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Magic Quadrant for Sales Force AutomationPublished 9 July 2018 - ID G00338301 - 47 min read

By Analysts Tad Travis, Ilona Hansen, Julian Poulter, Melissa Hilbert

The sales force automation market grew 15.7% to $6.2 billion in 2017, and embedded

predictive analytics is now a common capability from the leading SFA vendors. Our evaluation

of 15 vendors will help application leaders choose the solution that best meets their sales

execution requirements.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2021, 15% of all sales technology spending will be applied to sales enablement technology, up

from 8.7% in 2016.

Market Definition/Description

This document was revised on 5 November 2018. The document you are viewing is the corrected

version. For more information, see the  Corrections

(https://www.gartner.com/en/about/policies/current-corrections) page on gartner.com.

Gartner defines sales force automation (SFA) as systems that support the automation of sales

activities, processes and administrative responsibilities for organizations' sales professionals.

Gartner considers SFA to be foundational technology, implemented to automate an organization's

core sales processes.

The core functionalities of the SFA market include:

Account, contact and opportunity management■

Sales activity management■

Sales forecasting■

Mobile applications■

Reporting■

Partner relationship management (PRM)*■

Platform capabilities*■

* Gartner has added the last two capabilities to its market definition this year.

There are additional sales technologies and capabilities that are necessary for improving the sales

effectiveness of salespeople. These include but are not limited to:

While they are important, Gartner does not deem these extensions to be core to its market

definition.

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation

Sales enablement■

Relationship intelligence■

Lead management■

Guided selling■

Sales content management■

CPQ tools■

Source: Gartner (July 2018)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Aptean

Aptean remains in the Niche Players quadrant. Its performance in sales execution, marketing

execution and customer experience relative to the leading vendors contributed to its downward

movement within the quadrant. The Pivotal Sales Force Automation product runs on Microsoft

Azure and is suitable for midsize and larger companies with complex processes. It offers

deployment choices of on-premises, single-tenant cloud and multitenant cloud, but there are gaps

between the on-premises and SaaS versions. Aptean offers a wider range of vertical-specific

capabilities relative to the other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, including solutions for financial

services, manufacturing, real estate/construction, insurance and regulatory associations. In

January 2018, Aptean completed integration to Microsoft Office 365, UX enhancements and a

mobile application with online/offline capabilities.

Strengths

Cautions

Base

Base is again a Visionary, based on its strong market understanding and product vision for

improving sales execution. Base's SFA product features a UI that simplifies manual data entry and

automatically pushes sales activity insights to users. It is aimed at small and midsize businesses

seeking a comparatively easy-to-use application that can be deployed quickly. All implementations

and customer onboarding are performed by Base's postsales resources. The vendor's strongest

competitive differentiator is a prescriptive analytics product named Apollo. In the past year, Base

has added event-driven workflow functionality and a new marketplace for integration connectors.

Strengths

Platform capabilities: Aptean reference customers in the Magic Quadrant survey gave Pivotal

Sales Force Automation high scores for quality and ease of integration with external systems.

■

Market responsiveness: Reference customers noted that Aptean's customer advisory board

and executive team are really listening to them and making improvements to the product as a

result.

■

Sales execution: Aptean is a global company with a product line that extends beyond SFA. The

majority of its revenue comes from clients in North America, and most newly acquired

customers come from Europe and APAC.

■

Sales and marketing execution: Aptean has acquired very few new customers since last year

compared to other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. It also has a comparatively lower number of

qualified implementation partners.

■

Customer experience: Some Aptean reference customers cited support and professional

services turnover as an issue.

■

Analytics innovation: Aptean has yet to develop predictive analytics capabilities to increase

sales execution effectiveness. It is late to the market compared with the leaders in this Magic

Quadrant, which have made several advancements.

■

Roadmap and product innovation: Base continues to maintain a strong product roadmap and

deliver new capabilities years before the larger SFA vendors provide them. It has one of the

largest investments in SFA research and development of all the vendors surveyed by Gartner,

with future planned features including an autoprospecting function.

■

Cautions

bpm'online

Bpm'online remains in the Challengers quadrant but with improved positioning, due to its

customer experience scores from reference customers and improved execution. Bpm'online sales

is a comprehensive SFA product that is underpinned by business process management

functionality, enabling it to manage complex sales processes with ease. SFA is part of a bigger

suite from bpm'online also offering integrated marketing and service functionality. The vendor can

handle long and short sales cycles in both B2B and B2C sales processes. Bpm'online recently

released an online marketplace of applications that already has hundreds of apps, some with one-

click integration. Recent releases include new functionality in customer profile enrichment and

case management tools, as well as mobile dashboards and Kanban boards for opportunities.

Strengths

Ease of use: Base has one of the most attractive and easy-to-learn UIs in the market. Reference

customers also gave it the second-highest assessment for ease of use of all the vendors in this

Magic Quadrant.

■

Sales process automation: The product features functions that reduce or simplify manual data

entry, such as automatically capturing sales activity from email messages, or providing one-tap

voicemail delivery functions. Base Apollo features prescriptive next-best-action

recommendations.

■

Customization: Reference customers for Base cited missing functionality that is common to

other vendor products in this Magic Quadrant, such as the ability to customize the UI, build

custom reports or extend the product into nonsales use cases.

■

Implementation partners: Compared to the leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Base has a

significantly lower number of system integrators. All implementations are managed by Base's

postsales team — a consideration for midsize companies looking to implement complex sales

processes.

■

Product vision and scope: Compared to the leading SFA vendors, Base has a modest roster of

native product capabilities and third-party add-on tools.

