Critical Capabilitie 734608 NDX

Critical Capabilities for B2B Marketing Automation
Platforms
Published 21 September 2021 - ID G00734608 - 47 min read
By Analyst(s): Noah Elkin, Julian Poulter, Christy Ferguson, Ilona Hansen, Jeffrey Cohen
Initiatives: Marketing Technology and Emerging Trends; Digital Commerce and CRM
Sales Technologies
B2B marketing automation platforms help organizations to create,

orchestrate, execute and measure customer engagements across
multiple touchpoints. Digital marketing leaders should use this
research to identify vendor solutions that meet their needs for
audience and lead management, and reporting.
This Critical Capabilities is related to other research:
Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms

View All Magic Quadrants and Critical Capabilities
Overview
Key Findings
■ Forty-eight percent of B2B digital marketing leaders cited “improving lead quality”
among their top three digital marketing objectives for 2021, with “acquiring new
customers” following closely behind.
■ Marketing teams need increased agility to adapt to changing customer expectations

regarding personalized experiences and the disruptive forces shaping their
businesses. They are looking to improve the predictive decision-making that helps to
optimize audience discovery and management, engagements, lead scoring and
routing, and measurement at both the contact and account level.
■ Currently, 79% of marketing organizations report already having a B2B marketing

automation platform deployed; however, only one-quarter (25%) say they utilize more
than 67% of their platform’s capabilities.
Gartner, Inc. | G00734608 Page 1 of 40
This research note is restricted to the personal use of rajat.2001100@nitie.ac.in.

Recommendations
Digital marketing leaders responsible for identifying, evaluating and selecting B2B
marketing automation technologies should:
Drive alignment with other organization stakeholders around common demand

management and account-based marketing objectives. Determine how you can use your
marketing automation tool to automate measurable workflows for lead qualification,
distribution and nurturing, and to personalize engagement with prospects and existing
accounts.
■ Determine use cases for maximizing the features in your marketing automation
solution. Strengthen ROI outcomes by supporting your tools with robust skills
training and collaborative workflows. Establish whether additional support from your
current or prospective marketing automation provider can help you accelerate the
maturity of your demand generation program.
■ Assess shortlisted players based on technical and business fit, as well as usability.
Evaluate how capabilities, partner ecosystems, geographic presence, industry
expertise, licensing models and integrations with other tools in your martech stack
match your preferences and needs.
Strategic Planning Assumption(s)

What You Need to Know
Marketing activities supporting customer acquisition objectives, including improving lead
quality and delivering personalized experiences, remain top priorities for digital marketing
leaders in B2B organizations. The emphasis on customer acquisition is consistent with a
general trend toward seeking growth by expanding into new markets (see Digital
Marketing Survey 2021, Part 1: Agile Planning and Clear Leadership Mitigate Disruption).
That said, B2B digital marketing leaders are also focused on improving resell among
existing customers — to a significantly greater degree than their B2C counterparts.

This research represents an evolution of last year’s Critical Capabilities for CRM Lead
Management. This is the first iteration focusing on B2B marketing automation platforms,
which are core to B2B organizations’ customer acquisition and retention efforts. They
assist marketers and their sales partners in aggregating contact account data, and
deduplicating and augmenting inbound lead information, often with third-party data, to
form a more complete lead or account profile. B2B marketing automation tools score the
leads, send them through a multichannel nurturing workflow and, ultimately, qualify and
prioritize the selling opportunities delivered to sales channels such as a sales team or an
outbound contact center team. Advancing account-based marketing (ABM) tools in B2B
marketing automation platforms — including account profiling, scoring and engagement
functionality that goes beyond a roll-up of associated contact-level activity, and dedicated
reporting — further support B2B marketers that are seeking to fuel growth from existing
markets.
Paralleling developments among more B2C-focused multichannel marketing hubs, B2B

marketing automation vendors are broadly focused on augmenting their solutions with
predictive decision-making tools designed to optimize audience creation and
management, contact and account scoring and engagement and impact measurement.
Distinct from B2C solutions, however, B2B marketing automation platforms must support
a sales process that depends on active involvement from, and alignment with, sales
teams that are often dispersed across multiple business units and geographies.
Integration with sales force automation (SFA) solutions is critical to effective account and
opportunity management, making marketing automation and SFA the twin technology
pillars that power the customer life cycle in B2B organizations.
However, B2B marketing automation vendors and platforms are not all alike. The vendors
featured in this Critical Capabilities research vary in approach, focus, market presence and
core customers. They also differ in the breadth of their surrounding ecosystems for
additional functionality, implementation support and service offerings.
Use this document to identify the use cases for which your organization may need a B2B
marketing automation platform (MAP). Critical capabilities with associated ratings will
help you pinpoint areas of differentiation and help you determine which B2B MAP vendors
may be suitable fits to your requirements. Apply the “Customize” functionality in the
interactive version to align the capability percentages to your needs. Treat the scoring in
this research as a tool for determining whether the featured products meet your current
and evolving marketing automation requirements.

Finally, use the companion Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms to
understand key market dynamics and compare how the featured vendors are ranked in
the context of those dynamics.

Analysis
Critical Capabilities Use-Case Graphics
Figure 1: Vendors’ Product Scores for Customer Acquisition Use Case
Source: Gartner (September 2021)

Figure 2: Vendors’ Product Scores for Lead Nurturing Use Case

Figure 3: Vendors’ Product Scores for Conversion to Sales Use Case

Figure 4: Vendors’ Product Scores for Customer Retention/Upsell Use Case

Vendors
Act-On
Act-On’s marketing automation software is focused on growth marketing for B2B

companies through multichannel lead management, behavioral insights and automation
life cycle engagement. It is available as a professional package and an enterprise
package with the addition of CRM integration, ABM, and data studio for advanced
reporting.
Marketers in SMB and midmarket organizations can use Act-On to simplify and automate
manual, immature or outdated processes. Act-On appeals to vertical industries
characterized by a central authority and subsidiary models (insurance, healthcare and
hospitality, for example) because of its ability to maintain central management over
global messaging initiatives, while local instances can adapt to regional needs. In June
2020, Act-On refocused its platform on helping marketers grow lifetime customer
engagement, deliver consistent brand experiences, and ensure successful customer
onboarding, renewal and advocacy.
Act-On received its highest critical capabilities score for multichannel lead management,
tying for the highest score for this capability among vendors evaluated in this research. It
supports all basic marketing channels through a combination of native functionality in
the platform, through APIs and with named partners. Act-On received its lowest critical
capability rating for lead scoring/qualification. This reflects the platform’s method of
calculating account scores (that is, rolling up lead scores versus creating a unique
account score based on engagement) and the lack of predictive analytics embedded
within the lead scoring module. Marketers must manually determine the most relevant
attributes.
Act-On achieved largely consistent scores across all four use cases, with lead nurturing its
highest rated. This was driven by the ease of use and intuitive nature of its automated
journey builder. Overall, Act-On ranked in the bottom third among vendors evaluated in this
research across all four use cases.

