There’s no denying the fact that CRM software has become an indispensable tool for businesses. The need to compete in a dynamic, increasingly interconnected world has led to the explosive surge the industry has witnessed over the past several years. While helpful, this has led to a plethora of products, which begs the question, how does the CRM market share break down?

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What trends shape the current CRM market scenario, and are industry titans still dominating the market? Moreover, how can you successfully navigate this complex landscape, and what obstacles and goals do your peers have when choosing a CRM solution?

Those are the questions we’ll seek to answer in this article.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Key Market Trends & Statistics
• Leading CRM Vendors
  • Salesforce Sales Cloud
  • SAP Sales Cloud
  • Dynamics 365 for Sales
  • Oracle CX Sales Cloud
  • Adobe Experience Cloud
• Buyer Survey
• Buyer Profiles
• Buyer Behavior

All companies — big and small, multinational or mom-and-pop-shop — must understand customer behavior to improve business relationships and drive sales growth. The degree of engagement and resources directed to this business objective may differ from one company to another, but the fundamental fact is that all companies need to address this issue to survive.

Given the host of benefits CRM can provide, the priority becomes how to select the best system for your business. This step is critical because it requires you to navigate through the extensive maze of CRM products in the market.

To survive this challenge, your company should prepare a selection strategy that closely aligns your short and long-term business goals with the product you’ll ultimately choose. Most vendors have powerful sales and communication teams to promote their products, and the responsibility always rests with you, the buyer, to prioritize your needs.

Key Market Trends & Statistics

According to Gartner, the global enterprise software market witnessed a growth of 16% in 2021. Customer experience and customer relationship management were the dominant markets contributing to the growth. To deliver positive customer experiences, companies are increasingly incorporating digital technologies like CRM to drive business growth.

CRM Market Trends

CRM was valued globally at $52.4 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.3% between 2022-2030, according to Grand View Research. Revenue from CRM is forecasted to reach $157.6 billion in 2030. Here are some of the findings from the report:

Cloud-based Solutions Are Increasingly Gaining Traction

Cloud-based CRM solutions are the go-to deployment mode for businesses. They made up 50% of the total market share in 2021. Based on a study by Technavio, the SaaS CRM market grew by 14.14% in 2021, with the market size expected to expand by $44.17 billion between 2020-2025.

Benefits like instant accessibility, high flexibility and low maintenance costs make SaaS deployment the preferred model.

Businesses Prefer CRMs With Analytical Integrations

According to the report, CRM analytics will witness a significant increase across the forecast period. Analytical modules enable companies to convert unstructured data into rich insights. This, in turn, gives them a complete picture of customers and their behavior. Businesses can leverage these actionable insights to boost customer acquisition and streamline customer-facing operations.

CRM Adoption Based on Business Size, Industry and Region

Based on Grand View Research’s CRM Market Report, enterprises made up the largest revenue share (60%) in 2021. CRM’s ability to assimilate operations and foster collaboration between multiple departments like sales, marketing and customer service proves beneficial for large-scale businesses.

Grand View Research’s study also mentions that the retail sector is the largest shareholder (24%) of the overall market share. Burgeoning online shopping platforms, focus on digital marketing and increasing competition is driving demand for advanced CRM solutions. Aside from retail, CRM is also rapidly adopted across industries like IT, telecom, banking and hospitality.

According to Statista, the U.S. is the leading contributor to CRM’s market share ($34,540 million), followed by Germany ($3,676 million), Japan ($3,571 million), the UK ($3,521 million) and China ($3,078 million).

CRM Market Trends

Rising demand for improved customer experiences and expansion of digital business operations are the main drivers of CRM growth. Another reason for its success comes from the continuous adoption of emerging technologies. Some current trends in the CRM market include:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• SaaS, IaaS and PaaS service models
• Conversational Chatbots

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Leading CRM Vendors

These are the top five CRM solutions in terms of market share, according to Statista:

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Founded in 1999, Salesforce has grown leaps and bounds to emerge as one of the leading players in the global CRM market. It leads the race by a considerable margin and has ranked #1 for the eighth consecutive year. As of now, Statista mentions Salesforce has a 23.8% market share. It’s also the leading CRM market share leader in North America, Latin America, Western Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Salesforce’s Lightning Experience.

