What’s Changed: 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms

The editors at Solutions Review highlight and summarize the key takeaways and updates in Gartner’s 2024 iteration of their Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms.

Analyst house Gartner, Inc. recently released the 2024 version of its Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms. Gartner defines Sales Force Automation (SFA) Platforms as AI-augmented tools that support the automation and capture of sales activities, processes, and administrative tasks. These platforms are an essential part of a company’s sales technology stack, as they enhance a seller’s ability to engage with customers across touchpoints and provide actionable insights for improving sales contact management.

Most of these platforms have a collection of “standard” capabilities. According to Gartner, these include collaboration tools, guided selling, voice-activated assistants, bot data visualizations, data analytics, partner relationship management, composability, proposal builders, and quote builders. Gartner also identifies several “must-have” capabilities that every major player in the SFA marketplace should offer. These include sales activity management, lead management, platform integrations, and tools for managing accounts, contacts, opportunities, pipelines, and sales forecasts.

What’s Changed: 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms

In this updated Magic Quadrant, Gartner identifies thirteen of the most significant Sales Force Automation providers in the marketplace. The researchers behind the report—Adnan Zijadic, Guy Wood, Varun Agarwal, and Steve Rietberg—evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each provider listed and ranked them on the signature “Magic Quadrant” graph, which provides readers with an illustration of each vendor’s ability to execute their vision. The diagram includes four quadrants: leaders, challengers, visionaries, and niche players. A breakdown of each category and the companies associated with it is below.

Leaders

Salesforce continues to top the Leaders category and has climbed even higher on the graph this year. Its Sales Cloud product suite is designed to cater to small, midsize, and enterprise businesses. Although it supports other verticals, it has the strongest presence in the financial services, high-tech, and manufacturing industries. Salesforce’s defining strengths are its continued integration of customer data platform features into its SFA solution, its in-depth forecasting features, and the flexibility of its generative AI capabilities, helping sales operation admins improve their agility and customization.

Microsoft also retains its place in the category. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is used by organizations of all sizes and across industries but is most adopted in the financial services, healthcare, professional services, and manufacturing markets. Its strengths as an SFA vendor include the generative AI features packaged into its SFA product, the usability of its account and contact management tools, and its roadmap for the Synamics 265 Sales platform, which focuses on enhancing the Copilot experience with AI agents.

Oracle closes out the Leaders with Oracle Sales Cloud, an SFA product best suited for midsize and enterprise organizations. The company earns high marks for the mobile app capabilities available for this SFA solution, which include a simple user interface and access to the Oracle Sales Assistant tool. Oracle’s strengths include its continued commitment to composite AI, its overall market understanding, and a robust product roadmap with plans for expansion in generative AI content, composite AI, analytics, and GenAI-augment lead conversion tools.

Challengers

SAP has moved from the Visionaries to the Challengers category in the Gartner report. In the last year, SAP has redesigned its mobile app UI, enhanced its AI models for lead scoring, and will release innovations for its GenAI assistant and an AI/ML-based duplicate check feature before the end of the year. Its other differentiating characteristics in the market include its robust ecosystem of integration-ready products and its balanced approach to supporting discriminative and traditional AI and GenAI features in its AI roadmap.

Pega maintains its place as a Challenger with Pega Sales Automation, an SFA product ideally suited for larger enterprises with complex business processes. Last year, the company introduced several notable enhancements to its product, including a GenAI email composer, meeting summaries, route planning optimizations, email interpretation tools, and GenAI assistants for progressing sales deals and helping users with contextual searches. Gartner also highlights Pega’s GenAI Blueprint feature and activity management capabilities among its differentiating traits as an SFA vendor.

SugarCRM again closes out the Challengers category with Sugar Sell, an SFA solution targeting the B2B upper midmarket. Its strengths as an SFA vendor include its extensive community platform, which features approximately 12,000 members and connects customers, partners, and stakeholders while offering educational experiences for each via SugarUniversity. Gartner also highlights SugarCRM’s professional services offerings—including onboarding, training, and data migration support—and a growing roster of strategic partnerships helping the company stand out from the competition.

Visionaries

Zoho is back as a Visionary with Zoho CRM, an SFA solution that predominantly serves SMB and midsize segments, although it does have some enterprise presence. The company works with organizations across the life sciences, retail, financial services, high-tech, and professional services industries. Its strengths as a provider include its predictive scoring capabilities, workflow automation tools, automated lead assignment functionalities, data privacy support, and its AI assistant, Zia, which helps users analyze actions and improve a sales organization’s time to value.

Creatio has moved from the Challenger category into the Visionaries in this year’s Magic Quadrant. Its SFA product is Sales Creatio, which is well-suited for midsize and enterprise organizations with more than 250 total employees. Its strengths in the market include its product packages, pricing options, and the release of the Creatio Copilot experience. This recent feature enables users to summarize records, enrich data, initiate tasks, and more. Creatio is also one of the few vendors in this report that offer sales best practices to help businesses improve their lead and opportunity management.

Niche Players

BUSINESSNEXT is a Niche Player in this year’s report. Its sales force automation product is part of the company’s broader suite of enterprise solutions, most commonly used in the insurance and financial services markets. According to Gartner’s research, BUSINESSNEXT’s strongest features include its machine-learning-based predictive lead-scoring models, a user interface outfitted with an enhanced Kanban view, and its user-friendly AI solution, which is tailored for sales use cases and offers out-of-the-box AI models for lead scoring, predictive forecasting, and AI-guided selling.

HubSpot and its Sales Hub solution also return to the Niche Player category. The company’s products are best suited for small and midsize businesses with fewer than 2,000 employees. HubSpot has an above-average growth and customer retention rate in the SFA market, which has proven to be a reassuring factor for prospective clients needing a stable solution provider. Its other notable qualities in the market include a user-friendly interface and a collection of activity management functionalities, including a native conversation intelligence tool, an email template library for outreach efforts, a sequence builder, and a LinkedIn bidirectional sync.

Neocrm’s SFA product is Neocrm Sales Cloud, which primarily supports customers in China but is working to expand its reach outside the region. Its strengths as an SFA vendor include the improvements it introduced to its AI capabilities, a partner relationship management (PRM) feature that supports the life cycle of partner interactions, and its roadmap of innovations, which includes AI-powered tools for analyzing conversation insights, an email assistant for custom prompt building, and a digital sales room.

Freshworks is another returning Niche Player. Its SFA product is Freshsales, which focuses on helping small businesses and lower-midsize organizations with 250 employees or fewer. The company stands out from the competition with a more budget-friendly solution than other products, tools for creating custom visualizations, seamless report sharing, pre-trained chatbots, and omnichannel activity tracking tools for several channels, including Instagram, WhatsApp, SMS, and website chats.

Vtiger closes out this year’s Magic Quadrant with Vtiger One, an SFP product ideally suited for SMBs in the B2B and B2C markets. It offers an industry-specific version of its platform for construction companies but also supports the financial services, insurance, pharmaceutical, real estate, and CPG industries. Its strengths include its collection of collaboration tools, an always-free version of its solution for small businesses that supports a seamless transition to paid versions, and AI and rule-based tools for customer interaction summarization, AI-generated responses, automated seller data entry, and more.