Adobe
Adobe supports sophisticated B2B multichannel lead management programs through

Adobe Marketo Engage’s core marketing automation capabilities. Marketo Engage can be
extended to include sophisticated non-native marketing channel support, as well as
predictive insights and analytics via integrations to Adobe Creative Cloud and Experience
Cloud products. It offers a four-tier packaging model, with a base package comprising
core marketing automation capabilities. The Prime offering includes core functionality
along with lead- and account-based capabilities and analytics. The Ultimate package
adds access to Bizible’s multitouch attribution functionality.
As anticipated in last year’s research, Adobe recently updated the Marketo Engage user
experience to a modern UI, streamlining navigation in an effort to provide consistency with
other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. It plans to continue to build out integrations to
other Adobe products, including a focus on expanding account-based orchestration
through the Adobe Experience Platform, in addition to predictive lead and account scoring
through Adobe Sensei. A B2B edition of Adobe’s customer data platform (CDP) will enable
marketers using Marketo Engage to activate B2B audiences in support of ABM programs.
Marketo Engage received its highest critical capabilities scores for lead scoring and
qualification and integrations, rating excellent for both. Marketers are able to easily create
custom scoring models, using a comprehensive set of fields and data sources, including
digital commerce, with if/then statements and support for multiple scoring models. In
addition, the platform’s Account Profiling functionality offers AI-driven scoring and ranks
accounts based on the propensity to buy and user-defined fit indicators.
The Marketo Engage LaunchPoint marketplace provides marketers with access to over
500 applications, including ABM platforms. Users can access additional integrations via
the Adobe Exchange marketplace. A native Vertify integration enables connections to
Adobe and third-party digital commerce solutions. Adobe is one of the few vendors in this
research to offer native integrations to event providers, such as ON24. It received its
lowest critical capabilities score for lead workflow, scoring slightly below average
compared to other vendors. Its predictive support of workflow creation is limited to
likelihood to unsubscribe, and likelihood to register and/or attend an event.

Marketo Engage is a top-ranked vendor across all use cases in this research. It achieved
its highest rating for customer retention and upsell. Audience management functions
include segmentation of lead and account data by prebuilt behavioral and demographic
triggers and filters. Marketo Engage also provides extensive support for ingesting and
processing lead data from connected systems, marketing channels and integrations with
third-party data sources.
BSI
BSI is a new vendor to this research based in Switzerland, primarily serving customers
based in DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland). BSI Customer Suite covers marketing,
sales and customer service tasks, which allows its customers to use its proprietary
infrastructure as an automation platform across these customer-facing business units. It
consists of several modules, such as BSI Insight, CX and AI. BSI supports B2B, B2C and
B2B2C use cases in industry-specific solutions for banking, insurance and retail industries,
which are also its core markets. BSI offers a high degree of flexibility for customizing the
core system.
BSI services and addresses the needs of primarily large organizations (those managing
one million or more leads). It provides direct implementation services to the majority of its
customers. BSI offers flexible deployment options, supporting on-premises deployments
as well as hybrid (on-premises and cloud) and cloud-based. It also offers a managed
services option.
Multichannel lead management was a top-rated capability for BSI, based on its solid
multichannel execution functionality. It provides support for email, websites and landing
pages, and comes with a clean UI, enhancing the platform’s ease of use. However, BSI
lacks native support for event platforms such as tradeshows, seminars, online webinars
and virtual meetings. BSI’s analytics are also solid, especially its granular A/B testing
functions. The platform provides intuitive insights into campaign performance, using a
rich set of visuals that make it easy to understand data at a glance. BSI relies on Zapier
and REST APIs for integrations to other execution endpoints.
BSI achieved consistent scores across the four use cases. Using the platform for B2B will
require some planning and optimization, as functions that emphasize engagement
scoring (such as lead qualification) are tailored more for B2C and B2B2C scenarios. The
platform is not ideally suited for ABM. For example, the account scoring model provides a
roll-up of multiple contacts, but doesn’t score accounts independently, and the lead
workflow tools don’t easily support account-level activation and prioritization. The
platform is better suited for marketing organizations in high-consideration B2C categories.

Creatio
Marketing Creatio is integrated into a single core platform that supports related sales and
service applications, contact and account management, and AI/ML-based insights and
recommendations across the Creatio product suite. Marketing Creatio is designed to
support midsize or larger organizations seeking to unify processes and align cross-
functional teams.
Marketing Creatio provides marketers with comprehensive audience management,

segmentation and lead scoring, the ability to orchestrate multichannel lead management
campaigns via integrated execution endpoints, and an array of out-of-the-box and
customizable reports featuring contact and account-level insights.
Creatio has expanded its native integrations with other execution endpoints, including
Microsoft Teams and ON24 for virtual meetings and events, LinkedIn, WhatsApp,
conversational marketing platforms, and email marketing and analytics providers that
extend Marketing Creatio’s multichannel orchestration potential. The addition of AI-based
classification, regression, scoring and recommendation functionality to the Creatio
platform supports marketing teams with the identification and management of look-alike
audiences and segments for them to target. Creatio’s roadmap includes enhanced channel
marketing attribution models for organizations with complex partner structures, bolstering
Marketing Creatio’s suitability for organizations with indirect sales models.
Marketing Creatio received its highest score for lead scoring/qualification, also scoring
highest among vendors evaluated in this research for this capability. The platform’s
scoring interface features a highly visual, easy-to-understand workflow for building
scoring schemes through triggers and filters. The system incorporates account scores
directly into the account record, facilitating ABM planning and execution. ML-generated
insights help marketers understand a customer’s probability to engage, and can work in
conjunction with business rules. Recent upgrades bring an explanation UI to AI models,
providing transparency for marketing teams that are still ramping up their use of AI/ML
technologies.
Marketing Creatio’s scores for most other capabilities were above average, reflecting the
solution’s strong throughput. Marketing Creatio supplements native channel execution
endpoints like email marketing, landing page creation and direct mail with a variety of
connectors to third-party tools available through Creatio’s no-code platform and the
expanding Creatio Marketplace.