Salesforce Sales Cloud’s prominent capabilities include account management, omnichannel communication, customizable dashboards and lead scoring. The Lightning Experience optimizes sales processes by offering a kanban view of customer records, providing key coaching information on accounts and allowing sales reps to review upcoming tasks at a glance.

Salesforce serves a plethora of industries like energy, healthcare, manufacturing, nonprofits, retail and financial services. Its portfolio boasts of stalwarts like IBM, Kellogg’s, PayPal, AT&T and Bentley.

Top Benefits

• Personalization: Access customizable email templates to deliver personalized marketing campaigns. Use the Salesforce Engage module to view a detailed history of customers’ prior interactions with your company. Quick and easy access to client history enables your sales reps to take informed actions.
• Tracking: Monitor leads, contacts and opportunities in the activity timeline. You can also track events, meetings, reports, contracts and campaigns. Receive real-time alerts based on customer activities to ensure quick follow-ups.
• AI-driven Insights: Salesforce Einstein offers actionable customer insights derived from their interaction history. You can use this to make data-driven decisions and optimize campaign performance. It also predicts business outcomes and recommends the next best action.
• Collaboration: Coordinate with teammates and collaborate on sales opportunities on a social feed. Your staff can receive updates on relevant projects and discussions. Share proposals, files, contracts, presentations and other documents with other departments.
• Mobile App: Manage meetings and events, receive updates, make calls, track deals, and take notes. Sales reps can view and update customer data on the go, even in offline mode. Sales managers can access individual sales reps’ performance reports in real time.

Primary Features

• Contact Management: Manage individual and company contacts by storing relevant information in business and person account fields. You can add details like billing, revenue, communication history and description in associated fields. You can also pull customers’ social media content for a more well-rounded picture.
• Dashboard: Use the drag-and-drop functionality to configure dashboards with specific filters, fields and charts. Track sales team’s performance and other business-critical metrics.
• Lead Management: Manage and track all leads from capturing to the closing stage. Set up automated lead scoring and routing processes to ensure no lead falls through. You can see the source of marketing campaign leads and view insights for every lead to ensure faster conversion.
• Pipeline Management: Access a detailed overview of your sales pipeline within the system. You can make adjustments to your sales processes with real-time revenue forecasts. Create forecasts according to KPIs that align with your business.
• Workflow Automation: Built-in modules like Process Builder and Flow Builder allow you to automate complex workflows and approval requests. You can create custom workflows, set up automated email notifications and auto-assign activities to relevant team members.

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SAP Sales Cloud

The second most prominent CRM in the market is also by a legacy vendor — SAP. Founded in 1972, they have been sharing market space for 50 years and currently hold a market share of 5.4%. SAP Sales Cloud is a cloud-based solution that runs on the SAP C/4HANA platform.

Pipeline Analytics in SAP Sales Cloud.

It streamlines critical sales junctures with modules like intelligent recommendations, guided selling, pipeline management, interactive dashboards and built-in analytics. SAP caters to diverse industries such as banking, mining, media, automotive and healthcare. It lends its services to Air Canada, PwC, Lavazza, Scotiabank and more.

Top Benefits

• Centralized Repository: Store company-related documents, files and images in the library. You can view, update, delete and share records. Sort documents in ascending or descending order or on the basis of title, date, locked status or version. Add tags, flags and favorites to files.
• Email Marketing: Send personalized marketing emails to segmented target groups. You can schedule campaign activation immediately or set up a future date and time.
• Integrations: SAP Sales Cloud provides integrations with SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, IBM Lotus Notes, Gmail, MS Outlook and back office inventory solutions.

