Gartner Research

Critical Capabilities for Sales Force Automation Platforms

Published: 06 September 2023

Summary

Sales force automation platforms enable deeper sales automation, mediation of buyer and seller interactions and standardized CRM sales processes. Application leaders supporting sales should evaluate the 13 vendors against 12 critical capabilities within three use cases to identify the best fit.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • The sales force automation (SFA) platform market is experiencing low-value attainment and realization from deployments as noted by Gartner clients. Much of this is due to poor user adoption, data governance challenges, and a lack of best practices from vendors.

  • SFA platform vendors are heavily investing in and augmenting existing critical capabilities with generative AI (GenAI). This will improve overall value attainment and usability, and will transform ways to execute on sales processes.

  • Most SFA platform vendors in this research have redesigned, are redesigning or will redesign their user experience altogether through new and modernized user interfaces. Some will provide

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  • BUSINESSNEXT
  • Creatio
  • Freshworks
  • HubSpot
  • Microsoft
  • Neocrm
  • Oracle
  • Pega
  • Salesforce
  • SAP
  • SugarCRM
  • Vtiger
  • Zoho
  • Account and Contact Management
  • Activity Management
  • Opportunity Management
  • Guided Selling
  • Forecasting Management
  • Mobile, IoT and Bot
  • Lead Management
  • Visualization and Analytics
  • Partner Relationship Management
  • Platform and Composability
  • Collaboration
  • Proposal and Quote
  • B2B Sales
  • B2C Sales
  • Indirect/Relationship Sales

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Critical Capabilities: A deeper look into provider offerings

How does a Critical Capabilities report work?

As a companion to the Magic Quadrant™, a Critical Capabilities report scores competing products and services against a set of meaningful differentiators. It reveals which options are the best fit in various use cases to help you focus on the vendors best suited to your needs.

A Critical Capabilities report is more than just a diagram. You also get:

Sharper focus

Narrow down the product and service criteria most important to you.

Individualized use cases

Use interactive features to customize usage scenarios based on your organization’s unique needs.

Faster decision making

Use data to speed up provider selection and accelerate the procurement process.

A Gartner Critical Capabilities report is just one of our many offerings.

We provide actionable, objective insight to help organizations make smarter, faster technology decisions to stay ahead of disruption and accelerate growth.

Pick the right provider with confidence

We use a Critical Capabilities report, the Magic Quadrant and more to ensure you select the best-fit provider to avoid the costly repercussions of a poor decision.

Align deal structures and optimize spend

We benchmark pricing against the market so you avoid unnecessary charges.

Reduce complexity and risk

We analyze contract terms and conditions to protect you against future price increases and unanticipated costs.

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