Marketing Creatio ranked among the top four vendors across all four evaluated use cases,
scoring highest for lead nurturing. It offers out-of-the-box but customizable lead
management processes that help marketing teams that prefer not to build their own
workflows. Its embedded AI/ML tools guide marketers with next-best-action
recommendations based on context and route leads to the appropriate salesperson based
on chosen criteria.
CRMNEXT
CRMNEXT, a division of Acidaes Solutions, offers a full-suite CRM solution, with modules
that support marketing, sales and service. The marketing automation module tracks and
measures marketing campaigns through various channels, including email, social media,
direct mail and call centers. The SFA module primarily helps sales teams track leads and
opportunities, while the service module facilitates core customer support services. The
company also provides reporting and analytical tools to improve market segmentation
and targeting, while a collaboration module helps with task allocation and
communication management between marketing, sales and service teams, and
customers.
CRMNEXT has added its Open Communication Platform (OCP) to the marketing
automation platform to facilitate messaging between marketers and customers on their
preferred channels. The OCP is supported by a new real-time data layer that enhances
CRMNEXT’s already-robust data management capabilities. It provides engagement
insights on accounts, contacts and leads from both internal and external data sources.
The company’s roadmap includes advanced real-time augmented analytics to align
marketing and sales. CRMNEXT also plans to release AI-driven account activation and
orchestration functionality and predict insights to support ABM.
Audience management, lead scoring/qualification, lead workflow and analytics and

measurement were CRMNEXT highest-rated capabilities. It provides comprehensive data
management and support for all requested virtual meeting platforms, but its preference
management functionality is basic. CRMNEXT’s lead workflow capabilities feature
comprehensive visualizations and many possible lead assignment rules. ABM workflows
are also robust, but require expertise to implement. Mastering the CRMNEXT platform
likewise entails a learning curve, as noted by customers.

CRMNEXT ranks among the top five vendors in this research for the customer
retention/upsell and conversion to sales use cases. The platform’s extensive AI-driven
predictive capabilities for audience creation and targeting, lead scoring and next-best-
action recommendations are particularly valuable for these two use cases. Real-time
alerts enable marketers to trigger engagement based on events relevant to CRMNEXT’s
core banking and financial services customer base, such as large deposits. CRMNEXT
also scored strongly for customer acquisition and lead nurturing.
Freshworks
Freshworks’ Freshsales Suite consists of a simplified lead management tool for marketers
in SMB and midmarket organizations that are seeking an easy-to-use marketing
automation solution to meet their less complex business needs. Freshworks launched
Freshsales Suite in late 2020. It includes an embedded CDP, a mobile app, chat and
governance. In addition, Freshworks recently launched a landing page builder and
conversion rate optimization functionality. Freshworks plans to expand its Freddy AI
offering to enable email marketing optimization by adding frequency, subject-line and
layout recommendations.
Freshsales Suite received its highest critical capabilities scores for audience management,
and lead scoring/qualification. Using AI/ML offered through Freddy AI, marketers are able
to merge IP addresses from unknown profiles with email to create known profiles. In
addition, company websites, email addresses or social profiles can be used to match and
enrich data. Using Freddy AI, Freshsales Suite calculates scores based on contact
properties and engagement. Prebuilt scores include the likelihood to convert and Freddy AI
provides recommendations tied to account properties, engagement or in-app/web
activities. In addition, Freshsales Suite includes flexible bring-your-own scoring models
and allows multiple models to run concurrently.
Freshsales Suite received its lowest critical capabilities score for integrations with other
applications due to its limited integrations with SFA and ABM tools. Freshworks also
scored below average for analytics and measurement compared to other vendors. It
doesn’t support mobile reports for sales users, and doesn’t include marketing channel
attribution reports.

Freshsales Suite achieved its highest use case rating for customer acquisition. The
platform combines marketing automation with a unified customer record that lives within
Freshsales SFA. This enables marketers to segment audiences, develop campaign
strategies and trigger chat messages, while also offering sales teams the ability to set up
automated sales sequences. Freshworks ranked lowest across the vendors in this
research for customer retention/upsell, lead nurturing and conversion to sales use cases.
Freshworks may not be the best solution for B2B organizations with complex lead
workflows across sales and marketing organizations.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub provides B2B marketing automation as part of a broader suite
encompassing sales, service and a content management system (CMS), but it also works
well with other CRM/SFA tools. HubSpot offers a free tier but with limited functionality.
Otherwise, pricing is determined by an edition-based platform fee and then increases
based on the number of contacts beyond a set limit. HubSpot historically has targeted
SMB customers, and shows a high number of overall deployments and rapid customer
growth relative to other providers in this research due to its traction with SMB marketers.
The company is now focusing more attention on midmarket and enterprise organizations.
Gartner clients have noted a favorable balance between the platform’s functionality,
flexibility and extensibility, citing a positive overall experience with HubSpot.
The company has bolstered its ABM tools and functionality to support enterprise-grade
applications like asset partitioning for complex orgs. HubSpot also launched Operations
Hub, which is part of a rearchitecting of HubSpot for enterprise users. This new module
provides functionality around acquiring and managing customer data as well as process
automation tools. Notable roadmap items include the addition of several
recommendation engines, support for a marketing events object, support for multiple
business units as well as expanding data centers to include Germany, for data residency
options.
HubSpot received the same above-average score for four of the six critical capabilities.
Integration with other applications was particularly noteworthy due to HubSpot’s large
ecosystem of add-on products, extensions and integrations and connectors in its HubSpot
App Marketplace and the large number of global implementation providers. It rated
slightly lower for audience management, reflecting limited support for event and meeting
management providers.

Most Gartner clients use HubSpot for B2B marketing scenarios. It covers all four of our
use cases, rating best for conversion to sales, especially where HubSpot’s own Sales Hub
module is used. The customer journey design capabilities provide an attractive and
functional UI as well as native ABM functionality, including account selection, advertising,
personalization and measurement. HubSpot achieved similarly good scores in the other
three use cases.
Microsoft
Microsoft offers Dynamics 365 Marketing for marketing automation in conjunction with
the Customer Insights CDP. Both are available as stand-alone modules or as part of the
wider Dynamics 365 suite incorporating sales, service and more recently added commerce
applications. Supporting functionality is available in Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft
Power Automate and Microsoft Power BI and the Office 365 suite, all underpinned by
Microsoft Azure infrastructure services.
Dynamics 365 Marketing consists of comprehensive multichannel lead management

functionality, while the Customer Insights CDP provides a common data model that
unifies customer data and enables sophisticated audience management, insight and
activation. In August 2021, Microsoft announced the availability of customer journey
orchestration (CJO), a set of tools to build and analyze customer journeys. Microsoft
plans to extend customer journey orchestration across not just marketing, but also sales,
service and commerce and leverage the Power Automate ecosystem of workflow triggers
and actions. Also on the roadmap are no-code multichannel personalization along with
wider use of AI to simulate and provide recommendations for optimizing personalized
journeys.
Marketing is still a relatively new offering within the Dynamics 365 suite, but the recent
release of CJO and other enhancements have helped it mature in all of our critical
capabilities and use cases. Dynamics 365 Marketing received its highest critical
capabilities scores for audience management and multichannel lead management, tying
for the highest scores for these capabilities across vendors evaluated in this research. A
unique strength for Dynamics 365 Marketing is its integration with Microsoft’s Teams
collaboration software to set up and manage virtual events, using Dynamics 365
Marketing to manage the whole event life cycle. In addition, content and images are
suggested to marketers when building landing pages and emails. Microsoft received its
lowest critical capabilities score for integration with other applications mainly due to its
prioritization of the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem over integrations with third-party
tools, particularly SFA.

