The CRM market has been gaining power and strength for years now. No matter how big, how powerful, how international, or even how digital your company is: you’ll always need CRM to power your business with relevant data and insights. Clever as can be, many enterprises emerged to supply the market with CRM tools, turning it into a battlefield. These days, one can easily become overwhelmed by the vast panoply of CRM solutions to choose from!
And here is where we can help:
1.CRM Market Growth
As expected, the CRM market has been growing rapidly. The global customer relationship management market was assessed at USD 52.4 billion in 2021, with a CAGR of 13.3 percent predicted from 2022 to 2030. More impressing is the potential of this market: projected to be $82 billion by 2025 and with a revenue of near $50 billion . If this rate remains, until 2034 the CRM market potential would be $228 billion. But, where do these projections come from?
Data suggests that, each year 70% of businesses refer they plan to increase spending on technology, to keep up with the ever changing digital industry. Many of these companies seriously consider investing more in CRM to become GDPR compliant. In fact, 49% of businesses plan to increase spending on CRM software. More specifically, businesses plan to increase spending on customer service, marketing automation, knowledge management, and sales force automation. All of these, through primarily investing on CRM. Coupling to that, already in 2019, the overall CRM usage increased from 56% to 74%. And, in the same year, 91% of businesses with over 11 employees use CRM, and 50% of companies with more or less 10 employees also use it. All in all, 74% of CRM users reveal the tool improved their access to customer data.
Get to know the Breakdown of CRM customers worldwide by industry.
Having said this, we may only conclude the future of CRM can only be promising, yet also quite competitive. After all, who’s leading this market?
2.CRM Leaders
The CRM market is getting more and more competitive and complex. Therefore, and since CRM is rather a broad concept, let’s try to narrow it down according to Gartner. Gartner breaks down providers into two groups: Sales Force Automations (SFAs) and Customer Engagement. Let’s now analyse the market leaders in these two segments.
Salesforce Automations Market
The automation applications help manage contacts, orders, opportunities, forecasts, leads, and dashboards. These days, SFAs rely more and more on artificial intelligence and predictive analytics. The sales force automation market was USD 191.89 billion in 2021 and is projected to grow from USD 205.86 billion in 2022 to USD 395.09 billion by 2029.
Salesforce:
The Salesforce platform is the first market leader in the SFAs market. How did it get there? Thanks to its long expertise on the field and its well-known Sales Cloud, which is now empowered by Einstein, Salesforce Artificial Intelligence functionality.
Microsoft:
Microsoft is the second player in the market. It has been playing its role in the CRM world, offering advanced customization options through deep customer understanding.
Oracle:
Oracle comes third on the SFAs podium, playing a solid role when it comes to mobile and predictive analytics software.
Customer Engagement Market
Customer Engagement solutions ensure the client is the priority during the entire sales process and afterwards. Using user-friendly applications, providing knowledge bases, and sending automated follow-up emails are among common practices.
Salesforce:
The Salesforce platform is again the leader in the market, thanks to its multiple and often complementary cloud solutions, including Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and App Cloud. They are the reference for software solutions.
Microsoft:
Microsoft has been empowering its customer service software, using it as an independent module within its CRM software. Also, Microsoft enjoys from the fact it is already a well-established brand.
Oracle:
Besides Oracle large data base, what makes it special is the fact that they started early embedding AI into their customer engagement strategy. Also, Oracle’s solution is easy to set up.
3.Salesforce Throne
A little bit of history
After having had an overview of the major players in the market and its distinctive factors, it becomes clearer that Salesforce really is leading the CRM loop. So, how did it get there?
Salesforce was created in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff. All four, plus two dogs, in a bedroom apartment next to Benioff’s house, committed to revolutionizing the business software applications world. Less than one year after its creation, Salesforce moved into an eight thousand square feet office at Rincon Center along with ten employees and started positioning itself in the market – the game was on! The motto: No software!
In 2005, Salesforce stroke again, developing a service that would change business software forever: AppExchange. It offered a place for partners to develop their applications and open them up to Salesforce customers. In the following years, Salesforce launched Apex, the On-Demand Programming Language which allows third parties to write and run code on Salesforce.com’s shared architecture, and Force.com, opening possibilities for customers to build their custom applications.
After settling on Sales, Service, and Paas in 2012, Salesforce became a new market: Marketing. It created Marketing Cloud. Then came a higher focus on user experience, resulting in the rollout of the mobile app Salesforce and a new, more user-friendly, look-for-the-platform Lightning experience as we know it.
In 2016, Salesforce gave birth to what many considered the biggest development in Salesforce’s history: Artificial Intelligence – Einstein. Its capabilities were embedded in sales, service, marketing, and app development. The launch of Einstein was an enormous hype for the company!
The company also went through large and important acquisitions recently, such as in 2019, when it announced the purchase of Tableau software, a tool to increase the offer and possibilities of data analysis, and in 2020 the Slack application, which aims to create an operating system for companies.
And last but not least, 2022 brings us Genie to highly personalized, real-time customer experiences—a hyper-scale data platform that powers every Salesforce 360 Client.
According to reports, Salesforce has maintained its position as the leader for the 11th consecutive year in 2024. As of 2023, Salesforce’s market share was 21.7%, which is more than three times larger than Microsoft’s (5.9%) in the second position, and larger than the combined total of its four closest competitors.
Oracle (4.4%), SAP (3.5%), and Adobe (3.4%) were unable to reach the five percent mark, and the graph below illustrates Salesforce’s dominance in the sector.
Salesforce Today
As we saw above, to these days, the Salesforce platform has been acquiring multiple key companies, keeping its focus on AI and predictive analysis, and its strong multi-cloudiness presence (wasn’t Salesforce the pioneer of Cloud CRM!). Impressive as it may be, today, 95% of Fortune 100 brands partner with Salesforce!
Take a look at Salesforce’s market position through these graphics:
The #1 CRM company in the world is now lying on a bed of roses! With more than 150,000 companies using its CRM, a 2022 full year revenue of $26.492B – 24.66% increase from 2021 – and more than 20% market share, Salesforce announced it plans to achieve $60 billion in revenue by 2034!
“We had another year of outstanding revenue growth, surpassing $13 billion in revenue faster than any other enterprise software company in history,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO, Salesforce. “As companies of all sizes turn to Salesforce, we’re enabling them to put the customer at the center of their digital transformation through our intelligent Customer 360 platform. I’ve never been more excited about the opportunity ahead.”
We hope this post helped you keep updated on the CRM market, its latest trends, its major competitors, and its leading player!
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