Executive Summary

CRM Marketing

Customer relationship management (CRM) allows marketing departments to engage customers and prospects in the buying process and gain awareness of the enterprise’s products and services. With CRM, marketing has the ability to use information about companies and contacts to design and execute campaigns that enhance customer relationships and enable sales to engage leads. CRM also equips marketers with tools to better understand customer behavior, segment audiences, deliver personalized experiences and track campaign effectiveness.

ISG defines CRM Marketing as the set of applications that support the processes and tasks to support leaders, managers and analysts in their scope of responsibility from demand and campaigns to engaging prospects to customers. CRM systems allow marketers to segment customers based on various criteria such as demographics, behavior, preferences and past interactions. This capability enables targeted marketing campaigns, making marketing efforts more relevant and effective. With detailed customer data, marketers can craft highly personalized messages and offers. This level of personalization enhances customer engagement and loyalty, leading to higher conversion rates.

CRM provides marketing the tools to manage campaigns across multiple channels, including email, social media and SMS. Marketers can track campaign performance in real time and make data-driven adjustments to optimize results. CRM systems are instrumental in managing leads from acquisition to conversion, ensuring no potential customer is overlooked. Features like automated lead scoring and nurturing workflows guide leads through the sales funnel, increasing marketing efficiency.

Advanced analytics and reporting capabilities within CRM systems offer insights into customer behavior, campaign performance and return on investment (ROI). These insights help marketers refine strategies and allocate resources more effectively. CRM tracks customer interactions across various touchpoints to provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey. Understanding this journey helps marketers identify opportunities to enhance the customer experience and drive engagement.

The benefits of integrating marketing with CRM are broad. Improved customer insights enable marketers to better understand customer needs and preferences. Automation of repetitive tasks and streamlined workflows enhance marketing efficiency. Targeted and personalized campaigns yield higher engagement and conversion rates, maximizing ROI. Integration more closely aligns marketing and sales teams, which facilitates the seamless transfer of leads and consistent messaging.

Marketing within CRM is crucial for building and maintaining customer relationships, driving personalized and targeted marketing efforts and optimizing campaign performance. By leveraging CRM tools, marketers can expect to enhance customer engagement, improve operational efficiency and achieve better business outcomes. But for most in marketing, especially in B2B models, there is a need to have effective support for generating leads across channels that can be tracked and managed as they are engaged across commerce, sales and partners for potential revenue.

The challenge for most marketing organizations is the scattered set of applications and tools that are not integrated together with the marketing systems and CRM overall. Through 2026, marketing leadership across two-thirds of enterprises will continue to be plagued with silos of tools that impede the effectiveness of processes and performance to digitally engage buyers. Essential to evaluate in any CRM and marketing set of application is the level of integration across processes to data that should be securely shared and governed.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for CRM Marketing evaluates products based on the following key capability areas: managing customer data, market and account segmentation, demand generation, campaign management, prospect and lead management, and analytics and reporting. These capabilities enable marketing efforts that integrate with other areas of the CRM process including sales and customer service. The providers we evaluated had capabilities in all or most of these areas. Evaluated marketing products were required to be part of a CRM suite of products.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of CRM marketing as we define it: Adobe, Creatio, HubSpot, Microsoft, NetSuite, Oracle, Sage, Salesforce, SAP, SugarCRM and Zoho.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for CRM Marketing is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for CRM marketing software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for CRM marketing to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of CRM marketing technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of CRM marketing software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating CRM marketing systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources.  

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds Salesforce atop the list, followed by Oracle and HubSpot. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Salesforce has done so in seven categories; HubSpot and Oracle in six; and Zoho and SAP in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: HubSpot, Oracle, Salesforce and Zoho.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Creatio and Microsoft.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Adobe and SAP.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: NetSuite, Sage and SugarCRM.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle CRM marketing, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (10%), Capability 25%), Reliability (20%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. Oracle, Salesforce and HubSpot were designated Product Experience Leaders.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation 10) and TCO/ROI 10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Salesforce, HubSpot and Oracle. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for CRM Marketing in 2024, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 100 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.

Software providers were included that supported marketing in conjunction with a CRM system. Evaluation criteria were applied for supporting prospect and lead management, campaign management, market and account segmentation, managing customer data and analytics.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant CRM marketing products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”