Dynamics 365 Marketing achieved its highest use case ratings for customer acquisition
and lead nurturing, supported by the ability to apply multiple real-time lead scoring
models, sophisticated lead routing and clever multichannel lead management using
multiple triggers and journeys to automate personalized workflows. Dynamics 365
Marketing ranked slightly lower for conversion to sales and customer retention/upsell.
Oracle
Oracle’s Eloqua Marketing Automation solution consists of a B2B marketing automation

platform with robust audience and lead management. It augments native functions with
integrations to advertising, account intelligence, commerce, content management and
CDP modules within the broader Oracle Marketing portfolio. Connections with Oracle
Advertising and Oracle DataFox Data Management provide marketers with multiple native
options to enrich contact and account data that differentiate Oracle from other vendors in
this research.
Oracle has added support for multiple brands within a single Eloqua instance and enables
integrations with multiple CRM instances, extending its suitability for complex, global B2B
enterprises that seek to manage marketing and sales efforts at scale. It has also bolstered
the marketing automation and ABM functionality within Eloqua with the addition of
AI/ML-driven send-time optimization, subject-line optimization, contact fatigue analysis
and account scoring. In 2021, Oracle plans to add SMS as a native execution channel and
enhance cross-channel personalization via an integration with Oracle Infinity. A planned
integration with Oracle CrowdTwist Loyalty and Engagement will bring loyalty program
data into Eloqua for B2B organizations that anticipate using a direct-to-buyer sales model.
Oracle Eloqua received its highest critical capabilities score for integration with other
applications, tying for the highest score among vendors in this research. Oracle offers
native, bidirectional integrations with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics
365 Sales, as well as Oracle’s own Sales application. Native integrations as well as
integrations with other SFA solutions via connectors or third-parties do not incur
additional costs. Oracle Eloqua also offers native integrations with several leading ABM
platforms to augment Eloqua’s embedded ABM functionality. The Oracle Cloud
Marketplace offers Eloqua users access to over 300 partner-built apps that are easily
activated in the application.

Oracle Eloqua scored uniformly above average for our other evaluated capabilities.
Predictive lead scoring, a gap noted in last year’s evaluation, is expected to be generally
available by the end of 2021. Some actions, such as determining a next best content
recommendation, require users to add the available Oracle Content Management
application. Oracle has a more limited partner implementation network for global projects
than other market leaders.
Oracle Eloqua ranked among the top three vendors across all four evaluated use cases,
scoring highest for customer acquisition, lead nurturing and customer retention/upsell.
Gartner Peer Insights users called out the platform’s robust functionality and the generally
easy mechanisms for building, executing and measuring campaigns that guide customers
and prospects through the purchase journey, reflecting ongoing improvements as part of
Oracle’s Redwood UX implementation.
Pega
Pega’s Customer Decision Hub, built on the Pega Infinity platform, serves as the unifying
brain for all marketing automation activities across an organization. It provides tools that
can recognize and analyze customer behavior and suggest granular next best actions,
leveraging the Pega Next-Best-Action Designer. It can capture and connect a customer’s
conversations across multiple channels to anticipate and simulate their journey. It offers
end-to-end automation and real-time AI to drive insights around customer engagements.
Pega also provides a unified customer data repository, similarly built on Pega Infinity.
Gartner clients typically purchase Pega as an integrated solution combining marketing,
sales and service functionality.
Pega has introduced a range of tools to identify and maximize opportunities, aligning with
marketing’s focus on optimizing customer lifetime value. These include Scenario Planner,
which helps to evaluate the impact of potential changes to business rules or offer
eligibility, and 1:1 Operations Manager, which supports content and rules generation
across multiple lines of business. Pega has also introduced Customer Profile Designer to
help marketers turn customer behavioral data signals into actionable engagements.
Pega achieved good scores across all six of our critical capabilities. Its audience
management comes with strong privacy support, satisfying global enterprise marketers’
growing needs around consent, preference and permission management. Pega enables
marketers to encrypt their customer data in transit and at rest, and also provides removal
and audit functionality.

Across all four of our use cases, Pega achieved similarly strong ratings, scoring highest
for customer acquisition and customer retention/upsell. Pega dynamically manages
omnichannel personalized conversations through the entire customer life cycle, from offer
design to offer fulfillment. It focuses on next-best-action recommendations to support the
conversion to sales. It continuously learns and adapts to every customer in real time,
across all channels, including paid and mobile. These functions include proactive cross-
sell, upsell, and retention opportunities for customers, and coordination of the prospect
experience across inbound and outbound channels.
Pega Customer Decision Hub is suitable for very large companies that need to process
high volumes of detailed customer inquiries. Its model-based approach is designed to
serve industries with frequent changes in high-complexity processes, such as healthcare,
insurance and financial services.
Salesforce
Salesforce’s Pardot consists of support for lead management, ABM and multichannel
marketing, with a focus on aligning marketing and sales. Salesforce packages Pardot’s
functionality into four editions: Growth, Plus, Advanced and Premium. The Advanced
edition adds Salesforce Einstein AI for attribution, predictive lead scoring and behavior
scoring, while Pardot’s latest Premium edition includes predictive recommendations
through B2B Marketing Analytics Plus. Pardot is known for its tight integrations to
Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, industry clouds and Salesforce Marketing Cloud
modules such as Interaction Studio, Advertising Studio, Social Studio and Datorama.
Salesforce recently released features that deepen alignment between marketing and sales,
and continues its focus on increasing support for ABM programs. New functionality
includes the ability to add accounts as campaign members and add prospects to a list
directly from CRM, as well as Einstein Key Account Identification and Send Time
Optimization. Salesforce plans to continue investing in account-based experience
functionality, including deeper targeting, leveraging third-party engagement and extending
Einstein Attribution to account-based attribution.

Pardot received its highest critical capabilities score for analytics and measurement,
scoring highest across vendors evaluated in this research. Using B2B Marketing Analytics
Plus, built on Tableau Software, ABM marketers have access to a preconfigured account
dashboard, which allows them to see predicted pipeline by account, stage value by
account, sales activity and reach within accounts. Marketers are also able to click through
dashboards to customize reports and views and easily share reports to groups or
individuals. Due to its tight integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud and lack of integration
with other SFA tools, Pardot received its lowest critical capabilities score for integrations
with other applications.
Pardot ranked among the top four vendors across all four use cases. It achieved its
highest use case rating for customer retention and upsell. Utilizing scores and insights
from Einstein for Marketing, marketers have visibility into purchase history, which enables
them to target key accounts for cross-sell and upsell efforts. Leveraging Einstein Key
Account Identification helps marketers identify the accounts with a higher propensity to
purchase. Using Pardot’s Campaign Insights, B2B marketers can better understand what
factors drive upsell/cross-sell campaign performance. Salesforce has added a Slack
integration enabling marketing and sales teams to collaborate based on campaign
insights and workflow notifications.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM’s Sugar Market offers marketing automation functionality and is part of the
wider SugarCRM suite incorporating sales force and service automation. Sugar Market is
known for its cost-effectiveness and transparent pricing that make it attractive for budget-
conscious organizations. It also offers streamlined packaging requiring few add-ons. The
main increment on Sugar Market pricing is support for additional contacts.
SugarCRM acquired Node.io in 2020 to provide advanced AI capabilities and analytics, an

