Gartner recently published "Market Guide for Sales Engagement Applications, November 2021," with key insights on how this hot market is evolving. Authored by analysts Dan Gottlieb, Shayne Jackson, and Ilona Hansen, this report is now available to Gartner clients.
This extensive report provides a much-anticipated update to the last sales engagement research that TOPO published prior to its acquisition by Gartner.¹ We believe that TOPO's market view is aligned with this newly published Gartner Market Guide report, which reveals:
Sellers are more efficient and productive using sales engagement applications because they simplify daily workflows such as engaging buyers with minimal clicks, keeping them organized and facilitating CRM adoption.
The report also states, "Sales engagement application vendors are increasingly expanding their capabilities to meet the needs of account executives and customer success functions, overlapping with sales enablement, conversation intelligence, and revenue intelligence technologies."
Before diving into recommendations and analysis, the report first establishes a definition of the market that it now calls "sales engagement applications."
Sales engagement applications definition according to Gartner®
"Sales engagement applications accelerate how sales teams execute multichannel, multitouch engagement at scale and facilitate CRM/SFA adoption. They simplify seller workflows for engaging prospects and customers by coordinating the use of engagement channels (e.g., email, voice, SMS, social media) through a single console."
Source: Gartner, "Market Guide for Sales Engagement Applications, Dan Gottlieb, Shayne Jackson, Ilona Hansen, 9 November 2021"
The shift from sales development to entire sales teams
The report also notes how early vendors in the category were primarily focused on sales development use cases, as Gartner states, "Our name for this category of technologies evolved from inside sales technologies to sales acceleration technologies, and as it enters its next phase of growth, it is called sales engagement applications." Further, Gartner explains why it recently dropped sales acceleration as the category name in favor of sales engagement in the report "Quick Answer, Why is Sales Acceleration Become Sales Engagement, September 2021."
Whereas most sales engagement platforms have retrofitted their products to better serve the expanded needs of entire revenue teams, Groove has been singularly focused on building a product that fits seamlessly into the unique workflows of each team since its inception. Our approach has enabled us to attract the highest percentage of enterprise users among our competitive set, according to G2.
An expanding market
The Gartner report also features the following commentary about an expanding market for sales engagement technologies:
Account-based go-to-market
Staffing and recruiting
Fundraising
Sales partner management
Additionally, the segment is seeing increased demand from new and expanding vertical markets. The Gartner report points out, "We expect the development of more industry-specific sales engagement technologies for the life science and pharma industry to come soon."
Groove was ahead of this trend when it launched the first sales engagement platform for Salesforce Financial Services Cloud back in December 2020. Groove's unique Salesforce-native architecture allows it to seamlessly integrate with the core features of Salesforce Sales Cloud, plus all the custom fields and objects modeling financial accounts, assets, liabilities, and goals for both individual clients and across entire households available in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud.
Sales engagement core requirements and recommendations
Organizations looking to implement a sales engagement application should review the eight core requirements outlined in this Gartner Market Guide. Gartner also offers key recommendations for sales leaders looking to invest in sales engagement applications, two of which are "Form a cross-functional sales engagement committee" and "Prioritize vendors based on your revenue technology stack."
Gartner clients can access and others can purchase the "Market Guide for Sales Engagement Applications, Dan Gottlieb, Shayne Jackson, Ilona Hansen, November 2021" on their website.
Revenue teams looking to evaluate sales engagement platforms can learn more about Groove. To learn more about sales engagement platforms and what they do, read The Definitive Guide to Sales Engagement Platforms.
¹TOPO, "Research Note: Sales Engagement Market Guide," Craig Rosenberg, 10 October 2021 (Gartner acquired TOPO in October 2019).
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