Who Ranked #1 for Most Connected CRM?
Which CRM systems are better at connecting to external data? We took a look under the hood of leading CRMs to analyze and rank their connectivity capabilities.
Not all CRM systems are alike when it comes to connectivity capabilities with external systems. More and more, businesses evaluating a CRM system want to know how well it will integrate into their existing operational and data analytics systems. CRM vendors that deliver a seamless, data-driven experience for their customers will win.
To find out which CRMs are better “connected,” we analyzed and ranked the leading vendors in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation in our latest whitepaper: Progress Global Connected CRM Leaders.
Support for Open Standards Is Key to a Seamless Data Experience
As a vendor-neutral software vendor that provides standard connectors across popular CRMs, Progress has a unique “under-the-hood” perspective. This enables us to explore the longer-term costs of delivering a data-driven CRM experience.
We believe that supporting open data standards will be a major key to future-proofing CRM investments and providing a seamless experience with any data source. That’s why CRM providers that offer better connectivity capabilities with open standards ranked higher in our analysis.
“A lot of M&A as well as in-house development and partnerships will fuel more data-powered CRM announcements in 2017. The key, of course, is seeing which providers provide the most seamless and most sensible use cases out of the box for their customers.”
Martin Schneider
Vice President of Corporate Communications
SugarCRM
Connectivity Criteria
Our findings on which CRMs are considered connected are based on:
- Support for open data access standards
- How the system accesses and consumes external data
- Effort required to develop a standard connector for third parties
- Effort required to maintain a standard connector for third parties
- Architecture style for integration and connectivity
We also looked at the results of our 2016 data connectivity survey to see which cloud-based CRMs the survey respondents have adopted or developed integration for.
With the explosion of disruptive data sources and the push for data-driven decisions, CRM customers badly need out-of-the-box connectivity. It will be interesting to see in 2017 who will win the race for providing the best experience for accessing external data sources.
Ready to find out who ranked #1?
This content originally appeared on the Progress blog. Looking for more great stories about technology and building tomorrow’s business apps? Check out the blog for more.