area where it previously lagged other vendors in this market. Upgrades included
SugarPredict, an AI engine that continually monitors customer data to give AI-driven
recommendations that assist with reliable lead qualification and prioritization. SugarCRM
has also invested significantly in its platform with the release of Sugar Integrate, which
provides an integration platform as a service (iPaaS). In common with other larger
vendors, SugarCRM now has a broad multiapplication suite (with the exception of
commerce functionality), a small but growing ecosystem of ISVs, and a platform on
which the company and its partners can develop additional functions. SugarCRM’s
roadmap includes a more consistent interface to remove the issues introduced by multiple
acquisitions. The company also plans to introduce additional out-of-the-box event
management.

Sugar Market received its highest critical capabilities score for integration with other
applications, tying for the highest score across vendors evaluated in this research. It
leverages integrations with several leading SFA solutions that came with the Salesfusion
acquisition. Sugar Market also has integrations with many leading commerce, DAM, ABM,
meeting and contact center solutions. These broad integrations make Sugar Market and
other parts of its suite viable for companies with more complex martech stacks. It
received good scores for the other categories. A core feature not provided natively is the
ability to post to social marketing platforms, which requires the use of Oktopost. The lack
of programmatic display advertising, the fact the customer journey manager still uses a
third-party plug-in and lack of multitouch attribution reduced its scores across several
capabilities and diminishes its suitability for more complex use cases and sophisticated
marketers.
Sugar Market achieved consistent ratings across all four use cases, scoring highest for
lead nurturing, which speaks to the platform’s ability to use triggers for automated
campaigns. Customer journeys can utilize predictive algorithms to score and route leads
and also enable marketers to target accounts in support of ABM programs. Sugar Market
also stands out for its support for multiple lead scoring models and the ability to blend
rules and AI in the models. It offers built-in A/B testing functionality and has an attractive
UI that enhances the platform’s ease of use and appeal to marketers.
Zoho
Zoho’s marketing automation platform is a component of its Marketing Plus suite, as well
as its larger CRM Plus suite of products, and provides marketers with the ability to create
consistent experiences across the customer life cycle. The marketing suite offers a
simplified platform featuring multichannel content management, campaign orchestration,
privacy management and analytics. Zoho supports a full range of demand-generation
activities, which allows marketers to engage with prospects on the platform or medium
most likely to see a conversion. The customer journey builder features conditional
branching rules, enabling users to map and score the possible paths customers can take
as they move through the sales funnel.
Zoho has rolled out enhancements to its platform with automation and AI functions that
can suggest workflow activities, enrich and autopopulate customer data, recommend
products for customers and predict the likelihood of winning a deal. It has also extended
support for additional web and chat channels and increased options for website
personalization. AI-based tools and automation dominate the roadmap of features
designed to continue simplifying the workload of marketers while improving their results.

Zoho received a good rating on five out of six of our capabilities. Both the lead scoring
and lead workflow capabilities provide standard functionality with default templates that
are easily updated and configured to a marketer’s need. It received its lowest critical
capabilities score for integration with other applications, scoring below average compared
to other vendors. Beyond the Zoho marketing automation platform’s limited integration
partners, the marketing automation solution is designed as a component of the
company’s larger CRM suite. As such, it relies on the integrated SFA module for basic lead
management functionality.
Zoho received consistent ratings across all four use cases, driven by the simplicity of the
platform and its incorporation of automation features. Zoho reduces the manual
processes and allows a customized experience at both the user level and the organization
level. It gathers key data from across all touchpoints to simplify segmenting leads and
accounts, Once segmented, the prospects can be targeted with personalized multichannel
campaigns based on behavior, preferences and demographic data in prebuilt or custom
journeys. Overall, it ranked in the bottom quarter among all vendors evaluated in this
research.
Context
This research is an assessment of vendor capabilities at a point in time. The vendors
included here, their offerings and the market will continue to evolve. To that end, avoid
using this research in isolation as a tool for vendor and product selection. Rather, when
making specific tool selection decisions, use it alongside our companion Magic Quadrant
for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, related B2B marketing research and our analyst
inquiry service. Digital marketing leaders should also leverage proofs-of-concept from
potential B2B automation platform providers to gain a better understanding of how the
solution might fit their needs and current martech ecosystem (see How to Use POCs to
Accelerate Expansion or Acquisition of Martech).
The critical capabilities featured in this research represent core functionality that
contributes to successful B2B marketing execution, whereas the use cases represent
scenarios in which such differentiated functionalities play a critical role. The Critical
Capabilities methodology factors in a range of criteria in determining product capabilities,
as shown in the Critical Capabilities Definition, Inclusion Criteria and Methodology
sections.

Product/Service Class Definition
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 with 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 those with complex, indirect
sales processes (B2B2C).
Critical Capabilities Definition

Audience Management
The creation of persistent and unique customer and account profiles and making them
available for segmentation and activation by the B2B marketing automation solution.
Includes the ability to onboard lead and account data from multiple sources and systems,
such as marketing, sales, data management and digital commerce systems. Audience
management comprises integrated data cleansing to eliminate incomplete, redundant or
duplicative lead information, or to associate valid data with known customer profiles,
based on criteria set by the end-user organization. It also includes the ability to enrich
leads and accounts with value-added third-party information in real time or at time of
entry and in batch. Examples include firmographic, intent and technographic data.
Audience management entails support for ABM-specific functions such as matching

leads to accounts and maintaining distinct records for individuals and accounts. Also
included are the ability to collect and build firmographic, demographic and behavioral
history for qualified and unqualified accounts as they mature through the lead
management process.
It requires flexible data structures, prebuilt integrations with other systems, and a
marketer-friendly interface to easily add new data elements and quickly resolve conflicting
data. Functions may extend to consent and preference management and auditing.

