Forrester Focuses The Lens On Industry-Specific CRM Solutions

Enterprises are rapidly adopting industry-specific CRM. They are leaning into the promises to speed transitions to the cloud, to modernize the front office, and to enable enterprises to focus talent on creating brand differentiation. According to data and analytics decision-makers at enterprises from Forrester’s Data And Analytics Survey, 2022, the business priorities most frequently identified as high or critical priorities for the next 12 months include improving products and services and improving the experience of customers by improving the ability to innovate. My recently published report, The Industry-Specific CRM Landscape, Q4 2022, will help you navigate this fast-developing vendor landscape.

Industry-specific CRM is an established market. This market continues to evolve and has the potential to meet larger customer demand as well as new entrants focused on targeting small to midsize deployments. Here are dynamics that you should pay attention to when faced with numerous vendor options:

• Main trend. The evolution toward vertical-focused CRM has been able to address the needs of the market by creating solutions geared for rapid adoption and time to value.
• Primary challenge. This product is inherently more complex and expensive due to its architecture being built on top of horizontal CRM. Ensure that you are getting a high-value, industry-specific CRM with options for customization, automation, and support for custom fields that align to your company.
• Top disruptor. The adoption of modern, industry-specific CRM is increasingly driven by back-office moderation. To really advance, you will need to go further than industry-specific CRM.

In this report, we identified 15 vendors that provide solutions in five use cases: healthcare CRM, retail and CPG CRM, financial services CRM, manufacturing CRM, and communications and utilities CRM. We segmented them into three market presence segments: large, midsize, and small. We identified the type of offering and vendor focus by use case for each vendor we surveyed. In the report, you will learn more on how to work with these vendors and where I see the market going next.

To learn more details about these industry-specific CRM vendors, Forrester clients can read the full report here.