Primary Features

• Account Management: Store important details about customers, prospects and business partners. Admins can check for duplicate records by configuring a duplication check. Access integrations with Google Maps and AutoNavi Maps to track accounts. You can embed links to contacts and create social profiles.
• Contract Management: Draft contracts manually or customize pre-existing templates. Sales reps can view quotes and files offline from a collaborative portal. You can access integrations with SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA and SAP CPQ to view pricing and inventory information.
• Territory Management: You can automate territory assignments to accounts and manage reassignments by setting up realignment rules. Use the quota recommendation engine to receive suggested quotas for every sales rep according to metrics like historical and opportunity data.
• Dashboard: Drill down on critical business metrics via interactive sales dashboards. Track your team’s performance and receive actionable insights by setting up marketing and sales KPIs like product performance, quote to close ratio, monthly sales growth, conversion rate, ROI and social media traffic.

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Dynamics 365 for Sales

The third leading vendor on the list is Microsoft, another legacy enterprise that has managed to carve out a piece of the market since its first CRM launch in 2003. Presently, its market share stands at 5.3%. Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales caters to businesses of all sizes. Its prominent clients include Mercedes-Benz USA, L’Oréal, Siemens and HP.

Customer Journeys in Dynamics 365 for Sales.

The solution unifies a company’s sales, marketing and customer service endeavors. It uses AI to suggest the next best actions, deliver contextual conversations and rank leads based on their likelihood of closing. You can choose between cloud and on-premise deployment. Its mobile version is available on Android, iOS and Windows phones.

Top Benefits

• Sales Insights: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Premium version offers AI-based sales insights that help predict sales outcomes. With tools like intelligent guided selling, next best actions and personalized talking points, sales reps can initiate contact and follow up at the right time.
• Collaboration: Use Microsoft Teams to chat with team members, share documents and set up meetings. Share quotes, RFPs and emails by integrating with the Microsoft Office suite.
• Email Capabilities: Create, view, send and reply to emails within the system. Send bulk emails to prospects using pre-built, custom email templates. The solution automatically associates emails with relevant contacts.

Primary Features

• Territory Management: Create territories according to city, county, state, region and pin code. You can visualize them in a hierarchical format and associate financials with a specific territory. Create a custom workflow to assign sales reps opportunities based on the territory’s type and size.
• Reports: Gauge business performance with built-in reports on win-loss, sales activities, sales history, source effectiveness and progress against goals. Use Power BI for more advanced reporting capabilities. You can see email opens, clicks, reply rate and the time the email was opened with the email engagement module.
• Document Management: Store documents on Microsoft SharePoint and manage file types, including Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and Excel. You can archive sales, purchase and return orders, and quotes via Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The solution offers basic and advanced search and filter capabilities for quick document retrieval. Attach documents to contacts, leads, opportunities and accounts.

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Oracle CX Sales Cloud

Next on the list is Oracle, which represents 5.1% of the CRM market share. Oracle CX Sales Cloud provides businesses with comprehensive customer data, intelligent recommendations and CPQ capabilities. Its primary modules include sales automation, account management, pipeline management and customer data management.

Account Management in Oracle CX Sales Cloud.

It serves multiple industries such as consumer goods, energy, hospitality, industrial manufacturing, oil and retail. Oracle’s clientele includes Nescafé, Samsonite, Rutgers, Philips and Zoom.

Top Benefits

• Lead Recommendations: Analyze sales data to identify buying patterns and generate lead recommendations. You can set rule-based recommendations via the sales prediction module. Every lead recommendation includes details like average expected profits, sales cycle duration and conversion likelihood.
• AI Insights: Oracle Adaptive Intelligent (AI) Apps for Sales provide AI-based insights that direct sales reps towards leads with the highest win probability. It also boosts conversion rates by offering the next best actions.
• Call Analytics: Access call reports that include the outcome of a sales call, meeting minutes, attendee details, notes, file attachments and call summary.

Primary Features

• Sales Force Automation: Reduce manual dependency by automatically verifying customers’ addresses, emails and phone numbers. Automate and simplify sales operations with modules like AI, advanced search and sales-centric digital assistants. It offers contextual sales insights, predictive outcomes and recommendations.
• Contact Management: Create contacts directly in the cloud or import them via web services. You can see general contact information, quotes, active contracts, sales activities, open leads and opportunities on the contacts overview page. It also checks existing contacts for duplicate entries.
• Reports: Measure your team’s performance and see their entire schedule in a timeline view. Use Oracle Sales Planning Cloud to preview and save reports as snapshots. To export reports in PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, CSV and other formats, you can access integrations with Oracle Eloqua.
• Lead Capturing: Capture leads from multiple sources like marketing campaigns, forms, subscriptions, social media interactions, website visits and sign-ups. You can also manually add leads from business cards and entry lists in seminars.