Lead Scoring/Qualification
The creation of multiple lead qualification and scoring processes using business rules
and/or machine learning, including account and engagement scoring to support account-
based marketing.
Scoring models may be based on a variety of criteria, such as a campaign engagement

(email open or webinar attendance, for example), product ownership or usage, ideal
customer profile, lead data fields, estimated customer value, opportunity value or seasonal
criteria. Emphasis is given to systems that can support and manage multiple lead
qualification and scoring processes simultaneously.
Lead Workflow
The creation and execution of multiple lead management workflows, helping

organizations manage the lead life cycle from collection to conversion and
retention/upsell, using a graphical interface suitable for nontechnical users.
It includes support for lead workflows and processes specific to ABM, in parallel to those
supporting individual contacts. Lead workflow functionality dynamically routes leads
and/or accounts through scoring, qualification, nurture, augmentation and distribution
processes, based on criteria such as geography, estimated lifetime value and the status of
prior process steps. These criteria can be set by business rules and/or determined by ML-
based predictive models. Vendors should be able to pass qualified leads to a sales force
automation (SFA) system, call/contact center application, sales acceleration application
or digital commerce platform for sales execution.
Multichannel Lead Management
The ability to execute a single strategy across multiple channels or platforms, thus
maximizing opportunities to interact with and engage prospective and existing customers.
Vendors must be able to orchestrate at least three basic channels/endpoints and one
advanced channel/endpoint within the same campaign. Emphasis is given to native
channel support over direct connections with third-party applications, except where noted.
Basic channels/endpoints include:
■ Email marketing (creation, send and response tracking)
■ Web (landing pages, microsites and brand sites)

■ Organic social media marketing (on platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and
Facebook)
■ Online webinars (native fulfillment not required)
■ Direct mail marketing management (incorporation and management of direct mail

campaigns; native fulfillment not required)
Advanced channels/endpoints include:
■ Programmatic advertising/retargeting (including on social sites)
■ Conversational marketing apps (for example, Drift or Intercom)
■ Digital commerce sites
■ Video/interactive applications (for example, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube)
■ Tradeshows/seminars/events (virtual and/or in-person)
Analytics and Measurement
The ability to track, measure and report on strategic and operational KPIs to monitor and
guide revenue generation, including providing revenue guidance and insight based on
current lead and account volumes/quality.
Analytics and measurement capabilities also give organizations access to a set of

preconfigured, out-of-the-box reports and data visualization/dashboarding functions that
are appropriate for marketing and executive users. Reporting functions should extend to
account-level metrics to support ABM campaigns as well as access to reports on mobile
devices (via web and/or app) used by customer-facing sales teams.
Advanced analytics extends to AI-related technologies such as ML frameworks and native

support for predictive and/or prescriptive analytics and models. These support
automation of related marketing activities, such as journey design, content and next-best-
action recommendations and autonomous campaign optimization to maximize desired
marketing and business outcomes. Advanced functions may also enable customer
journey analytics (the ability to track and analyze the way customers and prospects use a
combination of available channels to interact with an organization over time); A/B testing;
and rule-based (first/last click) or algorithmic-based attribution modeling.

Integration With Other Applications
The ability to connect B2B marketing automation platforms to a broader technology

ecosystem.
It involves bidirectional integration with CRM/SFA applications, call/contact center

applications, sales acceleration technologies, digital commerce platforms and ABM
platforms.
This capability may also include connections with other adjacent systems such as event
marketing platforms to support virtual and/or in-person events, and web content
management and digital asset management platforms for tailoring and optimizing
customer and prospect interactions. In support of this capability, vendors may have
integration libraries/marketplaces and available APIs that enable marketing business
users to add new data sources and/or execution channels to their B2B marketing
automation solution.
Use Cases
Customer Acquisition
Coordination of marketing efforts in the pursuit of individual customers, leads and

enterprise accounts.
B2B marketing automation platforms leverage customer and account insights to create
effective, relevant marketing programs designed to capture demand.
Lead Nurturing
Harnessing best-in-class processes to qualify leads and accounts as they progress

through the sales funnel and their buying journey.
B2B marketing automation platforms sequence and time messages and/or recommended
actions, and coordinate channels targeted at both individual leads and enterprise
accounts.
Conversion to Sales
Choreographing of elements such as content, tasks and people in both marketing and
sales to drive leads and accounts toward a successful close.

Customer Retention/Upsell
Optimizing ongoing campaigns to increase customer retention and improve an

organization’s ability to upsell or cross-sell existing accounts.
B2B marketing automation platforms harness customer and account engagement and
purchase history to upsell customers and increase retention.
Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Critical Capabilities as markets change. As
a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Critical Capabilities may change
over time. A vendor’s appearance in a Critical Capabilities one year and not the next does
not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a
reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a
change of focus by that vendor.
Added
The following vendor was added to this Critical Capabilities and its companion Magic
Quadrant based on the relevance of its offerings to the B2B marketing automation
category and the frequency with which Gartner clients have raised questions about its
capabilities in the past year:
■ BSI
Dropped
The following vendors were dropped from this year’s Critical Capabilities and its
companion Magic Quadrant based on a combination of factors. These included shifts in
evaluation criteria that made some vendors’ solutions less relevant to the market, shifts in
vendor focus or strategy, and lack of consideration of certain solutions among
competitive offerings:
■ Acoustic
■ Resulticks
■ SAP

Inclusion Criteria
To be included in this Critical Capabilities research, vendors and products had to meet the
same inclusion criteria as the 2021 Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation
Platforms. The inclusion criteria represent the specific attributes that Gartner analysts
believe are necessary for inclusion in this research.
To qualify for inclusion, vendors needed to demonstrate that they met the following
criteria as of 30 April 2021:
■ Proven ability to deliver lead management functionality as defined below in the

Functionality section.
■ At least 20 customers using their B2B marketing automation solution(s).
■ A minimum of 12 new customers within the past 12 months (e.g., not new contracts
sold to an existing customer) that have successfully deployed the B2B marketing
automation solution in a production implementation. A successful deployment is
defined as being able to show production capability of more than one functionality
from the Functionality criteria listed below.
■ Demonstrated sales and customer support presence in a minimum of two of the

following four regions: North America, Latin America, EMEA, Asia/Pacific. Presence
is defined as regional coverage for three of the eight following industries:
■ High tech
■ Banking, financial services and insurance
■ Education
■ Healthcare (including providers, pharma and life sciences)
■ Manufacturing
■ Retail
■ Services
■ Transportation

■ Demonstrated business viability, for example, through three or more years of revenue
growth; outside funding, such as venture capital, private equity or other sources of
investment; or a reference list of successful customer implementations.
■ An ecosystem of partners that can provide technology extensions or services such

as system integration services, third-party applications, digital agency services or
consulting and implementation services for the above selected geographic areas.
■ At least $25 million in FY20 revenue from the B2B marketing automation solution
and enough cash on hand to fund a year of operations at the current rate of cash
depletion.
Functionality
Audience Management: Organizations seek to unify and synchronize their customer and
account data across multiple channels, devices and life cycle stages for orchestration of
lead workflows and engagement. Vendors should enable organizations to input,
synchronize, cleanse and activate their own first-party data while augmenting existing
contact data with third-party data sources. This functionality includes:
■ An ability to aggregate, store and segment unqualified leads from other marketing,
sales, data management and digital commerce systems.
■ Support for integrated data cleansing capabilities to eliminate incomplete, redundant

or duplicative lead information, or to associate valid data with known customer
profiles, based on criteria set by the end-user organization.
■ An ability to enrich leads and accounts with value-added information in real time or
at time of entry and in batch. Examples include firmographic, intent and
technographic data.
■ ABM-specific functions that are clearly labeled as such within your platform, such
as:
■ Matching leads to accounts.
■ Maintaining distinct records for individuals and accounts.
■ Collecting and building firmographic, demographic and behavioral history for

qualified and unqualified accounts as they mature through the lead
management process.

