Sixth annual report unveils top vendors and key trends among sales and marketing software solutions
In an increasingly competitive environment to break through the noise and bring on new customers, IT budgets are rising – with businesses bringing on new tools that enable them to work smarter and more efficiently. This includes software for sales and marketing efforts. At G2, we know there are a number of solutions to help sales, marketing, and customer success teams. But, it can be difficult to know which are the best tools for your tech stack.
That’s why we’ve partnered with Bowery Capital on an annual Software Sales Stack Report. The report, now in its sixth year, tracks and identifies the top software tools for startup sales organizations. It aims to serve as a guiding framework for anyone evaluating sales solutions – including those across sales, marketing, customer success, or management – looking to utilize software to optimize customer acquisition or management processes.
In the 2021 report, released today, Bowery Capital updated the selection of software categories with feedback from the sales, marketing, and customer success community as well as further integrating remote work trends. Like past years, this report relies on unique, verified second-party data from the G2 reviews platform.
Based on an analysis of over 5,000 sales technology vendors, key takeaways of the latest edition of the report include:
- Vendor consolidation was one of the strongest trends in 2021, and it will continue. Large, novel companies are evolving their tech stacks to more categories than ever. Some notable companies that have emerged as top players in multiple categories are HubSpot(7), Outreach (3), PandaDoc (3), and Groove (3).
- This has been a dominant year for HubSpot, a top player in seven different categories. The software also emerged as the #1 ranked tool in four of them: Sales Analytics, Sales Performance Management, Email Tracking, and Sales Engagement.
- Good news for Marketing Automation providers: users are content with their current tools. This category displays one of the highest overall satisfaction ratings among top companies in the space, with an average 95.4.
- Large, well established companies continue to dominate the CRM space, which indicates that this is a much more mature category than others. In addition, many of these CRM leaders offer complimentary sales tools.
- Proposal Tools used to help sales or partnerships have made major advancements since last year with the leading companies making gains in every category: overall satisfaction, ease of use, ease of setup, and quality of support.
- Bowery Capital observed a spike in VC investment (>43% YoY growth) into AI and ML technologies which are continuing to advance the frontier of sales tools in all of our analyzed categories. Companies that are able to adopt and build on this technology will have an advantage in their respective markets.
The report highlights several categories, including email template builders, proposal / RFP tools, contract management, sales coaching, email tracking and more. Download the complete 2021 Startup Sales Stack Report from Bowery Capital and G2.
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by Anna Charity