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Adobe Experience Cloud

The last vendor with the highest market share is another industry giant — Adobe. It currently makes up 3.8% of the market share, according to Statista. Adobe Experience Cloud offers a host of products that help manage customer experience. It provides rich customer profiles with real-time AI insights to drive personalized interactions.

Customer Profiles in Adobe Experience Cloud.

Companies like Marriott International, Land Rover, Ben & Jerry’s, Virgin Atlantic and Sage use the solution to boost customer relationships. Like its counterparts, Adobe has also made headways in several industries, including government, healthcare, retail, high tech and more.

Top Benefits

• Analytics: Analyze customer data from online and offline channels to optimize interactions throughout a customer’s journey. Access AI insights to uncover persistent business issues and anomalies. Executives can access the dashboard app for real-time omnichannel customer insights.
• Workflow Management: Boost productivity by automating workflows and accessing native integrations. Configure approval workflows to ensure everyone stays in the loop.
• Personalization: You can deliver relevant, dynamic content across multiple channels in real time. Use Adobe Sensei to recommend high-performing articles to buyers.

Primary Features

• Customer Profiles: Create comprehensive customer profiles by collecting data from every stage of the customer lifecycle.
• Campaign Management: Deploy marketing campaigns on multiple channels like email, social media and offline events through Adobe Campaign. You can manage cross-channel campaigns from a centralized location.
• Customer Journeys: Adobe Journey Optimizer lets you segment profiles at scale. It provides instant insights into a customer’s journey progression. You can use Offer Decisioning to recommend offers based on customer attributes.

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Buyer Survey

As part of our mission to help companies make the best software selection decisions, we conducted interviews with 254 companies that were in the market for CRM software and compiled the data. The goal was to answer some of the critical questions that companies should ask themselves before embarking on this business task. Questions like:

1. Given the large number of CRM software vendors, each proposing and offering what they consider to be the best product in the marketplace, what’s the most helpful strategy to align the company’s needs and priorities to the CRM products and their multiple features and functionalities?
2. How can research conducted within and by the company help in this effort to select the best possible CRM product?
3. Who, in the company, should be assigned to spearhead the selection process? Including the specific functionalities that would best serve the company’s objectives?
4. How much time should be allotted to this selection process? Or should the process be fluid, allowing it to develop and finalize its goal without fear of meeting a deadline?

Our analysis will provide you with an all-important jumping off point. It’s not intended to provide you with all (or any) of the answers about individual CRM products, but rather to offer you some guidance with regard to the important questions and issues to consider when making this decision for your company.

Our survey of your peers is especially relevant as a source of information that comes to you in an unfiltered manner. It speaks to the real-life challenges and aspirations of their companies’ growth and success.

Buyer Profiles

Who’s looking for CRM and why? Our survey of 254 companies reveals the following demographic details:

Eighty-four percent of the companies surveyed have under 1,000 employees, with the greatest concentration found between 1 and 500 employees (refer to Figure 1).

Figure 1: Respondent breakdown by number of employees.

Seventy-five percent also have an annual revenue between $1 and $50 million, with a concentration of 58% between $1 and $10 million. Together, these demographics reveal that 70% of companies have an annual revenue ceiling of $50 million and an average of between 0 and 500 employees with a maximum of 1,000 employees (refer to Figure 2).

Figure 2: Respondent breakdown by annual revenue.

The breakdown of companies in our business sample, by industry, is as follows: services represent the majority at 32%, followed by information technologies (IT) and manufacturing, both at 13%.

As a point of clarification, many of the manufacturing companies that have an ERP system expressed the concern that the CRM features available in their ERP solution were inadequate and opted to purchase a dedicated CRM system (refer to Figure 3).

Figure 3: Respondent breakdown by industry.

Why Is This Important? How Does the Market Define This Category of Businesses?

