Gartner is pleased to release the newest installment of the annual Sales Force Automation Magic Quadrant. This year the Magic Quadrant covers 19 vendors. Several vendors changed position in this year’s installment. SAP and bpm’online move into the Leaders quadrant. CRMNEXT and Zoho move into the Challengers quadrant.
New vendors in the Magic Quadrant include: Vtiger, Copper, X2Engine, Pipedrive, Freshworks, and Pipeliner.
Within this group of CRM vendors, Gartner finds a market that spans many sales use cases, from complex B2B long-cycle sales to basic B2C sales processes.
Among the list of qualification criteria to merit inclusion in the Magic Quadrant, Gartner expects vendors to demonstrate strong core SFA capabilities for accounts, sales activity, opportunity management, forecasting management, and native mobile applications.
In the past year, the top market development has been the continued improvement predictive analytics in SFA product suites. The majority of vendors in this Magic Quadrant now offer predictive analytics for at least one of these use cases: opportunity scoring, lead scoring, relationship health scoring or forecasting. The vendors that do not offer predictive analytics will be at a competitive disadvantage.
Gartner also believes that two other forms of AI — virtual digital sales assistants and voice-driven data entry — will become important functions in this market. Vendors have already made good strides on the latter capability.
Few vendors have built deep capabilities for prescriptive guided selling, but that situation will change in the mid-term.
In 2018, the sales force automation (SFA) market grew by an estimated 12.8% to $6.9 billion, with almost all the growth relating to cloud-based offerings.
Gartner estimates that SFA technology comprises approximately 55% of the overal sales technology market.
Gartner clients can access the Magic Quadrant here. Non-clients may view a preview of the document here.
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