■

Sales process modelling: Bpm'online's core SFA capabilities are extended with a deep business

process management capability, which means that multiple different customer journeys and

sales processes can easily be modeled in the system.

■

Market responsiveness: Reviewers on Gartner Peer Insights have noted that bpm'online is very

responsive to customer enhancement requests.

■

Customer experience: Reference customers gave bpm'online the highest overall customer

satisfaction and experience ratings in this Magic Quadrant.

■

Cautions

CRMNEXT

CRMNEXT's position as a Visionary is driven by its market understanding and market strategy. It

offers vertical-specific products, mainly for the financial services, insurance, retail and

pharmaceutical industries. It can do very large implementations, especially in banking, and is

primarily implemented in B2C financial services companies. CRMNEXT is a holistic product suite

with multiple modules built on a unified platform and code base. The SFA offering is part of an

integrated CRM product suite including marketing, lead management, customer service, loan

origination, digital acquisition and digital services. CRMNEXT offers end-to-end processes such as

the loan origination process, covering steps from lead qualification through opportunity

underwriting to disbursal and collection.

Strengths

Cautions

Regionalfootprint: Bpm'online's customer footprint in the APAC and North America regions is

not as large as those of the leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant.

■

New customer growth: The vendor's marketing has had limited impact beyond EMEA, so

awareness of bpm'online across the wider CRM market is limited. It is targeting larger

enterprises and winning deals, but the number is modest compared to the leading vendors in

this Magic Quadrant.

■

Implementation partners: Compared to the leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant, bpm'online

has fewer global system integration partners and certified implementation resources.

■

Technology: CRMNEXT has a proprietary Catalyst sales performance modeler that uses

multiple parameters, such as historical KPI performance, current revenue run rate and

campaign effectiveness. Admins can use the models to create revenue and sales activity

targets for sales reps, and to monitor performance against sales execution metrics.

■

Relationship intelligence: Reference customers rated CRMNEXT comparatively higher on

relationship intelligence compared to the leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant. The vendor

provides insightful views of contacts and accounts, such as engagement health factor and

"who knows who" connections, allowing for relationship activity plans.

■

Roadmap: CRMNEXT'S roadmap for new functionalities includes a chatbot engine that

manages interactions with customers and prospects, and that performs actions on behalf of

agents, such as qualifying leads or completing underwriting approvals.

■

Application marketplace: CRMNEXT doesn't provide a third-party marketplace, which is a

common offering from the leading SFA vendors. Prospects outside of CRMNEXT's core

■

Infor

Infor improved its position this year within the Niche Players quadrant, based on its marketing

strategy and product developments over the last 12 months. It targets enterprises in the

manufacturing, distribution, retail, hospitality, public sector, healthcare and financial services

industries. Infor's SFA product is available on-premises or as SaaS. Further CRM-related

technologies offered by the vendor include CPQ, contract life cycle management (CLM), a

commerce module (Rhythm), marketing resource management (MRM), campaign management

(Marketo/OCM) and interaction advisor (IA). Acquired by Infor in 2017, Birst allows customers to

leverage analytical capabilities such as predictive analytics.

Strengths

Cautions

industries that are interested in extended sales technologies will not find additional applications

developed by authorized ISVs or other CRMNEXT partners.

Forecasting: Reference customers gave CRMNEXT comparatively low scores for forecasting

and for account and contact capabilities, relative to all the Magic Quadrant vendors. B2B

prospects in particular should carefully evaluate these functionalities, as both are core

elements for B2B sales teams.

■

Geographic presence: Seventy-five percent of CRMNEXT's revenue comes from APAC. The

vendor lacks the same level of sales and support resources in North America that the leading

Magic Quadrant vendors exhibit.

■

Opportunity management: Infor CRM for sales provides good functions for tracking the sales

cycle, gauging the likelihood of closing sales and reviewing win/loss data, in order to take

corrective actions early on. These capabilities also allow for strategic decisions such as

territory realignment.

■

Implementation support: Infor offers packaged implementations to help customers with time to

market. It offers, for example, a quick-start program including basic activities such as user,

contact and account importing; mobile app deployment; and user access rights configuration.

■

Relationship intelligence: Reference customers rated relationship intelligence highly for Infor

compared to other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Infor provides better understanding of

customer interactions and activities, and allows for higher visibility into the customer life cycle.

■

Geographic presence: Infor derives the majority of its SFA revenue from North America, and has

limited presence in EMEA and Latin America. Prospects outside the U.S. should determine their

requirements for implementation services and ensure availability in their region. Reference

customers claimed it is hard to find implementation partners all over the world to support a

global rollout.

■

Insightly

Insightly makes its inaugural appearance in this Magic Quadrant, entering as a Niche Player.

Insightly CRM is a SaaS-only product for small-to-midsize sales organizations. The product offers

several core SFA capabilities, including opportunity management and pipeline management.

Insightly CRM features an embedded, native project management module, which is not common

among other SFA offerings. The product also features relationship intelligence functions to help

determine the strength of relationships with decision makers.

In the past year, Insightly has improved the product with a Kanban board view for pipeline

management, improved Outlook integration, new data visualization dashboards and improved

metadata architecture. Insightly has a Salesforce migration tool that moves physical data and

metadata from Salesforce into Insightly.

Strengths

Cautions

Reporting: Reference customers rated Infor's reporting capabilities comparatively lower than

the average score for all the vendors in this Magic Quadrant.