The most common way of defining business categories is by the number of employees and annual revenue. For SMBs, the number of employees ranges from 0-999, and they have an annual revenue between $5 million and $10 million.

When it comes to choosing technology solutions that best fit your particular business, understanding how your business is classified is important. This is why many technology solutions are built with business classifications in mind and have features and pricing that correlate to these business classifications.

As such, let’s consider the following: small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), are the backbone of the U.S. economy. They make up 99.9% of all firms, employ close to half (46.8%) of U.S. employees and generated 466,607 net new jobs, according to SBA’s Small Business Profile.

This is undoubtedly a strong and influential group in the IT marketplace and has resulted in a significant change of focus to the model of IT software.

The new model focuses much more on consumer-friendly software products, rather than catering almost exclusively to companies in the enterprise sector. This initiated a flood of more cost effective and less complicated solutions, all geared to SMB needs.

The result is a great environment to be in when shopping for new software. This is especially true if you’re in the SMB category and are poised to take advantage of the wealth of new, more reasonably-priced products with new options like cloud computing and subscription pricing models.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that many businesses that had previously hesitated to invest in software and research the best options are now doing so.

But this isn’t to say that the process is without its challenges. It still makes good business sense to follow a set of principles that guide the selection process. Below, we analyze our respondents’ views with regard to this process and what lessons can be gleaned from their experiences.

Buyer Behavior: Guide to the Selection Process

The graph below (Figure 4) represents the distribution of the software and tools used by companies to cover important CRM functions. In these choices, we can surmise that a lot of improvisation and creativity took place. For example, using basic tools like Excel, Gmail, Outlook and Office indicate that many of these options were used to build databases to store customer contact information and other such functions.

Figure 4: Distribution of the solutions currently used by respondents.

Some respondents revealed using free versions of solutions like HubSpot, SugarCRM and Mailchimp, or adopting mainstream software like Salesforce and combining it with other tools to achieve different ends.

Here are some findings provided by our respondents, with regard to the software and tools used in place of CRM:

• Approximately 500 solutions and tools were used by our sample group of 254 companies.
• Of the 500 solutions and tools mentioned, 300 were neither CRM solutions nor CRM-related solutions.
• The more popular of these tools included Gmail, Outlook, Excel, ERP, QuickBooks, BI, donor management, Exchange server, SQL tools, POS, Apple Contact Manager and SharePoint.
• Of the remaining 200 CRM solutions used, over two-thirds had only a single mention, indicating that many companies have attempted to take advantage of the overwhelming choice but have struggled to find their ideal product. As previously noted, while the CRM market size offers an abundance of options, prices, features and deals, an undisciplined buyer can easily get caught in the details of the product and lose sight of the overall picture — an efficient and usable system for their own set of circumstances
• Of the big five vendors that dominate the CRM market share (Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft), only Salesforce is represented in our survey of the top 5 of the most used CRM products, at 6%. Microsoft and Oracle are behind with less than 3% each. Our findings are similar to most industry analysis that Salesforce has roughly 2x the market share as compared to the vendors vying for the number two position.

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Principle Reasons To Invest

Most companies reach a critical point in their lifecycle where they’re obliged to closely examine and review two important areas of business behavior: increasing efficiency and optimizing operations. How this process unfolds is driven, in large part, by the strategies a business has in place, as well as a commitment by management to successfully pursue them.

These two objectives embrace many aspects of a business, but the investment in an IT solutions strategy is usually at the top of the priorities list. Consequently, the reasons articulated by our respondents for taking the decisive step to invest in a CRM solution are an attempt to address the issues of efficiency and optimization.

The graph below (Figure 5) is a shopping list of grievances (in order of importance) that the companies surveyed have given as reasons to invest in a CRM solution.

Lack of functionality and centralization are at the top of the list at 22.75% and 17.25% respectively. But the remaining items on the list are also consequential, each with an average of about 10% – 15%. Most of the features in question are technological in nature and are largely resolved by an efficient CRM system.

Figure 5: List of features that drove companies to CRM.

The right CRM system helps set in motion a series of practices, strategies and technologies that enable companies to manage and analyze customer interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.

