ISG Buyers Guide for CRM Marketing Classifies and Rates Software Providers

ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The CRM Marketing: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research. This research is part of a portfolio of ISG Buyers Guides in CRM covering sales, customer service, partners, platform, digital commerce and sales engagement.

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.

This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of CRM marketing software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.

We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating CRM marketing offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.

The Buyers Guide for CRM Marketing in 2024 finds Salesforce first on the list, followed by Oracle and HubSpot.

Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.

The Leaders in Product Experience are:

• Oracle
• Salesforce
• HubSpot

The Leaders in Customer Experience are:

• Salesforce
• HubSpot
• Oracle

The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:

• Salesforce, which has achieved this rating in seven of the seven categories.
• HubSpot and Oracle in six categories.
• SAP and Zoho in one category.

The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.

Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle CRM marketing there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.

ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our CRM marketing blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.

You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.