employee "burn rates" and to generate profits. Each vendor is also evaluated on its commitment and ability to generate revenue and profits specifically in the SFA market.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The organization's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. The vendor must provide global sales and distribution coverage that aligns with its marketing messages. The provider must have specific experience of, and success in, selling SFA applications to sales buying centers (that is, vice presidents of sales or sales operations).

Market Responsiveness/Record: We evaluate the vendor's ability to respond, change direction and be flexible to evolving customer needs and market dynamics. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: This refers to the clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the vendor's message to influence the market, promote its brand and business, increase awareness of its products, and establish a positive identification of the product, brand or vendor by buyers. This mind share can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotions, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Feedback from active customers on generally available releases during the period April 2016 to March 2017 is an important consideration. Sources of feedback include vendor-identified reference customers, Gartner client inquiries and other customer-facing interactions, such as those at Gartner conferences. Customers' experiences are evaluated based on the vendor's ability to help customers achieve business value, as well as sustained user adoption, quality implementation and ongoing support.

Operations: This criterion evaluates the vendor's ability to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure — skills, experience, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the vendor to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis. For SaaS offerings, operations also includes the vendor's ability to manage operational infrastructure requirements in order to meet client demand.

Table 1.   Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria

Weighting

Product or Service

High

Overall Viability

Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing

Medium

Market Responsiveness/Record

High

Marketing Execution

Medium

Customer Experience

High

Operations

Medium

Source: Gartner (July 2017)

Completeness of Vision

Marketing Understanding: An evaluation of the vendor's ability to understand the business issues facing vice presidents of sales, and to demonstrate and explain how SFA applications can be applied to improve the overall sales effectiveness and performance of a prospective customer's sales organization.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated marketing strategy has a set of messages that appeals to selling organizations and is consistently communicated throughout the organization, and externalized through the website, customer programs and positioning statements. Vendors are evaluated on how their solutions appeal to selling organizations in multiple industries. If a vendor derives a significant percentage of its revenue from recurring revenue-based products, it must also have a customer retention strategy.

Sales Strategy: An evaluation of how well the vendor's strategy for selling SFA software uses an appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service and communications affiliates to extend the scope and depth of its market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and customer base. Key elements of sales strategy include a sales and distribution plan, internal investment priority and timing, and partner alliances.

Offering (Product) Strategy: Vendors should demonstrate a vision for new application functionality across the breadth and depth of product capabilities; this is critical for meeting the needs of a maturing market. Subcriteria cover the vendor's vision for opportunity management; sales effectiveness capabilities, such as guided selling, sales configuration, quote management and content management; access and architecture (such as its openness, flexibility, extensibility and usability); and sales reporting and analytics. Also considered is the vendor's vision for industry-specific products. The product strategy can be a combination of organic development, acquisitions and/or ecosystems. It can also include industry-specific offerings. However, for ecosystems, close attention is paid to the quality and support of third-party partners.

Business Model: Vendors need to have clear business plans for how they will succeed in the SFA market. These plans should include appropriate levels of investment to achieve profitability and healthy revenue growth over a three-to-five-year period. Sales channel and partnership strategies are important components.

Innovation: To score well, vendors must show continued investment to improve their core SFA capabilities. They must also be growing in new areas, such as sales execution improvement, analytics, social collaboration and SaaS; or devices, such as tablets and smartphones; or new technology directions, such as those arising from the Nexus of Forces.

Geographic Strategy: An evaluation of the vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of regions other than that in which its corporate headquarters is located, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries, as appropriate for that geography and market.

Table 2.   Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria

Weighting

Market Understanding

Medium

Marketing Strategy

Medium

Sales Strategy

Low

Offering (Product) Strategy

High

Business Model

Medium

Vertical/Industry Strategy

Not Rated

Innovation

High

Geographic Strategy

Medium

Source: Gartner (July 2017)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders

Leaders have the ability to execute their vision through products, services and demonstrated, solid business results in the form of revenue and earnings. Leaders have significant successful customer deployments in North America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific in a wide variety of industries, and with multiple proof points for deployments above 500 users. They demonstrate consistently above-average customer experience satisfaction. Leaders are often the vendors against which other providers in the market measure themselves.

Challengers

Challengers are often larger than most (but not all) Niche Players, and demonstrate a higher volume of new business for SFA. They have the size to compete worldwide; however, in some cases, they may not be able to execute equally well in all geographies. They often return strong customer experience satisfaction scores. They understand the evolving needs of a sales organization, yet may not lead customers into new functional areas with a strong functional vision. Challengers tend to have a good technology vision for architecture and other IT organizational considerations, but have not won over the top sales executives.

Visionaries

Visionaries are ahead of most potential competitors in delivering innovative products and/or delivery models. They anticipate emerging and changing sales needs and move the market into fresh areas. They have a strong potential to influence the direction of the SFA market, but are limited in terms of execution and/or track record.