■

Forecasting management: Infor's forecasting capabilities lag those of the leading vendors in

this Magic Quadrant, according to reference customers.

■

Sales execution: In 2017, Insightly had one of the highest customer acquisition rates of the

vendors evaluated by Gartner in this Magic Quadrant. The company has over 25,000 corporate

clients, covering 1.5 million end users worldwide.

■

Application platform: Insightly's reference customers cited the quality of the product's platform

for extensibility, reporting, workflow automation and integration with Google.

■

Product innovation: The relationship intelligence functions are embedded into the SFA product.

Insightly's business relationship graph parses emails from Outlook 365 or Gmail for quantity of

interactions with employees, to identify the relative strength of relationships with customers.

■

Product vision: Insightly lacks the same depth of capabilities common to the leading SFA

vendors, particularly in forecast management, partnership relationship management, guided

selling, predictive analytics for opportunities and quota management.

■

Customer experience: Reference customers gave Insightly comparatively low scores for overall

experience and willingness to recommend the product, relative to all the Magic Quadrant

vendors. Customers specifically indicated concerns with timely responses to product questions

and ability to understand their needs.

■

Functional depth: Reference customers gave Insightly comparatively low scores for ease of

use, mobile functionality, enforcing record editing permissions and forecasting.

■

Microsoft

Microsoft is in the Leaders quadrant, based on the quality of its product vision, integration with

other products and sales execution. Having established a larger field sales organization to sell to

enterprises, Microsoft continues to demonstrate that it is selling to larger sales organizations than

it has in the past. Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales is available as SaaS or on-premises, and there

is a native mobile application that works in offline mode on both mobile phones and tablets. In the

past year, Microsoft has addressed customer concerns by updating the usability of the web

browser UI, and released a new sales solution, Microsoft Relationship Sales, that combines

Dynamics 365, Office 365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator into a single SFA offering. After a recent

update, it now features a rebuilt lead management module and a function for real-time updates on

tracked accounts.

Strengths

Cautions

Oracle

Marketing and sales execution: Based on conversations with Gartner clients, Microsoft is in

larger, more-complex SFA implementations than it has been in the past. The company is

drawing interest from prospects in retail banking and retail — verticals that have complex

business processes and significant data integration requirements.

■

Product vision for sales transformation: Microsoft has a notably strong vision for defining how

its sales technology relates to companies' B2C customer experience and digital transformation

initiatives. Reference customers positively noted its meaningful vision for supporting better

sales execution initiatives.

■

Product scope: Microsoft offers a significant number of native SFA product capabilities,

including newer capabilities such as predictive analytics for lead scoring, customer churn

indicators and relationship health.

■

Application performance: Gartner continues to field comments from some of our clients and

Magic Quadrant references about the speed and performance of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for

Sales in SaaS deployments. Microsoft attributes the issue to poor implementation design.

Clients and prospects with complex process automation and large datasets should consult with

Microsoft's product experts before planning deployment.

■

Contracting and licensing: Reference customers gave Microsoft comparatively low scores for

ability to understand buyer needs, pricing flexibility and overall satisfaction with the contracting

process, relative to all the Magic Quadrant vendors.

■

Postsales technical and customer success support: Compared to other vendors in this Magic

Quadrant, reference customers gave Microsoft low scores for quality of technical support,

quality of support from customer success resources, and product documentation.

■

Oracle strengthened its position in the Leaders quadrant with a significant increase in its Ability to

Execute, reflecting its own rapid growth and the maturity of its CRM cloud suite offering. Oracle

Sales Cloud is part of the Oracle CX Cloud Suite, a SaaS-based solution that offers comprehensive

breadth of CRM functions. While Oracle CX Cloud Suite is primarily installed in midsize

corporations, the Sales Cloud product is relevant for enterprises with large user bases and

complex requirements. In the past year, Oracle has improved its mobile application, adding

automated data capture functions, and released its first virtual digital sales assistant function. It

has improved its Adaptive Intelligence applications with prescriptive next-best actions and

account insights. Oracle has also expanded its number of vertical-specific applications, adding an

automotive dealer management application.

Strengths

Cautions

Pegasystems

Pegasystems moved into the Visionaries quadrant this year on the strength of improved vision for

its technical architecture and for its relevance to customer experience initiatives. It is one of the

few vendors providing a common data model and single platform code base, with on-premises,

cloud and hybrid deployment options, making it attractive to verticals where on-premises

deployments are required. The Pegasystems SFA product is aimed at B2C enterprise deployments

Cloud revenue growth: Annual revenue growth for Oracle CX Cloud Suite has exceeded 45% in

each of the last two years (Gartner estimate), reflecting the strength of Oracle's improved sales

and marketing execution.

■

Vertical solutions: Oracle is building solutions out in at least eight industries so far, making it

attractive for prospects in those supported. Further, Oracle has a roadmap for additional

industries to address each one's unique challenges.

■

Scope of predictive analytics: Although to date there are only a small number of delivered use

cases in sales and marketing, the platform is now in place to rapidly roll out additional use

cases of AI across CRM/CX and other applications. Unlike other vendors in this Magic

Quadrant, Oracle enables admins to control the relative influence of certain fields and attributes

in the predictive models.

■

Functionality: Reference customers rated Oracle comparatively lower for lead and opportunity

management, relative to all the Magic Quadrant vendors.

■

Dated web UI: Oracle's web/desktop-only client UI is outdated compared to those of best-in-

class offerings.

■

Sales execution: Some reference customers noted that Oracle sales teams did not clearly

communicate the limits of existing GA functionality as opposed to planned functionality on the

vendor's product roadmap.

