Market Definition/Description

Gartner defines B2B marketing automation platforms as software that supports lead
generation, lead management, lead scoring and lead nurturing activities across multiple
marketing channels.
The main goal of these systems is to capture, qualify and nurture leads to the point that
they are sales-ready, then align them to the appropriate sales team member(s) to drive
toward a closed deal. B2B marketing automation platforms assist with data cleansing (by
eliminating incomplete or redundant lead information) and lead augmentation (by providing
additional data about prospects). B2B marketing automation platforms are designed to
primarily support B2B use cases, but they may also be applicable to B2C organizations
selling high-consideration products and/or B2B2C models with more complex, indirect
sales processes.
The core capabilities of B2B marketing automation platforms include:

 Ability to input, synchronize, cleanse and activate first-party data while augmenting
existing contact data with third-party data sources and relevant data from other marketing,
sales, data management and digital commerce systems
 Lead scoring functionality supporting the creation and management of lead
qualification processes using business rules and/or artificial intelligence (AI) and machine
learning (ML)
 Lead workflow functionality enabling organizations to manage the lead life cycle
from collection to conversion and retention/upsell, using a graphical UI suitable for
nontechnical users
 Ability to deploy and manage a customer engagement program across multiple
channels
 Ability to track, measure and report on strategic and operational KPIs to monitor
and guide revenue generation, including revenue guidance and insight based on current
lead and account volumes/quality
 Access to preconfigured, out-of-the-box reports and data
visualization/dashboarding capabilities appropriate for marketing, sales and
executive users
Optional capabilities of B2B marketing automation platforms include:

 Predictive analytics supporting automation of marketing activities, such as journey

design, content and next-best-action recommendations and autonomous campaign
optimization
 Prescriptive analytics that specify a preferred course of action for the end-user
organization
 Customer journey analytics supporting the ability to track and analyze the way
customers and prospects use a combination of available channels to interact with an
organization over time
Note that this Magic Quadrant represents an evolution of the research formerly known as
the Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management. This is the first iteration focusing on B2B
marketing automation platforms.
Magic Quadrant
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms
Source: Gartner (September 2021)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Act-On
Act-On is a Challenger in this year’s Magic Quadrant. Act-On is focused on growth
marketing for B2B companies through multichannel marketing, behavioral insights
and automated life cycle engagement. Its operations are mostly in North America, and its
customers tend to be small and midsize business (SMB) and midmarket companies within
the business services, manufacturing, retail and hospitality, banking and securities,
healthcare, and technology sectors. Recent innovations include an automated journey
builder, SMS channel support and a unified view of contacts, with future improvements
 geared toward better user experience, expanded multichannel capabilities and enhanced
contact data management.
Strengths

 Pricing: Act-On’s pricing model is defined by active contacts, determined by the

customers in the contact database to whom organizations are actively marketing, and
there are no consumption fees for volumes of emails sent. This helps marketers more
easily manage their budget and limits surprises from changes in campaign strategy.
 Multichannel lead management: Act-On provides marketers the ability to
personalize messages across key engagement channels, including email, SMS and social
platforms. Email marketing campaigns can be customized through adaptive sending,
which optimizes the time to send each email by open and click times as well as a
customer’s overall engagement with the company.
 Product updates: In addition to major feature releases — including three during
2020 — Act-On software is updated on a weekly basis to provide minimal disruption to
marketers.
Cautions

 Lack of AI/ML: Act-On does not incorporate AI nor ML in its software, as is

common in most other vendors reviewed for this research. This requires marketers to
manually determine the most appropriate selections within areas such as lead scoring
attributes, engagement channels and advanced analytics, rather than choose from
recommendations suggested by algorithms.
 Account scoring: Act-On’s approach to account scoring considers accounts as a
collection of leads rather than an account with its own unique attributes. For example, the
calculation of an account score is a roll-up that aggregates all leads in an account or
averages all leads in an account.
 Minimal marketer visibility: Act-On has among the lowest awareness of all vendors
in this research among Gartner marketing clients, and it has not increased as a result of
the company’s rebranding efforts in 2020.

Adobe
Adobe is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Adobe Marketo Engage product supports
multichannel marketing automation and account-based marketing (ABM), with
comprehensive lead and account-based qualification. Its operations are globally diversified
while its customers are predominantly in North America and tend to be enterprise-scale
organizations in high tech, financial services and manufacturing. Adobe plans to launch a
chatbot to trigger cross-channel actions for leads and accounts and route leads to sales,
and enable the forthcoming B2B edition of Adobe Real-Time CDP to connect multiple
instances of Marketo Engage. Expanded integrations with other Adobe products, including
the Adobe Experience Platform, are also on the roadmap.
Strengths