Lead Scoring/Qualification: The ability to create multiple lead qualification and scoring
processes using business rules and/or ML, including account and engagement scoring to
support ABM. Scoring may be based on criteria such as a campaign engagement (e.g.,
email open or webinar attendance), product ownership or usage, ideal customer profile,
lead data fields, estimated customer value, opportunity value, or seasonal criteria.
Emphasis is given to systems that can create and manage multiple lead and account
qualification and scoring processes simultaneously.
Lead Workflow: This functionality enables the creation and execution of multiple lead
management workflows, including those specific to ABM, helping organizations manage
the lead life cycle from collection to conversion and retention/upsell, using a graphical UI
suitable for nontechnical users. Lead workflow functionality dynamically routes leads
and/or accounts through scoring, qualification, nurture, augmentation and distribution
processes, based on criteria such as geography, estimated value and the status of prior
process steps. These criteria can be set by business rules and/or determined by ML-based
predictive models. Vendors should be able to pass qualified leads to an SFA system,
call/contact center application, sales acceleration application or digital commerce
platform for sales execution.
Multichannel Lead Management: The ability to execute a single strategy across multiple
channels or platforms, thus maximizing opportunities to interact with and engage
prospective and existing customers. Vendors must be able to orchestrate at least three
basic channels/endpoints and one advanced channel/endpoint within the same
campaign. Emphasis is given to native channel support over direct connections with third-
party applications, except where noted.
Basic channels/endpoints include:
■ Email marketing (creation, send and response tracking)
■ Web (landing pages, microsites and brand sites)
■ Organic social media marketing (on platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter and
Facebook)
■ Online webinars (native fulfillment not required)
■ Direct mail marketing management (incorporation and management of direct mail

campaigns; native fulfillment not required)
Advanced channels/endpoints include:

■ Programmatic advertising/retargeting (including on social platforms)
■ Conversational marketing apps (e.g., Drift, Intercom; native fulfillment not required)
■ Digital commerce sites
■ Video/interactive applications (e.g., Instagram, TikTok, YouTube; native fulfillment

not required)
■ Tradeshows/seminars/events (virtual and/or in-person)
Analytics and Measurement: Vendors must provide organizations with the 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. They must also give organizations access to a set of preconfigured, out-
of-the-box reports and data visualization/dashboarding capabilities appropriate for
marketing, sales and executive users. These should include account-level metrics to
support ABM campaigns that go beyond a roll-up of lead data as well as access to reports
on mobile devices (via web and/or app) used by customer-facing sales teams.
There is increasing market expectation that vendors will offer AI-related technologies such
as ML frameworks and support for predictive and/or prescriptive analytics and A/B
testing as natively embedded capabilities. Accordingly, vendors should support at least
one of the following advanced analytics functionalities:
■ Predictive analytics/modeling that support automation of other 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.
■ Attribution — rule-based or algorithmic; multitouch attribution.
■ Customer journey analytics — The ability to track and analyze the way customers
and prospects use a combination of available channels to interact with an
organization over time. It should cover the full scope of the lead management
process, including human interactions such as with a call center; digital marketing,
e.g., website, email and mobile app; customer service, e.g., live chat; and touchpoints
with a limited two-way interaction, e.g., display advertising.

Integration With Other Applications: The ability to support bidirectional integration with
CRM/SFA applications, call/contact center applications, sales acceleration technologies,
digital commerce platforms and ABM platforms.
Vendors must support integration with adjacent solutions in a minimum of two of the
following platform categories as a standard, documented capability:
■ CRM/SFA (including the ability to pass qualified leads on to a sales organization as

an automatic function of the lead management process)
■ Digital commerce
■ Web content management
■ Sales acceleration
■ ABM
We also look for vendors to have integration libraries/marketplaces that enable marketing
business users to add new data sources and/or execution channels to their B2B
marketing automation solution.

Table 1: Weighting for Critical Capabilities in Use Cases
(Enlarged table in Appendix)

Critical Capabilities Rating
Table 2: Product/Service Rating on Critical Capabilities

Table 3: Product Score in Use Cases

Acronym Key and Glossary Terms
ABM account-based marketing
AI artificial intelligence
B2B business to business
B2B2C business to business to consumer
B2C business to consumer
CDP customer data platform
CRM customer relationship management
ISV independent software vendor
KPI key performance indicator
ML machine learning
SFA sales force automation
SMB small and midsize business
UI user interface
Evidence
Gartner 2021 Digital Marketing Survey: The purpose of this survey was to understand
current and future digital marketing strategies. This includes where responsibilities lie,
current and anticipated challenges and responsibilities, how digital marketing strategies
were impacted by disruptive events, where marketers’ channel-specific investments and
initiatives are directed today, and what techniques they are using to support an effective
cross-channel and multichannel digital marketing strategy.
This study was conducted online from November through December 2020, among 350
respondents from:
■ U.S. (31%)
■ Canada (10%)
■ U.K. (30%)
■ Germany (14%)

■ France (14%)
Percentages don’t add up to 100% due to rounding.
Ninety percent of respondents came from organizations with $1 billion or more in annual
revenue. The respondents came from a variety of industries:
■ Financial services (40 respondents)
■ High tech (39 respondents)
■ Manufacturing (41 respondents)
■ Consumer products (41 respondents)
■ Media (42 respondents)
■ Retail (39 respondents)
■ Healthcare providers (42 respondents)
■ IT and business services (26 respondents)
■ Travel and hospitality (40 respondents).
Respondents were required to hold a leadership position in decisions related to digital

marketing strategy.
The survey was developed collaboratively by a team of Gartner analysts and was
reviewed, tested, and administered by Gartner’s Research Data and Analytics (RDA) team.
Disclaimer: Results of this survey do not represent global findings or the market as a
whole, but do reflect sentiments of the respondents and companies surveyed.
Gartner 2020 Marketing Technology Survey: The purpose of this study was to understand
how marketers are investing in, deploying and getting value out of marketing technology.
The research was conducted online from July through September 2020, among 387
respondents:
■ U.S. (54%)
■ Canada (3%)

■ France (6%)
■ Germany (8%)
■ U.K. (29%).
Respondents were required to be involved in decisions related to their company’s

marketing technology strategy. Eighty-five percent of the respondents came from
organizations with $1 billion or more in annual revenue.
The respondents came from a variety of industries:
■ Financial services (46 respondents)
■ Tech products (51 respondents)
■ Manufacturing (63 respondents)
■ Consumer products (27 respondents)
■ Media (40 respondents)
■ Retail (46 respondents)
■ Healthcare providers (48 respondents)
■ IT and business services (44 respondents)
■ Travel and hospitality (22 respondents)
The survey was developed collaboratively by a team of Gartner analysts and was
reviewed, tested, and administered by Gartner’s Research Data and Analytics (RDA) team.
Disclaimer: Results of this survey do not represent global findings or the market as a
whole, but do reflect sentiments of the respondents and companies surveyed.
Critical Capabilities Methodology

This methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class of
products or services. Each capability is then weighted in terms of its relative importance
for specific product or service use cases. Next, products/services are rated in terms of how
well they achieve each of the critical capabilities. A score that summarizes how well they
meet the critical capabilities for each use case is then calculated for each product/service.