■

— particularly those with complex workflow and business processes — using its native intelligent

business process management system (iBPMS). AI provided in the underlying platform has been

well-implemented by the vendor to provide insights and guidance in multiple use cases throughout

the SFA product. In particular, a new forecasting widget provides insights into forecast accuracy.

Strengths

Cautions

PipelineDeals

PipelineDeals maintains a solid position as a Niche Vendor, having strongly improved its Ability to

Execute. PipelineDeals is a competitively priced offering aimed at small business users in

companies with revenue below $100 million. It offers an attractive but simple SFA application on

web and mobile. It does not offer marketing or service capabilities. Recent enhancements include

postsale customer management features such as key milestones and deliverables, customer

health and happiness indicator tracking, and a "team" capability to allow management of complex

accounts. The company has also clarified its go-to-market strategy, using a self-service channel

for the smallest deals, focusing its inside sales team on the larger deals, and developing a partner

channel.

Strengths

Product quality: Reference customers cited the overall quality of the Pegasystems SFA product,

noting that the vendor adds a deep set of SFA capabilities each product release.

■

Integrated predictive analytics: Pegasystems integrates its Decision Hub predictive analytics

platform with the SFA application, providing insights and prescriptive next-step guidance.

■

Business process modeling and automation: The underlying iBPMS functionality works well to

support complex sales processes — for instance, in mortgage and loan origination. This

capability makes Pegasystems suitable for larger, complex enterprise deployments.

■

B2B sales execution: Compared to the leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Pegasystems

has very few B2B deployments.

■

Partners and certified consultants: Compared to the leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant,

Pegasystems has had relatively modest success with recruiting small and midsize

implementation partners for SFA implementations. Its number of certified implementation

resources trails the levels of the leading SFA vendors.

■

Relationships with customers: Reference customers rated satisfaction with Pegasystems's

overall customer experience and with contract negotiations lower than the all-vendor averages

in this Magic Quadrant.

■

Ease of deployment: Reference customers gave PipelineDeals notably high ratings for ease of

deployment and deployment timelines.

■

Cautions

Salesforce

Salesforce stays in the Leaders quadrant for the 12th year in a row, reflecting the vendor's

continued strength of product vision and revenue growth. With over 4 million users, Salesforce

Sales Cloud provides a wide span of native functionality in all SFA critical capabilities, boasts

market-leading platform functionality, and offers extensions for partner relationship management

and CPQ. In the past year, Salesforce has boosted Sales Cloud Einstein AI investments, adding

predictive lead and opportunity scoring functions. It has also updated Trailhead for learning,

adding functionality that permits users to create custom training classes integrated directly with

their Salesforce org.

Strengths

Customer service: Free telephone technical support and customer service processes were

rated very highly by PipelineDeals's reference customers, who cited the speed of the vendor's

response and resolution times.

■

Ease of use: Reference customers rated the PipelineDeals product highly for core capabilities

such as account, contact and activity management, and for other capabilities such as lead

management and advanced analytics.

■

Revenue growth: PipelineDeals reported 2017 revenue of less than $6 million, representing only

modest growth of approximately 10% year over year, lower than the overall SFA market growth

of 16%.

■

SFA functionality: The PipelineDeals product lacks functionality outside of SFA, such as CPQ,

and relies on a limited set of integrations and extensions for functionality such as customer

service and marketing.

■

Implementation and ISV partners: PipelineDeals lacks an ecosystem of implementers or

product add-ons.

■

Market strategy: Among the leading vendors surveyed by Gartner, Salesforce has a notably

strong market strategy. It offers products for different customer segments, from SMB to global

enterprise. It develops marketing messages and content for all decision-making roles. It has

one of the largest implementation partner ecosystems, supporting deployments in all

geographies.

■

Postsales support: Salesforce has the most extensive postsales support organization of any

vendor in this Magic Quadrant. It offers a wide scope of tools and product documentation for

self-directed education on product best practices. For larger clients, it offers dedicated, on-

demand assistance from customer success resources.

■

Cautions

SAP

SAP returns as a Visionary, based upon the scope of its SaaS-based SFA product. SAP Hybris

Sales Cloud provides broad and deep vertical capabilities as well as industry-specific process

flows, data models and attributes for the following industries: consumer products, industrial

machinery and components, automotive, professional services, utilities, high-tech, the public

sector, travel, wholesale, and chemicals. The product is mostly acquired by large enterprises with

complex, strategic B2B sales across large teams, with long sales cycles and comprehensive

product offerings. SAP has grown its SFA revenue considerably, with its year-over-year growth rate

the third-highest among the vendors evaluated.

SAP has had difficulty articulating a vision for SAP Hybris to customers and prospects in recent

years. It reacted to this in early June (after the research period for this Magic Quadrant closed) by

launching its CRM portfolio as the SAP Customer Experience suite, branded SAP C/4HANA.

Additionally, SAP upgraded its data center hardware infrastructure and doubled the number of

data centers to improve availability and performance recently. Furthermore, SAP will release a new

data workbench on SAP Cloud Platform and is investing in consulting enablement and best-

practice documentation.

Note: In early 2018, SAP acquired CallidusCloud, a CPQ and sales performance management

software vendor. Related integration plans and product roadmap were not available prior to the

research cut-off for this Magic Quadrant.

Strengths

Innovation and product releases: Salesforce continues to maintain a strong record for product

releases, adding a significant number of new SFA functions in each release and maintaining a

comparatively good record for innovative functionality.

