The future of Salesforce in CRM
Salesforce as we all know has been the market leader in CRM and has been one for a hot minute now. It has Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and Adobe beat among others. While we sit here and contemplate it's future CEO Mark assures us that $30 billion in revenue is ‘right around the corner’, Pretty Daring, Marc!
As one of the most exciting Cloud platforms around, the Salesforce suite of applications is beginning to find widespread applicability in a rapidly increasing number of industry domains, and SFDC has witnessed tremendous growth in recent years.
But what does the future hold for Salesforce? Is the Salesforce family of solutions all set to dominate –even monopolize- the enterprise software market for the decade ahead?
To predict the future for Salesforce, let’s begin with a glimpse into the recent past. A quick look at the current state of the CRM industry and the role played by Salesforce apps will help us connect the dots and arrive at a plausible future trajectory -
- 47% of total CRM software revenue in 2014 was generated from SaaS-based CRM applications.
- Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) leads the worldwide CRM market with 18.4% market share.
- The top ten CRM vendors together were able to generate 60% of worldwide revenue in 2014.
- Undoubtedly, Salesforce dominated the worldwide CRM market with a market share of 18.6%, and 28.2% revenue growth from 2013 to 2014.
- SAP had the second largest market share with 12.1%, with a growth rate of 7.2% in 2014.
- Oracle had the third largest market share of 9.2% with a growth rate of just about 2.6% in 2014.
(Estimates by Gartner)
The pie-chart here illustrates the worldwide CRM Software Spending by Vendor in 2014. The graph compares CRM revenue growth rates by vendor for 2014 worldwide CRM sales.
The figures speak for themselves. When it comes to CRM, Salesforce reigns supreme - and the platform has continued to expand, integrating a host of functionalities and tools from Salesforce.com’s many acquisitions in recent years.
How Does Salesforce Revive Businesses?
Over 54% of organizations that use CRM solutions claim that Salesforce lends itself well to providing a personalized customer-service experience. 4 in 5 Salesforce customers’ needs were met with greater ease with Salesforce than with other CRM offering.
As the cloud enables employees to access data from anywhere, the advantage of using a single account for client records and data across their sales, finance, and legal teams isn’t lost on organizations.
As an intelligent tool that helps the Salesforce at companies spend less time searching, managing, and entering data and more time on selling, the Salesforce platform has elevated the way businesses are done - to a whole new level!
In the longer term, we expect Salesforce to integrate data science and big data capabilities to its Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. This would result in automated customer service tasks (via Service Cloud) and would let marketers leverage data for predictive and targeted marketing (via Marketing Cloud). If this is done, it will be a step in the right direction, considering a report from MIT which stated that 71% of businesses invest in business intelligence and big data, of which 20% have said to have made substantial investments.
By providing customized CRM tools to specific categories of businesses and by providing personalized experiences for clients that in turn help in capturing relevant and specific information, Salesforce can promise itself a growth that it has sustained for itself so far. My educated-ish guess after looking at these figures and strategies would be that Salesforce is going nowhere, at least for a long while!
-Shubhangi Sinha (HR Analyst) & Priyadarshini (Education Specialist)