Gartner Research

Critical Capabilities for Sales Force Automation Platforms

Published: 21 September 2022

Summary

Sales force automation platforms enable collaboration, mediate interactions between buyers and sellers, and standardize CRM sales processes. Application leaders supporting sales should evaluate the 14 vendors against 12 critical capabilities within three use cases to identify vendors for further evaluation.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • The sales force automation platform (SFA) market is enabling more new capabilities to support remote selling and buying needs, such as team and buyer collaboration, proposal and quotation features, as well as, bot-supported mediation and IoT device support with some vendors offering the ability to invoke sales processes via smart home devices.

  • CRM suite functions — which unify standard CRM data objects with sales as well as other functions such as service and marketing visibility — are now offered by over 80% of the vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant.

  • Intermediate data ingestion — which capture signals from emails, calendar

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  • Creatio
  • CRMNEXT
  • Freshworks
  • HubSpot
  • Microsoft
  • Neocrm
  • Oracle
  • Pega
  • Salesforce
  • SAP
  • SugarCRM
  • Vtiger
  • Zendesk
  • 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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