Niche Players

Niche Players offer products for SFA functionality, but may lack some functional components; they may not show the ability to consistently handle deployments of more than 500 users across multiple geographies, or they may lack strong business execution in the SFA market. These vendors may offer complete portfolios for a specific industry, but face challenges in one or more areas necessary to support cross-industry requirements, such as complex forecasting and sales effectiveness. They may have an inconsistent implementation track record, or they may lack the ability to support the requirements of large enterprises. Even so, Niche Players often offer the best solutions for the needs of particular sales organizations, considering the price/value ratio of their solutions.

Context

All the vendors in this Magic Quadrant have customers that are using their products and services successfully. However, they are not the only vendors in this market. There are more than 70 vendors in this market, and some regional and/or vertical-industry SFA specialists did not meet the inclusion criteria.

This Magic Quadrant represents a wide cross-section of vendors, including those that offer different delivery models (such as on-premises, SaaS and hybrid), and differing levels of functional breadth and sophistication. To give a cross-section of the market's vendors and offerings that is as accurate as possible, we include some vendors that have comparatively low annual revenue and comparatively small installed bases.

Consistent with the concept of core SFA capabilities as described in the Market Definition/Description section, this Magic Quadrant places particular emphasis on vendors' core SFA capabilities. However, for the purpose of building as complete a picture as possible, we also evaluate their noncore SFA capabilities, such as content management, lead management and PRM.

Separately from this Magic Quadrant, Gartner covers a range of add-on sales automation capabilities that are relevant to sales execution, including sales enablement, business information services for sales, CPQ suites, and sales performance management. SFA vendors are increasingly expanding their offerings by adding these capabilities to their SFA products. Please see the Recommended Reading section for some documents that provide more detail about these solutions.

By collecting and analyzing a wide range of sales automation capabilities, Gartner has developed a broad and deep understanding of vendors' solutions. This also means that Gartner has a strong understanding of how the full range of sales automation technologies applies to a variety of industries and selling practices. Software buyers should note, however, that SFA requirements are unique to each B2B sales organization, based on the maturity and culture of the organization in terms of its use of technology, the sophistication of its sales practices and the expected return on investment.

SFA has distinct implications for different types of sales organization:

Product-driven, transactional sales organizations, such as those engaged in short-cycle B2B sales, will value basic lead and opportunity management capabilities to reduce sales cycles and improve sales management visibility.

Product and service organizations selling enterprisewide deals, such as long-cycle B2B sales organizations, will value account management and forecasting capabilities. These organizations often also value PRM, CPQ and sales enablement tools, such as those for sales content management. They often tie together proposals, bids, configurations and quotes with authorizations and order-capture systems. Organizations operating in this space require granular forecasting and pipeline management features.

Organizations engaged in relationship selling or that have indirect sales processes require SFA tools to manage their customer and prospect data, but they also require sales enablement tools for content distribution and sales activity capture.

In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner refers to vendors' target customer segments. We define these segments as follows:

Small business: fewer than 50 sales users

Midsize business: 50 to 500 sales users

Large businesses: 500 to 1,000 sales users

Enterprises: more than 1,000 sales users

Whichever provider you are considering, ask yourself the following question: "Will this vendor help my sales organization sell more effectively?" In many cases, a sales organization must evaluate not just a vendor's suite of products, but also the ecosystem of providers that can fill functional gaps for capabilities the considered vendor does not offer.

A good vendor selection strategy assesses providers that support data requirements, access modes and functionality for each sales role. It is informed by a good understanding of how sales processes dictate the functional components that best satisfy organizational and individual sales requirements.

To help clients make the right choice of vendor and product, Gartner is publishing the inaugural "Critical Capabilities for Sales Force Automation." In it, Gartner scores each vendors' core SFA capabilities against five common sales use cases: long-cycle B2B sales, short-cycle B2B sales, short-cycle B2C sales, long-cycle B2C sales, and indirect/relationship sales.

Implementation methods for SFA vary, ranging from self-implementation to global system integrator (SI)-led efforts for comprehensive global implementations involving multiple business units. Companies that have low to moderate sales process complexity and that do not need to integrate with back-end systems can self-implement some of the systems reviewed here. Companies with complex processes that span multiple departments and require data integration commonly employ third-party SIs. In cases with exceptional process complexity, it is common to hire the vendor's professional services group for the implementation. As a general rule, regardless of the complexity of your sales process, Gartner recommends that you employ an SI if you are new to the vendor's technology.

Use this Magic Quadrant to aid your evaluations, but explore the market further to assess the capacity of each vendor to address your unique business problems and technical concerns. Your shortlist should be determined by the complexity and scale of your requirements. This Magic Quadrant is not designed to be the sole tool for creating a vendor shortlist; use it as part of your due diligence, in conjunction with discussions with Gartner analysts.

