Can only giants play the CRM Game?
By: Mariana Fonseca
Tags: Cloud, Digital, Customer Service, CRM, Salesforce

Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle… Can only giants play the CRM Game?

Learn the rules of the CRM game, get to know the major players, and become overwhelmed by how Salesforce is rocking the business! Mariana Fonseca Follow Sep 23, 2019 · 6 min read

The CRM market has been gaining power and strength for years now. No matter how big, how powerful, how international, or even how digital your company is: you’ll always need CRM, powering your business with relevant data and insights. Responding, clever as can be, many were the enterprises that emerged to supply the market with CRM tools, turning it into a battlefield. These days, one can easily become overwhelmed by the vast panoply of CRM solutions to choose from!

CRM Market Growth

As expected, the CRM market has been growing rapidly. Only in 2017 it grew 11,85%, approaching nearly $27.2 billion. More impressing is the potential of this market: projected to be $82 billion by 2025, growing at an annual rate of 12%. If this rate remains, until 2034 the CRM market potential would be $228 billion. But, where do these projections come from?

Data suggests that, each year 70% of businesses refer they plan to increase spending on technology, so as to keep up with the ever changing digital industry. Many of these companies seriously consider investing more in CRM to become GDPR compliant. In fact, 49% of businesses plan to increase spending on CRM software. More specifically, businesses plan to increase spending on customer service, marketing automation, knowledge management, and sales force automation. All of these, through primarily investing on CRM. Coupling to that, already in 2018, the overall CRM usage increased from 56% to 74%. And, in the same year, 91% of businesses with over 11 employees use CRM, and 50% of companies with more or less 10 employees also use it. All in all, 74% of CRM users reveal the tool improved their access to customer data.

Having said this, we may only conclude the future for CRM can only be promising, yet also quite competitive. Afterall, who’s leading this market?

CRM Leaders

The CRM market is getting the more and more competitive and complex. Therefore, and since CRM is rather a broad concept, let’s try to narrow it down according to Gartner. Gartner breaks down providers in two groups: Sales Force Automations (SFAs) and Customer Engagement. Let’s now analyse the market leaders in this two segments.

Sales Force Automations Market

The automation applications that helps managing contacts, orders, opportunities, forecasts, leads, and dashboards. These days, SFAs rely more and more on artificial intelligence and predictive analytics. The sales force automation market grew 15.7% to $6.2 billion in 2017.

Salesforce:

Salesforce is the first market leader on the SFAs market. How did it get there? Thanks to its long expertise on the field and its well-known Sales Cloud, which is now empowered by Einstein, Salesforce Artificial Intelligence functionality.

Microsoft:

Microsoft is the second player in the market. It has been playing its role on the CRM world, offering advanced customization option through deep customer understanding.

Oracle:

Oracle comes third on the SFAs podium, playing a solid role when it comes to mobile and predictive analytics software.

Source: Magic Quadrant reports by Gartner — SFA leaders in 2017

Customer Engagement Market

Customer Engagement solutions ensure the client is the priority during the entire sales process and afterwards. Use user-friendly applications, providing knowledge bases, and sending automated follow-up emails are among common practices.

Salesforce:

Salesforce is again the leader in the market, thanks to its multiple and often complementary cloud solutions, including Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and App Cloud. They are the reference on software solutions.

Pegasystems:

Pegasystems comes second on this leader-board. The company is following Salesforce steps in what concerns the vast offer of solutions for all business sizes and industries.

Microsoft:

Microsoft has been empowering its customer service software, using it as an independent module within their CRM software. Also, Microsoft enjoys from the fact it is already a well-established brand.

Oracle:

Besides Oracle large data base, what makes it special is the fact that they started early embedding AI into their customer engagement strategy. Also, Oracle’s solution is easy to set up.

Zendesk:

Zendesk found its way to success by focusing on the small businesses niche. Yet, these days, their solutions may be implemented in companies with over 100 employees, as well. They offer intuitive and user-friendly solutions.

Source: Magic Quadrant reports by Gartner — SFA leaders in 2017

Salesforce Throne:

After having had an overview of the major players in the market and its distinctive factors, it becomes clearer that Salesforce really is leading the CRM loop. So, how did it get there?

Salesforce starting point…

Salesforce was created in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff. All the four, plus two dogs, in a bedroom apartment next to Benioff’s house, committed to revolutionize the business software applications world. Less than one year after its creation, Salesforce moved into an eight thousand square feet office at Rincon Center along with 10 employees and started positioning itself in the market — the game was on! The moto: No software!

In 2005, Salesforce stroke again, developing a service that would change business software forever: AppExchange. It offered a place for partners to develop their own applications and open them up to Salesforce customers. In the following years, Salesforce launched Apex, the On-Demand Programming Language which allows third parties to write and run code on Salesforce.com’s shared architecture, and Force.com, opening possibilities for customers to build their own custom applications.

After having settling on Sales, Service, and Paas, in 2012, Salesforce turned into a new market: Marketing. It created Marketing Cloud. Then came a higher focus on user experience, resulting in the roll out of the mobile app Salesforce1 and a new, more user friendly, look for the platform, Lightning experience, as we know it.

In 2016, Salesforce gave birth to what many considered the biggest development in Salesforce’s history: Artificial Intelligence — Einstein. Its capabilities were embedded in sales, service, marketing, and apps development. The launch of Einstein was an enormous hype for the company!

Salesforce Today…

To these days, Salesforce has been acquiring multiple key companies, keeping its focus on AI and predictive analysis, and its strong multi-cloudiness presence (wasn’t Salesforce the pioneer of Cloud CRM!). Impressive as may be, today, 99 of Fortune 100 brands partner with Salesforce!

Take a look at Salesforce market position through these graphics:

The #1 CRM company in the world is now lied on a bed of roses! With more than 150,000 companies using its CRM, a full year revenue of $13.28 billion, and more than 20% market share, Salesforce just announced it plans to achieve $60 billion in revenue by 2034! Meanwhile, Salesforce keeps on being prized by many: on February 2019, Salesforce was named the leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP)!

“We had another year of outstanding revenue growth, surpassing $13 billion in revenue faster than any other enterprise software company in history,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO, Salesforce. “As companies of all sizes turn to Salesforce, we’re enabling them to put the customer at the center of their digital transformation through our intelligent Customer 360 platform. I’ve never been more excited about the opportunity ahead.”

We hope this post helped you keeping updated on the CRM market, its latest trends, its major competitors, and its leader player!

Originally published at https://stellaxius.com on April 23, 2019.