This brings us back to our company survey and their list of grievances. Of particular significance is the fact that many of the reasons listed in the chart above relate directly to user experience. This, of course, is true for software in general. Issues such as the age of software, outdated applications and tools, unfriendly UI, and difficulty integrating applications all hinder the usability of a system. And ultimately, that affects the day-to-day work routines of users.

A CRM system must support the collection of data in an accurate and efficient manner. Using non-specific software and tools (as the majority of our respondents did) to complete this job created a mix of solutions that were difficult to use and maintain, as well as highly cumbersome. Data analysis, which is equally important, was difficult and inefficient to complete from multiple sources.

Below are some of the frustrations expressed by respondents looking for CRM:

• The complexity and high cost of some CRM products was one of the most frequently cited frustrations. Most companies indicated the importance of well-priced software that was simple to use but that also came equipped with robust features.
• The cost of licenses and extra or hidden costs was another concern. As one respondent remarked, “We bought a Cadillac when we needed a Toyota.”
• The issue of employee training was another aspect cited by a significant number of respondents. Insufficient training can, in many cases, lead to CRM implementation failure. The importance of proper training is always relevant, but so too is a cultural change within the company that encourages all employees to use and benefit from the system.

As many industry analysts have noted, today’s CRM market is saturated with choices, options and pricing structures. But this has not translated into an easier selection experience for most buyers.

Why?

Lots of choice can add to product confusion, as well as blurring the priorities that are important to the buyer. The only way to combat this phenomenon is to come to this task well-prepared. Don’t skip thinking through and creating a sound selection strategy.

CRM software can mean many things to many different companies. This highlights the fact that it’s important to first understand how your company prioritizes its needs and how these needs are best served by a CRM system.

Some pre-planning will ensure that the CRM tool you choose can grow with your business and continue to provide vital support for continued success. An analysis of the findings in the following section will be an indication of how our survey group responded to this challenge.

Who’s in Charge of the Selection Process?

Findings (depicted in Figures 6 and 7 below):

• Responsibility for selection appears to be anchored both to position in the company and to the company size.
• For companies with an annual revenue below $50 million, the selection was largely in the hands of the president or CEO at 20%, followed by sales at 15%.
• For companies with an annual revenue over $50 million, the CEO’s role dropped to 2%, while IT most commonly headed the search at 30%, followed by marketing at 15%.

Figure 6: Breakdown of individuals responsible for CRM selection, per business role.

Figure 7: Breakdown of individuals responsible for CRM selection, per business role and per company revenue, less than and greater than 50 million.

These findings are not exceptional in any way. The high participation rate of the president or CEO in small companies is likely explained by the fact that most small companies do not have IT or marketing departments, so most investment decisions rest with the president.

Conversely, larger companies are more likely to have designated IT and marketing teams, so this decision would be delegated to one or both of these groups. This reflects a more traditional approach where larger companies entrust the CRM decision to departments that are more strategically involved in that decision.

However, does the traditional approach produce the most beneficial results in terms of software selection for a company? Can you afford to leave out individuals involved in the front-line use of the system?

It makes sense that those individuals will provide valuable insight and knowledge throughout the process. But stakeholders that are slightly more peripheral to the system may have equally important input, as they will look at it from a different perspective.

An approach that includes a team made up of a variety of stakeholders is by far the most effective method for choosing a software system. The advice of a consultant can help steer you through the selection process, but this shouldn’t happen at the expense of the rest of the team.

In fact, the CRM selection process has become far more user-driven than company-driven, thanks to the fact that the applications themselves are far less complicated than other software systems in the company.

The market drive to appeal to a more consumer-driven model has also impacted the way selection decisions are made. There’s a movement away from allowing the experts in IT departments to exercise complete control (due to their expertise) and a turn towards the users themselves, as the software environment encourages their participation.

What Are Companies Looking For in a System?

Survey results that identify what companies want in a CRM system are pretty closely aligned with the reasons companies tell us they are ready to invest in a CRM system. Principally, they’re an attempt to address the issues of efficiency and optimization that, at some point in the business cycle, confront all companies.