Magic Quadrants are snapshots in time. To be impartial and to complete our analysis, we stop our data collection efforts at a consistent time across the board. In this case, the cutoff date was 1 March 2017. Although this means that some products' capabilities may have changed since then, the same is true for all vendors evaluated.

Market Overview

In 2016, the SFA market grew by 12.8%, to $5.6 billion, with almost all the growth relating to cloud-based offerings.

Almost 69% of sales were of SaaS, and 64% of revenue was generated in North America. Almost 87% of worldwide sales in 2016 was concentrated in 10 countries.

Gartner forecasts that the SFA market will grow to more than $9.4 billion by 2019, with SaaS-based solutions continuing to take a larger share (see "Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, Worldwide, 2015" ).

The overall CRM sales segment shows substantial innovation beneath its top-line growth of 13.4% in 2016. This compares with an application software growth rate of 9.2%, and 5.3% growth for all software. Although SFA is a mature sector, innovation in SFA technologies, with improvements in ease of use, better mobile use cases and early applications of artificial intelligence, have driven growth through deeper penetration and larger deals.

This innovation and growth has extended to the sales enablement sector — a range of add-on tools and functions designed to make the sales rep's life more efficient, organized and effective within an SFA environment. Gartner's market share figures estimate the growth in the sales enablement segment in 2016 to be 15.5% and the segment's size to be $445 million, which represents 5.6% of the overall sales sector. Sales enablement includes third-party solutions that cover the entire life cycle of sales reps — from recruitment and selection to onboarding, coaching and training. They make reps more efficient in sales situations, with just-in-time training, curated account intelligence, recommended sales content and optimized pricing solutions. The sales enablement segment is receiving a lot of attention, startup activity and venture capital.

As part of the Magic Quadrant analysis process, Gartner collected input, via a survey, from over 130 vendor reference customers who use the SFA solutions reviewed in this Magic Quadrant. Insights we gained from this survey include the following:

Sales automation implementations are a considerable investment. Respondents spent an average of $276,440 each on SFA solutions in their most recent fiscal year, compared with $153,970 on non-SFA sales applications.

The top-three reasons for purchasing SFA solutions:

To improve customer relations/service (69% of respondents).

To create operational efficiencies (68%).

To improve business process outcomes (67%; multiple responses were allowed).

The top-three criteria for selecting an SFA solution:

Product functionality and performance (67% of respondents).

Competitive costs (60%).

Architectural scalability (49%).

Eighty-nine percent of the surveyed respondents were "very satisfied" or "completely satisfied" with their SFA solution. This, however, is a drop of six points from last year's survey.

Based on recent innovations and product improvements on vendors' roadmaps, Gartner believes that the following product considerations will shape the SFA market during the next three years:

Predictive analytics for improving sales forecasting, lead conversion, relationship intelligence, and "white space" opportunities.

Embedded AI.

Sales enablement tools that support better sales execution.

Data-driven selling, whereby companies apply big data analytical techniques to their sales programs, to uncover new insights about sales execution best practices.

Model-driven SFA applications, using business process modeling techniques and methods that are already well-established in the fields of B2C selling and customer service.

The first two considerations will have the biggest impact in the short term. Most SFA vendors now offer native, embedded predictive analytics for at least one of the capabilities listed above. This development is important because SFA tools have traditionally been systems of record, suitable for capturing sales activity, looking up contact details or managing sales forecasts. They have rarely been good at improving sales execution, at helping representatives close more deals. Predictive analytics addresses the two most common questions of representatives:

What should I do next with this deal?

How likely am I to close this deal?

Predictive analytics, when combined with emerging (but not yet mature) prescriptive analytic functions, will go a long way toward answering these questions. They are predicated on self-adjusting machine-learning models that improve the quality of insights, based on continuous collection and analysis of new sales process inputs.

Artificial intelligence has not yet achieved wide adoption, but there are many relevant new technologies on the market. Tools that automate sales activity entry, or that send emails on behalf of representatives, are already available from third-party vendors. For more examples of the use of artificial intelligence in sales environments, see "Cool Vendors in CRM Sales, 2017." Based on the roadmaps of SFA vendors that Gartner has reviewed, it will only be another two or three years before artificial intelligence is common in SFA offerings.

Sales enablement will be an important factor in this market in the midterm. Gartner regularly speaks with companies that are looking to improve sales execution. Sales enablement processes — representative training, managerial coaching and sales content distribution — are an essential part of this objective. However, Gartner finds that sales enablement is not a significant part of SFA offerings, regardless of vendor. Nor is it typically part of vendors' roadmaps. This means that many organizations must continue to consider additional tools to fulfill all their sales execution needs.

Evidence

As part of the Magic Quadrant process, Gartner analysts collected input from over 130 reference customers (who had been identified by the vendors) using a formal online survey, as well as via inquiries from Gartner clients evaluating the vendors' products. Gartner analysts also used data drawn from the Gartner Peer Insights portal for the SFA market. In addition, they interviewed vendors and attended product demonstrations.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute

Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.

Completeness of Vision

Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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