■

Contract negotiation and sales tactics: Gartner clients, Salesforce reference customers and

Gartner Peer Insights reviewers all give Salesforce comparatively low satisfaction scores, on

average, for contract negotiation, sales tactics and pricing flexibility.

■

Value from product: Some Salesforce clients and reference customers continue to have

difficulty attaining value from their investment in Salesforce, citing issues with low user

adoption, unrealized business results and the overall product cost.

■

Functionality satisfaction: Reference customers gave Salesforce comparatively low scores, on

average, for ease of use, activity management, sales content management, master data

management and pipeline inspection functions.

■

Sales functional breadth: SAP Hybris Sales Cloud offers functionalities that extend beyond

basic SFA, such as relationship intelligence, sales training and coaching, sales acceleration for

■

Cautions

SugarCRM

SugarCRM reaffirmed its position in the Visionaries quadrant this year. Its vision is supported by a

solid marketing strategy, reflected in its broad go-to-market approach. SugarCRM sells to

businesses of all sizes, but primarily is acquired by companies with 200 to 5,000 employees. Its

SFA revenue distribution is very balanced, with 42% in North America, 35% in EMEA, 13% in APAC

and 9% in Latin America. SugarCRM has moved to a cloud-first release model, which includes four

releases per year for partners and customers. Since 2017, it has an additional product line, Hint, to

complement its relationship management functionalities with relationship intelligence

capabilities. Its near-term product roadmap includes the release of 100 out-of-the-box reports and

corresponding dashlets.

Strengths

outbound lead management, advanced analytics, and social collaboration. The relationship

intelligence capabilities are appreciated by the reference customers.

Industry functional depth: SAP Hybris Sales Cloud supports front-office functional breath by

providing vertical products to customers. Customers from different industries will find that it

supports their market-specific needs in workflow and process design.

■

Front-to-back-office process integration: SAP plays to its strengths in ERP, with tight process-

level integration of end-to-end processes that run through the front and back offices, such as

order-to-cash, returns and claims management.

■

Customer service: Reference customers shared their dissatisfaction about SAP Hybris Sales

Cloud customer support, including upgrades, uptime and performance issues. They also

claimed that the consulting teams have not been meeting their needs well enough.

■

Migration support: Gartner has collected concerns from SAP Hybris Sales Cloud customers

about the lack of data migration tools and data migration support provided by SAP. Prospects

should verify if the data migration project is feasible for their organization, and if so, start their

data migration process as early as possible.

■

Sales and marketing strategy: Based on interactions with customers and prospects, Gartner

finds that SAP lags behind the leading vendors in its ability to reach sales leaders, who find it

difficult to see the business value of SAP Hybris Sales Cloud.

■

Relationship intelligence: SugarCRM Hint delivers public social account profiles and uncovers

the insights about a business relationship. It can be extended through the relationship analytics

for SugarCRM.

■

Implementation: SugarCRM received comparatively high reference customer ratings for its

smooth implementation and easy maintenance, relative to all the Magic Quadrant vendors.

■

Cautions

Xiaoshouyi

Xiaoshouyi continues as a Niche Player as it sells only to customers in China. The SFA product is

well-suited for small to midsize businesses that have B2B and B2C sales processes. It supports

Chinese companies with global operations, and has plans to move upmarket. Xiaoshouyi has had

success with acquiring customers in the high-tech/software, manufacturing and professional

services industries. It offers a free version and free trial versions, as well as Professional and

Enterprise editions. Capabilities include core SFA functionality such as lead, territory, opportunity

and account management as well as some near-core capabilities such as order management. It

has native integration with Tencent's QQ mail service.

Xiaoshouyi has a strong mobile application for iOS and Android, and communication with WeChat

is natively embedded. It opened a North American product development office in 2017.

Strengths

Cautions

Deployment options: The SugarCRM cloud hosting provider is Amazon Web Services, which

offers deployment support across North America, EMEA and Australia.

■

Reporting and dashlets: Reference customers mentioned dissatisfaction with the reporting and

dashlet functionalities provided by SugarCRM. The engagement of programmers is needed to

create new dashlets that complement those delivered out of the box.

■

Product functionality: SugarCRM received comparatively low reference customer ratings for its

capabilities in account and contact management, for its lead management functionalities, and

for its mobile application — core elements for managing complex B2B sales processes.

Prospects assessing SugarCRM for long-cycle B2B solution sales should assess carefully.

■

Implementation services: Reference customers cited concerns with the quality of services

provided by SugarCRM's own professional services group, and with the availability of third-party

implementers.

■

Service and support: Xiaoshouyi received high satisfaction scores for service and support from

reference customers, who also stated that it is very customer-focused in service delivery.

■

Product enhancements: Xiaoshouyi has a mobile-first design that also features a developer

platform and APIs. Reference customers stated that product enhancements come quickly, but

often lack deep functionality in their first iterations.

■

Innovation: Xiaoshouyi's graphical approach to relationship intelligence is not yet seen from

other SFA vendors. This provides customers the ability to see via mobile and the web "who

knows who"-type functions and notifications, enabling sales reps to be more effective.

■

Zoho

Zoho continues to be positioned as a Niche Player. Gartner has seen significant improvement on

its Ability to Execute its product strategy and the strengthening of its corporate viability. With

strong input from an active user community, Zoho has over 150 integrations and 55 apps in its

marketplace. The vendor provides a relatively low-cost deployment that is suitable for the SMB

market, and has acquired customers globally. Its products are built for 10 segments, including

automotive, retail, insurance and real estate. In early 2018, Zoho released new predictive analytics

functions and AI capabilities, including customer sentiment analysis, opportunity predictive

analytics and a conversational AI UI.

