CDPs and Analytics Take CRM Lead Management Providers to New Heights

By Sudipto Ghosh On Oct 2, 2019

Recently, Gartner released the Magic Quadrant 2019 for CRM Lead Management. The list includes the usual top-end Martech providers, Salesforce, Adobe’s Marketo, Acoustic (IBM) and the low-code champion in this segment, bpm’online. As a global business software provider for Process Automation and CRM, bpm’online has carved a unique space for itself in the CRM Lead Management category this year. bpm’online is a MarTech RADAR Company 2019.

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bpm’online was also a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Sales force Automation 2019 released in July 2019.

A major push into this CRM category come from fast-paced adoption and delivery of AI-based applications, in addition to seamless integration with Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Marketing Analytics, and Account-Based Everything platforms. Gartner’s report evaluates 15 vendors, defining CRM lead management as “the process of capturing leads, tracking their activities and behavior, qualifying them, giving them constant attention to make them sales-ready, and then passing them on to the sales team.”

Gartner highlighted the role of AI as specified by both vendors and clients that are looking after AI technologies to facilitate lead management processes. While broadly used, lead management use cases for AI are becoming available in many applications, such as for lead scoring.

Other players listed in the various quadrants include consistent MarTech Series contributors such as HubSpot, Pegasystems, Zoho, SugarCRM (Salesfusion), X2Engine, Impartner, and SAP.

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We spoke to Katherine Kostereva, CEO and Managing Partner at bpm’online at the time of this announcement. Katherine stated —

“AI and ML have already moved from the realms of emerging tech to must-adopt technology and are becoming a critical success aspect for the customer experience and engagement. According to the recent Gartner report, the number of enterprises implementing artificial intelligence grew 270 percent in the past four years and tripled in the past year with an estimated 37 percent of firms now implementing AI in some form.”

Bpm’online marketing is a marketing automation software which helps organizations orchestrate customer journeys and accelerate lead-to-revenue. The product comes with best practice processes for efficient lead management – from demand generation to lead nurturing, to lead scoring, to final hand-off to sales. Its primary task is ensuring companies focus on qualified and sales-ready leads only. Bpm’online marketing can be both used separately or as a part of bpm’online CRM suite – coupled with bpm’online sales and bpm’online service solutions, built on one low-code process management platform. Bpm’online CRM allows for streamlining engagements across the entire customer journey.

Katherine added, “In the fast-paced business environment, marketing professionals expect software to make lead management process easy, though highly efficient. Bpm’online equips businesses with powerful tools, capable of amplifying their marketing efforts and ensuring top-notch customer engagement. This year, we were positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management, and we believe this recognition is a result of our consistent focus on helping companies accelerate.”

We probed how bpm’online continues to excel with their low-code applications for Martech and Salestech ecosystems. Katherine explained, “Business requires automation to be delivered in a fast and efficient manner. While IT has a huge backlog and limited capacity to deliver on all requests various departments, including what Marketing and Sales, have.”

“One of the solutions to accelerate modernization and transformation for marketing and sales is utilizing low-code / no-code technologies, which enable the staff to deliver new capabilities and automation much faster and easier. Leveraging low-code technology sales representatives and marketers can build some automation on their own. Such tools enable even less tech-savvy employees to make required configuration, build processes, interfaces, dashboards with no specific development skills,” said CEO of Sales force Automation provider.

Katherine’s recent achievements include being named as one of Top 50 SaaS CEOs in 2018, and 2019. In addition, she was been named one of the top women entrepreneurs in cloud computing, ranked among the top 3 CEOs in Boston, MA, recognized as one of the most influential women in BPM industry, and listed as one of the 5 coolest Business Process Management CEO’s of 2018 by Solutions Review.