Uncover the strengths and cautions associated with recognized sales force automation (SFA) and B2B marketing automation platforms in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Force Automation Platforms1 and the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms.2
Read the reports to see how Dynamics 365 helped positioned Microsoft as a Leader in SFA and B2B Marketing Automation Platforms.
Sales force automation platforms have continued to evolve, with vendors addressing UI complexity and planning to embed generative AI capabilities to augment existing critical capabilities. Applications and software engineering leaders can use this research to support their CRM sales evaluation process.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
By 2026, B2B sales organizations using generative-AI-embedded sales technologies will reduce the amount of time spent on prospecting and customer-meeting prep by over 50%.
By 2028, 60% of B2B seller work will be executed through conversational user interfaces (UIs) via generative AI sales technologies, up from less than 5% in 2023.
https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2ERUVYSO&ct=230822&st=sb
Marketing operations leaders must enable the delivery of coordinated, multichannel engagement to prospects and customers. B2B marketing automation platforms are an essential tool for supporting this mandate, and early vendor investments in generative AI show promise of expanded solution value.
Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines B2B marketing automation platforms (B2B MAPs) as software that supports demand generation processes at scale. This includes building awareness, generating and nurturing high-quality leads, orchestrating multichannel engagement to guide customer journey progression, and using analytics to measure and optimize performance.
The main goal of these systems is to help marketers capture, qualify and nurture leads and accounts, align them to the appropriate sales team member(s), then continue marketing-driven engagement across the remainder of the customer journey. B2B marketing automation platforms also enable engagement with existing customers in support of retention and account growth objectives.
B2B marketing automation platforms are designed to primarily support B2B marketing use cases. They may also be applicable to B2C organizations selling high-consideration products with lead management needs and/or B2B2C models with more complex, indirect sales processes.
Vendors in this Magic Quadrant support the following standard capabilities of B2B marketing automation platforms:
- Contact and/or account record pages to view customer-level marketing engagement history and other pertinent relationship details.
- Ability to input and synchronize and activate first-party data, as well as augment existing contact/account data with third-party data sources.
- Ability to create segmented lists of contacts or accounts using business rules and/or predictive analytics capabilities.
- Lead scoring functionality to support the creation and management of lead qualification processes using business rules and/or predictive analytics capabilities.
- Lead workflow functionality enabling organizations to manage the lead-to-revenue life cycle, from generation/collection to conversion.
- Lead workflow functionality enabling organizations to create multistep journeys for contacts (e.g., drip campaigns, customer onboarding motions) using a graphical UI suitable for nontechnical users.
- Ability to deploy and manage an orchestrated coordinated customer engagement program across multiple channels, including native email and landing page execution.
- Functionality to enable personalized customer communications based on account, persona or journey stage attributes.
- Ability to measure tactical, strategic and operational KPIs to monitor campaign, channel and funnel performance using data visualization/dashboarding capabilities.
Optional capabilities of B2B marketing automation platforms include:
- Functionality for next best action orchestration capabilities (e.g., next best offer, next best channel) using AI.
- Ability to partition the platform for users in distinct business units, brands or regional marketing teams.
- Functionality for account-level scoring to support account prioritization processes using business rules and/or AI.
- The creation of content components (e.g., email copy) using generative AI.
https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2ETWTC29&ct=230829&st=sb
If you’re ready to take your business to the next level with the leader in automation platforms, give us a call now. David Blumentals, Director, Dynamics 365 Practice, David@d365.Global, +61 409 245 354