Strengths

Cautions

Geographic presence: Xiaoshouyi focuses on the sale and support of its product for China-

based organizations, although is supporting global operations at this time.

■

Functional depth: Some reference customers noted that some product capabilities lack depth.

Gartner notes a lack of native integration with Microsoft Exchange and weaker analytics

capabilities than the leaders in this Magic Quadrant have. Some admin functions are displayed

in Chinese and utilize Google for translation.

■

Partners: Xiaoshouyi has not exhibited a global focus for marketing, social media or thought

leadership. It has a lack of depth of SI and certified partner resources, which prospects should

consider when discussing deployment and any follow-on services that might be required.

■

Pricing: The product has relatively lower pricing than leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant,

making this product attractive for SMB buyers. Zoho maintains a regular cadence of releases,

with capability improvements such as lead scoring, market apps and validation rules.

■

Partners: Zoho has increased its use of implementation partners, and reference customers

expressed satisfaction with using them.

■

User community: Zoho has a strong user community and internal support structure, including

24/7 chat. Reference customers stated that they required little help from the vendor's resources

as the product doesn't require coding skills.

■

Customer support: While scores for customer service and support were positive overall, Zoho

reference customers from larger organizations cited that support and documentation were

insufficient. Prospects with hundreds of payees should consider the internal resources required

to support the application.

■

Sales execution and strategy: Compared to the leading vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Zoho

has lower sales execution ratings. Reference customers cited issues with contracting and

pricing processes, as well as with getting timely answers to product questions. Zoho also has a

■

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

Insightly

Dropped

NetSuite — NetSuite does not sell SFA as a stand-alone module

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for this Magic Quadrant, vendors must meet at least five of the following criteria:

comparatively smaller investment in sales resources than the leading vendors in this Magic

Quadrant have.

Market understanding: Zoho messaging does not differentiate between the needs of SMB and

enterprise organizations. It will need to express that differentiation in both messaging and sales

strategy, reflected in product enhancements, to support enterprise organizations successfully.

■

Have a technology solution that automates the SFA critical capabilities: account and contact

management, sales activity management, opportunity management, reporting and dashboards,

mobile applications, PRM, and API integrations. The solution must also provide sales

forecasting and pipeline management capabilities.

■

Have at least 25 customers with live SFA implementations as of March 2018, cumulatively

spanning at least three industries, in accordance with industry definitions established by

Gartner.

■

Have an average number of SFA users per customer (not organization/instance) of at least 20

users as of March 2018.

■

Received revenue from SFA software and services of at least $10 million during 2017.■

Have customers with live SFA implementations in at least three of the five use cases for SFA

critical capabilities: long-cycle B2B sales, short-cycle B2B sales, long-cycle B2C sales, short-

cycle B2C sales and indirect sales.

■

Made at least one major release with significant functional improvements during the 12 months

from April 2017 to March 2018. A new or acquired offering from an established vendor in this

market is also considered, if Gartner established that offering was being sold to customers.

■

Honorary Mentions

Several vendors in the SFA market provide relevant capabilities but did not meet the inclusion

criteria for this Magic Quadrant. The following may be worth considering:

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. As this is a cross-industry Magic Quadrant, 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

Core goods and services that compete in and/or serve the defined market.

This includes current product and service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on. This

can be offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships, as defined in the market

definition and detailed in the subcriteria.

Vendors are evaluated on the quality of their native SFA capabilities, including both the critical

capabilities as well as SFA extensions. They are also evaluated on technical considerations such

as deployment options and administrative functions.

Overall Viability

Closed SFA contracts with at least six new, named logos (not new contracts sold to an existing

client) during the 12 months from April 2017 to March 2018.

■

Nimble■

Pipedrive■

Sage■

Tour de Force■

An assessment of the organization's overall financial health as well as the financial and practical

success of the business unit; the likelihood of the organization continuing to offer and invest in the

product as well as the product position in the current portfolio.

Key aspects of this criterion are the vendor's ability to ensure continued vitality of a product,

including support for current and future releases, as well as a clear roadmap for next year. The

vendor must have the cash on hand and consistent revenue growth for four quarters to fund

employee burn rates and generate profits. The vendor is rated 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. It must have specific experience and success selling SFA applications to sales buying

centers (i.e., the VP of sales or sales operations).

Among the many factors in this category, Gartner evaluates the number of new customers

acquired, growth in SFA revenue, average SFA deal size, average contract duration and customer

retention. Gartner also evaluates clients' satisfaction with contacting and negotiation processes.

Market Responsiveness and Track Record

Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities

develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change; the vendor's history

of responsiveness to changing market demands.

Gartner evaluates the quality and depth of the vendors' releases, and the ability to release

functions requested by clients.

Marketing Execution

The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's

message in order to influence the market, promote the brand, increase awareness of products and

establish a positive identification in the minds of customers.

Gartner measures the frequency and quality of the vendor's marketing techniques, including but

not limited to use of publicity, user conferences, promotions, thought leadership in social channels

or print publications, word of mouth and sales activities. Gartner also evaluates the vendor's

presence on the shortlists of Gartner's clients.

Customer Experience

Products and services and/or programs that enable customers to achieve anticipated results with

the products evaluated — specifically, quality supplier/buyer interactions, technical support or

account support. This may also include ancillary tools, customer support programs, availability of

user groups, SLAs and so on.