The importance of functionality in a CRM software system is a given. All the basic functions (as identified in our graph) that make CRM run smoothly and efficiently were rated highly by respondents. Technology, an equally important component, shows a little more variance, with automation and integration identified as the most important features (Figure 8 below).

Figure 8: Top 5 functional and technical requirements outlined by respondents.

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Short and Long-term Strategies

Twenty-two percent of companies in our survey that are looking for CRM systems also say they’re looking for specialized features like project management, billing, donor management, membership, student information and even logistics. This points to a significant evolution in the way of doing business. It also reveals the need to maximize and organize all the different ways in which information about a customer is available to companies.

For example, billing information opens up a wealth of indirect customer information:

• What, when and how often are customers buying?
• What might future purchases include?
• How sound is their credit history?

Project management allows company reps to gain intimate insight into a customer’s priorities for their business, including personalized needs and pain points.

All this type of information may have been available to a company in the past, but it was located and stored in multiple places. The ability to access and share it from a central location changes the way business is conducted. Breaking down the information silos will increase overall efficiency and contribute to a more productive company culture.

Because these alternative channels of customer information are far too important to ignore, many companies are turning to big data analytics tools that are required to get a 360-degree profile.

This new approach to gathering, sharing and analyzing information represents a sea of change in doing business, as we’ve noted. Our survey findings reflect this important change.

No longer is CRM simply a record storing system, but, more and more, a system that will help users acquire the business intelligence to take tangible actions for their businesses.

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Delivery Models

Our survey respondents considered two delivery models for their CRM systems: cloud and on-premise.

Cloud CRM (also called CRM cloud) refers to any CRM technology where the software and accompanying customer data is housed in the cloud and is accessible via the internet.

Alternatively, on-premise CRM software is installed on your own servers and controlled and maintained in-house.

Figure 9: Delivery models preferred by respondents.

Our survey results revealed a definite preference for the cloud delivery model at 99% of respondents. However, 43% of those were also willing to consider the on-premise model. Only one company expressed exclusive interest for on-premise delivery (refer to Figure 9).

A more in-depth analysis of the delivery model preferences isn’t surprising and appears to emphasize the following:

• SMBs, on the whole, are more likely to choose the cloud delivery model, the more obvious reasons being lower cost and greater flexibility.
• The percentage of SMBs considering both options (cloud and on-premise) is 20%, but 80% want cloud only.

Medium to large companies show a greater propensity to consider both models (64%). This is supported, in part, by the fact that many of them have larger IT departments and IT infrastructure in place that can be used to support an on-premise CRM (refer to Figure 10).

Figure 10: Delivery model preferences by company size.

Vendor Selection

If you’ve tackled the software selection process in a thorough and meaningful manner, the vendor selection should be relatively straightforward. In fact, your business priorities drive the functions required, and that should streamline the list of possible vendors. By adding budget considerations, level of training required and offered for employees, and software delivery models, the number of vendors remaining should be manageable.

Selecting the right technology vendor is an important task for businesses. The right vendor needs to work with your company’s internal teams, which can be a complicated and emotional process, as humans interact with other humans.

As mentioned earlier in this report, the ongoing boom in CRM software will make software selection both easier and more challenging. But the work you put in before the final selection will definitely be rewarded.

The results below (Figure 11) outline our client survey responses to questions about vendor viability and provide a point of departure with which to analyze them.

Figure 11: Comparison of the most used and the most considered vendors.

Let’s begin this analysis by looking at the one vendor that stands out above the crowd of vendors, according to our survey group: Salesforce.

They came out in front as the vendor with the highest number of company mentions, at 26%; the highest number of companies seriously considering this software; and the highest number of companies using it, at 8%. This may not be a surprising finding, but it reinforces the market view and expectation of Salesforce.

Founded in February 1999, Salesforce has grown into a company whose CRM market share continues to trend upward and outpace the other major players by a wide margin.

In part, Salesforce has been able to do this by changing the market in several ways:

• They created a platform for the development not only of apps, but for entire software solutions that were distinct and complex. In fact, many point solutions for CRM are built on this platform, adding true value to the CRM market in general.
• They acquired and integrated products like Jigsaw and Radian6 for social media monitoring at a time when most CRM vendors didn’t have this option.
• They expanded their offering to cover areas like sales performance and e-commerce, usually not delivered by other CRM vendors.

