In recent years, the CRM market has seen big changes. In the last five years alone, the market for enterprise organizations has consolidated while many new point solution vendors have claimed its place in the CRM space. With new technologies delivered via modern interfaces and strategies aimed at answering specific business needs such as lead generation management, sales performance optimization and omnichannel customer experience, the offerings have gotten more precise and sophisticated.
The variety of products can be overwhelming even to the industry experts, let alone business owners that are looking to make the smartest buying decision possible. So, with this massive volume of information to digest and the variety of CRM capabilities available from vendor solutions, how do you choose what CRM best suits your needs?
Let’s explore what findings business owners can get from reputable research data and how it can assist in the selection of the best solution for your organization.
The Forrester Wave™ report:
Forrester Wave™ report provide comparisons of vendors’ products and services. This interactive tool helps companies to optimize vendor selection with a detailed analysis of products and services based on Forrester’s transparent, fully accessible criteria.
For example, in the Forrester Wave evaluation of customer relationship management (CRM) suites for midsize organizations in 2015, Forrester identified the 10 most significant CRM suites evaluating each vendor against 95 criteria, and categorizing them into the following three areas: current offering, strategy and market presence. The evaluation of the current offering of the CRM vendors was performed, based on the strength of their current product offering across a spectrum of CRM capabilities including sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service, field service, eCommerce, business intelligence, customer data management, technology, and architecture.
The report details Forrester’s findings on how well each of the vendors fulfills criteria, and where they are positioned comparing to other vendors’ solutions. The evaluation helps application development and delivery professionals supporting CRM operations to select the right partner for their customer engagement initiatives, as well as serves as a starting point for companies trying to determine what product best fits their CRM needs.
Download a complimentary copy of the Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites For Midsize Organizations, Q1 2015.
Gartner™ Magic Quadrant
According to Gartner, “A Gartner Magic Quadrant is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors. By applying a graphical treatment and a uniform set of evaluation criteria, a Magic Quadrant helps you quickly ascertain how well technology providers are executing their stated visions and how well they are performing against Gartner’s market view”.
What kind of information could be derived from the Gartner’s interpretation of their research findings? Companies that have made it into the quadrant demonstrated a defining vision in the CRM space and provided a wide range of functionality across a variety of geographies and verticals. The report provides the overall market evaluation and vendor analysis providing business owners with the insights for selecting an initial vendor based on their organization requirements as well as an understanding of the opportunities and challenges that executives experience when building and deploying customer relationship management systems.
Here are some key takeaways from the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center, 2015.
The Nucleus Research Value Matrix
The Nucleus Research Value Matrix evaluates the value CRM vendors provide to their customers based on products’ usability and functionality as well as innovations to compete within the highly-viable CRM market. The Value Matrix evaluates the progress in usability and functionality by vendors in the three core pillars of CRM: sales, marketing, and customer service.
Vendors are evaluated on their depth of functionality and usability across the spectrum of capabilities, including embedded analytics, marketing, social collaboration and acquisition activity. The Value Matrix is an ultimate tool for companies to assess their investment short list as well as to evaluate the case for maintaining an existing product that may lag behind the value offered by the others. For example, bpm’online shifted up in Usability Scoring in the Facilitator area with every update in the report thanks to out-of-the-box processes that facilitate the customer flow from acquisition through customer support, and elegant engaging interface that keeps users on what’s most relevant at the time. As stated by Rebecca Wettemann, Vice President of Research at Nucleus Research: “Nucleus found that as a result of better usability, sales agents can spend more time selling, which then leads to greater visibility, increased productivity, and reduced agent churn”.
Significant investments in usability and incremental growth in functionality drives the change in positioning in the matrix that is updated every 6 months, which provides with the most up to date information possible.
We strongly advise you to consult the analytical data from the most respected technology research and advisory companies outlined above, while making a CRM purchasing decision. However, always remember that the best CRM is the one that perfectly fits your needs. First and foremost, get the answers to the questions: why you need CRM, what KPI’s are important for you and what ROI you are anticipating, and then evaluate functionalities and capabilities of different CRM systems available on the market and define what’s important specifically for your organization. Stay tuned for some more tips and practical advices.