Feedback from active customers on generally available releases during the past 12 to 18 months

is an important consideration. Sources of feedback include vendor-supplied references, Gartner

client inquiries and other customer-facing interactions, such as Gartner conferences. Customer

experiences are evaluated based on the vendor's ability to help customers achieve positive

business value, as well as sustained user adoption, quality implementation and ongoing support.

Operations

The ability of the organization to meet goals and commitments.

Factors here include the quality of the organizational structure, skills, experiences, programs,

systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently.

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Source: Gartner (July 2018)

Completeness of Vision

Gartner analysts evaluate vendors on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements.

This includes current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs, and competitive

forces, as well as how well they map to Gartner's view of the market.

Market Understanding

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing Medium

Market Responsiveness/Record High

Marketing Execution Medium

Customer Experience High

Operations Medium

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Ability to understand customer needs and translate them into products and services.

Vendors that show a clear vision of their market listen, understand customer demands, and can

shape or enhance market changes with their added vision.

The vendor must define how its SFA solution improves its clients' sales process execution as well

as supports sales effectiveness objectives. Vendors must also define their competitive

differentiators, value proposition and the outcomes achieved by their clients.

Note: Gartner has changed the weighting from medium to high this year, reflecting the fact that

SFA buyers have much higher expectations for improving sales execution for their SFA vendors

than they have in the past.

Marketing Strategy

Clear, differentiated messaging consistently communicated internally, externalized through social

media, advertising, partner programs, system integrators, customer programs and positioning

statements.

Vendors are evaluated on their segmentation strategy and how their solution appeals to selling

organizations in multiple verticals, as well as prospects with 50 or more sales reps.

If the vendor gets a significant percentage of revenue from recurring revenue-based products, it

must also have a customer retention strategy.

Sales Strategy

Primarily involves a sound strategy for selling that uses the appropriate direct and indirect sales

strategy, as well as partners that extend the scope and depth of market reach, expertise,

technologies, services and customer base.

Vendors are evaluated on their ability to sell to both business and IT stakeholders, as well as to

the segments defined in the marketing strategy.

Note: Gartner has changed the weighting from low to medium this year, reflecting the fact that SFA

buyers expect sales teams to deliver insight into how vendor solutions solve their business

transformation and sales execution needs.

Offering (Product) Strategy

An approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes market differentiation,

functionality, methodology and features as they map to current and future requirements.

The vendor should demonstrate a product vision that accounts for core SFA functionality (as

defined by the market's critical capabilities), but that also offers new application functionality

across the breadth and depth of product capabilities. The latter consideration is critical for

meeting the needs of a maturing market.

Subcapabilities include, but are not limited to, the vendor's vision for:

Business Model

The design, logic and execution of the organization's business proposition to achieve continued

success.

Vendors need to have clear business plans for how they will be successful in the SFA market.

These business plans should include appropriate levels of investment to achieve profitability and

healthy revenue growth during a three- to five-year period. Sales channel and partnership

strategies are important components.

Innovation

Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for

investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Vendors are evaluated on the quality of their enhancements and product releases.

Vendors must show continued investment in improving core SFA capabilities. They must also

show growth into new areas, such as improving sales execution, analytics, social collaboration

and SaaS; or new devices, such as the tablets and smartphones; or new technology directions,

such as the Gartner Nexus of Forces.

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.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Sales enablement capabilities, such as content management and guided selling■

Lead management■

Sales effectiveness capabilities, such as CPQ or order management■

Sales performance management capabilities, such as territory management and quota

management

■

Platform capabilities, including interoperability, integration, API capabilities, flexibility,

extensibility and usability

■

Sales reporting and analytics■

Integration with third-party sales applications■

Source: Gartner (July 2018)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders

Leaders have the ability to execute their vision through products, services and demonstrably solid

business results in the form of revenue and earnings. Leaders have significant successful

customer deployments in North America, EMEA and APAC 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, but in some cases

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

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Medium

Sales Strategy Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Low

Vertical/Industry Strategy Not Rated

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Medium

Evaluation CriteriaEvaluation Criteria WeightingWeighting

fresh areas with solutions that improve sales execution. They have 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

Around 1995 the name "sales force automation" was born in the context of CRM systems. Gartner

has regularly published the Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation since 2006, when we

called it the opportunity management software market (and before that, the technology-enabled

sales market).

The worldwide SFA vendor market is estimated to be around 75 product providers. There are

hundreds more vendors that provide basic contact management software, which is a subset of

SFA (for details and examples, see Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp). The vendors presented

in this research are only a small part of the overall SFA vendor market.

This Magic Quadrant places particular emphasis on vendors' core SFA capabilities, as described in

the Market Definition/Description section. However, for the purpose of building as complete a

picture as possible, we also evaluate their noncore SFA capabilities, such as content management

and lead management.

Sales Organization Types

SFA means different things to different types of sales organizations:

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.

■

Target Customer Segments

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

segments as follows:

About Gartner Magic Quadrants and Critical Capabilities

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 2018. Although this means that some products' capabilities may have changed since then,

the same is true for all vendors evaluated.

To help clients make the right choice of vendor and product, Gartner also publishes the "Critical

Capabilities for Sales Force Automation." In it, Gartner scores each vendors' core SFA capabilities

against five common sales use cases:

Market Overview

In 2017, the sales force automation (SFA) market grew by an estimated 15.7% to $6.2 billion, with

almost all the growth relating to cloud-based offerings.

Almost 79% of sales were of SaaS, and 62% of revenue was generated in North America. Almost

85% of worldwide sales in 2017 was concentrated in 10 countries (estimates).

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.