Microsoft CRM also drew attention in our sample. While not attaining Salesforce’s numbers, Microsoft CRM has also shown resilience with both SMBs (8%) and large companies with employee numbers greater than 1,000 (15%).

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While Microsoft CRM has historically catered to the SMB market, they are steadily extending their reach to the global enterprise market. Helping aid that goal is the availability of Microsoft CRM in both a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premise model.

SAP and Oracle are the primary competitors to Microsoft CRM in the medium and large company category, and both of these findings are confirmed by our survey results.

The one area of divergence was the absence of Adobe as a CRM our survey respondents either used or considered. It’s plausible that this lack of mention is due to the fact that many consider Adobe a suite of tools for design purposes, rather than as a CRM platform, despite its penetration into the CRM market share.

The final two vendors that are significant to our analysis are Zoho and HubSpot. These companies were in second and third place as possible vendor selections to the SMB market, although neither vendor scored well in the large company category.

Zoho’s web-based CRM is designed to offer a low cost and quick CRM software solution, including providing a free trial model and starting solution. Zoho also covers a wide product scope of complementary services due to its integration with over 20 other Zoho applications.

HubSpot CRM is also promoting the simple-to-use, low-cost model but is additionally marketing itself as a CRM platform that allows sales teams to regroup quickly by not significantly changing their existing workflow.

Figure 12: Top 5 vendors by company size (in order of importance).

The number of respondents in the ‘other’ category is quite high, at 21% of total respondents. This category’s market share is larger than that of Microsoft. On reflection, however, this number is possibly another indication of the market’s abundant number of products and its turn towards consumer-friendly models (detailed in Figure 13).

Smaller vendors are more and more addressing consumer needs by creating quasi niche solutions for many business scenarios, attracting many smaller and first-time buyers.

Figure 13: Some of the other vendors mentioned by companies (in alphabetical order).

Selection Timeframe

The question regarding an appropriate amount of time required for the selection process is highly subjective and differs greatly from one company to the next. The ideal objective is to allow the process to mature and develop as required and, in the end, have selected the best possible product that meets the individual company’s objectives. There really is no way to standardize this task.

But the responses we received in our survey, for the most part, do not follow this formula. The most important consideration, according to our survey, appears to be speed with highly unrealistic expectations of what can be accomplished in a very short time period.

Figure 14 illustrates the results of this question. As is clear, the highest concentration of company responses is between “ASAP” (10%) and one to three months (22% at one month, 14% at two months and 16% at three months). There were two other small spikes at the 6-month (19%) and 12-month (15%) marks.

Figure 14: Timeframe for selection (in months).

With respect to the number of vendors that had actually been contacted (Figure 15), about 50% of companies did not contact any vendors. Among the respondents who wanted a selection made within one month’s time, 64% contacted either one or no vendors.

Figure 15: Percentage of respondents that contacted 0 to 5 vendors.

While CRM software is less complicated than most other business software (for example, ERP), you should allot an appropriate amount of time to the task. Cutting corners in this stage of the process may result in a substandard product at a greater cost. Trying to shortcut this process is ultimately counterproductive.

Many companies are conducting the majority of their research online, relying on websites, reports and advice from peers. This may indeed work for some companies, but for most it’ll result in having to reinvest in software and repeat this process in a few years’ time.

Compare Top CRM Software Leaders

Conclusion

Many factors can jeopardize the CRM selection process. It’s ideal to adopt an inclusive strategy that listens to as many stakeholders as possible. But keeping a close eye on features and functionalities that meet your company’s priorities and goals is equally important.

CRM market share continues to grow above and beyond every other software industry. We’ve put together free resources so you can effectively navigate the inundated market. Our comparison guide will enable you to quickly compare different products. And if you need to define your top priorities, so you know which products to look into further, our requirements template can help.

Do you believe Salesforce will reign next year as well? Do you think a non-legacy vendor might penetrate the leading CRM market share in the coming years? Let us know in the comments below!