"Critical capabilities" are attributes that differentiate products/services in a class in terms
of their quality and performance. Gartner recommends that users consider the set of
critical capabilities as some of the most important criteria for acquisition decisions.
In defining the product/service category for evaluation, the analyst first identifies the
leading uses for the products/services in this market. What needs are end-users looking to
fulfill, when considering products/services in this market? Use cases should match
common client deployment scenarios. These distinct client scenarios define the Use
Cases.
The analyst then identifies the critical capabilities. These capabilities are generalized
groups of features commonly required by this class of products/services. Each capability
is assigned a level of importance in fulfilling that particular need; some sets of features
are more important than others, depending on the use case being evaluated.
Each vendor’s product or service is evaluated in terms of how well it delivers each
capability, on a five-point scale. These ratings are displayed side-by-side for all vendors,
allowing easy comparisons between the different sets of features.
Ratings and summary scores range from 1.0 to 5.0:
1 = Poor or Absent: most or all defined requirements for a capability are not achieved
2 = Fair: some requirements are not achieved
3 = Good: meets requirements
4 = Excellent: meets or exceeds some requirements
5 = Outstanding: significantly exceeds requirements
To determine an overall score for each product in the use cases, the product ratings are
multiplied by the weightings to come up with the product score in use cases.
The critical capabilities Gartner has selected do not represent all capabilities for any
product; therefore, may not represent those most important for a specific use situation or
business objective. Clients should use a critical capabilities analysis as one of several
sources of input about a product before making a product/service decision.

Document Revision History
Critical Capabilities for CRM Lead Management - 13 August 2020
Critical Capabilities for CRM Lead Management - 24 October 2019
Critical Capabilities for CRM Lead Management - 3 October 2018
Recommended by the Authors

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.
How Products and Services Are Evaluated in Gartner Critical Capabilities
Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms

Maturity Model for Managing Marketing Technology
How to Use POCs to Accelerate Expansion or Acquisition of Martech
How to Measure a Digital Marketing Campaign

Best Practices to Improve Martech Utilization
© 2021 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of
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without Gartner's prior written permission. It consists of the opinions of Gartner's research
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this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, Gartner disclaims all warranties
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should not be construed or used as such. Your access and use of this publication are governed by
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research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from any
third party. For further information, see "Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity."

Table 1: Weighting for Critical Capabilities in Use Cases
Customer
Critical Capabilities Customer Acquisition Lead Nurturing Conversion to Sales
Retention/Upsell
Audience Management 35% 27% 18% 25%
Lead Scoring/Qualification 12% 13% 20% 15%
Lead Workflow 11% 14% 20% 10%
Multichannel Lead 20% 28% 20% 18%

Management
Analytics and Measurement 15% 10% 18% 25%
Integration With Other 7% 8% 4% 7%

Applications
As of 6 August 2021
Gartner, Inc. | G00734608 Page 1A of 3A

Table 2: Product/Service Rating on Critical Capabilities
Freshworks
SugarCRM
Salesforce
CRMNEXT
Microsoft
HubSpot
Critical
Creatio
Act-On
Adobe
Oracle
Zoho
Pega
Capabilities
BSI
Audience 3.0 3.5 2.5 3.5 3.5 3.0 3.0 3.5 3.5 3.5 3.5 3.0 3.0
Management
Lead 2.5 4.0 3.0 4.0 3.5 3.0 3.0 3.0 3.5 3.0 3.5 3.0 3.0
Scoring/Quali
fication
Lead 3.0 3.0 2.5 3.5 3.5 2.5 3.5 3.0 3.5 3.5 3.5 3.0 3.0
Workflow
Multichannel 3.5 3.5 3.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 3.5 3.5 3.5 3.0 3.5 3.0 3.0
Lead
Management
Analytics and 3.0 3.5 3.0 3.0 3.5 2.0 3.5 3.0 3.5 3.5 4.0 3.0 3.0
Measurement
Integration 2.5 4.0 2.5 3.5 2.5 2.0 3.5 2.5 4.0 3.5 3.0 4.0 2.5
With Other
Applications
As of 6 August 2021

Table 3: Product Score in Use Cases
Freshworks
SugarCRM
Salesforce
CRMNEXT
Microsoft
HubSpot
Creatio
Act-On
Adobe
Oracle
Zoho
Pega
Use Cases
BSI
Customer 3.01 3.54 2.74 3.49 3.33 2.63 3.27 3.24 3.54 3.34 3.54 3.07 2.97
Acquisition
Lead 3.04 3.54 2.76 3.52 3.28 2.61 3.30 3.24 3.54 3.30 3.51 3.08 2.96
Nurturing
Conversion to 2.98 3.52 2.79 3.51 3.36 2.58 3.31 3.17 3.52 3.30 3.57 3.04 2.98
Sales
Customer 2.98 3.56 2.79 3.45 3.34 2.54 3.30 3.18 3.54 3.34 3.59 3.07 2.97
Retention/Up
sell
As of 6 August 2021

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Critical Capabilities for B2B Marketing Automation

B2B marketing automation platforms help organizations to create,

This Critical Capabilities is related to other research:

Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms

■ Marketing teams need increased agility to adapt to changing customer expectations

■ Currently, 79% of marketing organizations report already having a B2B marketing

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Drive alignment with other organization stakeholders around common demand

Strategic Planning Assumption(s)

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Paralleling developments among more B2C-focused multichannel marketing hubs, B2B

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Source: Gartner (September 2021)

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Source: Gartner (September 2021)

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Source: Gartner (September 2021)

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Source: Gartner (September 2021)

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Act-On’s marketing automation software is focused on growth marketing for B2B

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Adobe supports sophisticated B2B multichannel lead management programs through

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Marketing Creatio provides marketers with comprehensive audience management,

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Audience management, lead scoring/qualiﬁcation, lead workﬂow and analytics and

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Dynamics 365 Marketing consists of comprehensive multichannel lead management

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Oracle’s Eloqua Marketing Automation solution consists of a B2B marketing automation

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SugarCRM acquired Node.io in 2020 to provide advanced AI capabilities and analytics, an

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