■

Small business: fewer than 50 sales users■

Midsize business: 50 to 500 sales users■

Large business: 500 to 1,000 sales users■

Enterprise: more than 1,000 sales users■

Long-cycle B2B sales■

Short-cycle B2B sales■

Short-cycle B2C sales■

Long-cycle B2C sales■

Indirect/relationship sales■

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, 2016").

The overall CRM sales segment shows substantial innovation beneath its top-line estimated growth

of 16.3% in 2017. This compares with an application software growth rate of 13.6%, and 11.4%

growth for all software (estimates).

Functionality Trends

In the past year, the top market development has been the maturing of 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

guided selling. The vendors that do not offer predictive analytics are starting to fall behind, and

will thus be at a competitive disadvantage.

Prescriptive analytics — functions that are helpful for recommended next-best actions — is not yet

mature nor widely adopted by software buyers, but Gartner thinks that it will become an essential

part of SFA products in the near future. 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,

particularly for helping reps close more deals. Predictive analytics, when combined with emerging

prescriptive analytic functions, will go a long way toward improving reps' sales execution.

Gartner believes that SFA vendors' focus on predictive analytics has come at the expense of

providing functionality that sales leaders and application leaders frequently request. As a group,

almost all SFA vendors have limited sales enablement capabilities, for example (see "Sales

Enablement Technology Transforms the CRM Sales Landscape"). Some vendors — SAP,

SugarCRM, Oracle and others — have struck limited strategic partnerships to fill this gap. Others

such as Salesforce are partner-agnostic, allowing multiple vendors to sell to their client bases. The

remaining vendors tend to have a very limited sales enablement product strategy.

This functionality gap is important because it indicates that SFA vendors have not addressed an

important aspect of selling: engagement. Sales enablement technologies have proven to be

effective for measuring engagement, for both specific prospects and sales reps. Sales

enablement tools with content management capabilities measure the frequency and level of

engagement with the sales content sent to them. Customer engagement metrics can be turned

into use engagement metrics, where reps are measured on their ability to move deals forward

using sales content. And with those metrics, sales managers can have better coaching meetings

with their reps.

For more information on trends in sales enablement, see "Tech Go-to-Market: 3 Ways to

Reimagine Sales Enablement Strategies to Win More Deals and Shorten Sales Cycles."

Customer Insights

As part of the Magic Quadrant analysis process, Gartner collected survey input from over 150

vendor reference customers who use the SFA solutions reviewed in this Magic Quadrant. Insights

we gained from this survey include the following:

Gartner also speaks with over a thousand Gartner clients each year about their SFA strategy, SFA

vendor selection and implementation considerations. In these conversations, application leaders

frequently express interest in the following themes:

Sales automation implementations are a considerable investment. Respondents spent an

average of $610,889 each on SFA solutions in their most recent fiscal year, compared with an

average of $333,839 on non-SFA sales applications.

■

We asked reference customers, "Why did you purchase the software or service?" (n = 153,

multiple responses allowed). The top five reasons selected were:

■

To create operational efficiencies (70% of all reference customers)■

To improve business process outcomes (67%)■

To improve business process agility (64%)■

To improve customer relations/service (63%)■

To drive revenue growth (55%)■

We asked reference customers, "What were the key factors that drove your decision to choose

this vendor?" (n = 153, multiple responses allowed). The top-five factors for selecting an SFA

vendor were:

■

Product functionality and performance (62% of all reference customers)■

Competitive costs (50%)■

Product roadmap and future vision (50%)■

Architectural scalability (48%)■

In terms of overall experience with their vendor, 86% of reference customers (n = 153) selected

one of the top-two boxes ("very satisfied" or "completely satisfied"), on a 5-point rating scale

(where 1 is completely dissatisfied and 5 is completely satisfied).

■

In terms of satisfaction with their vendor's vision for improving sales execution, 86% of

reference customers (n = 151) selected one of the top-two boxes ("very satisfied" or "completely

satisfied"), on a 5-point rating scale (where 1 is completely dissatisfied and 5 is completely

satisfied).

■

The more-progressive clients are also considering SFA processes in the context of digital

transformation and customer experience. Gartner finds that the vendors that are selling

successfully in the SFA market are addressing all five of these interests.

Gartner also increasingly finds that its clients are looking for systems that are immediately

relevant to their selling context and industry. They want out-of-the-box applications that reflect

business processes and application functionality that reflects the best practices of their industry.

In the future, Gartner may decide to add vertical-specific capabilities to the definition of this

market.

Acronym Key and Glossary Terms

B2B business to business

B2C business to consumer

CPQ configure, price and quote

PRM partner relationship management

UI user interface

UX user experience

Evidence

The Magic Quadrant reference check is part of the data gathering effort to help Gartner build on

its existing knowledge of vendors in a particular market. During the kick-off of this Magic Quadrant

process, all invited vendors were asked to submit references that generally represented the

inclusion criteria. The references were invited to complete a 20- to 30-minute online survey. A total

of 153 references from 15 vendors completed the survey.

Please note that vendor reference data is different from primary research and is not a

representative knowledge base of SFA. The references do not represent customers in the overall

SFA market, but rather just the select customers the vendors chose to share with Gartner that

ultimately elected to participate as a reference check.

Platform capabilities that allow them to rapidly deploy new capabilities■

Integration with other elements of their strategic technology stack■

Improved sales execution■

Gartner also collected information from several hundred inquiries with Gartner clients evaluating

the vendors' products, as well as independent customer conversations at conferences and events.

Vendors were also interviewed and Gartner attended in-depth 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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