Its only a couple of weeks away from CRM conference season – Oracle’s Cloud World is in Las Vegas from September 9-12; Salesforce’s Dreamforce is in San Francisco from September 17-19; Hubspot’s Inbound is in Boston from September 18-20 to name a few of the upcoming events. I’m excited to hear about all the new innovations that vendors will be releasing – new AI scenarios, decision tools to help with LLM choice, easier ways to do prompt engineering. Yet, I am also hearing that many organizations can’t keep up with all these innovations. I will be on the lookout to understand how gen AI is getting real traction in organizations beyond simple (and safe) use cases; and how organizations scale their efforts up beyond small pilots.
Top CRM Trends
These events will also be a pressure test for Forrester’s CRM trends report. Some of the trend highlights include:
- More heat on industry CRMs. They speed time to value, fuel innovation and market differentiation. Our data shows that 61%of global business and technology professionals say their firm wants to increase their industry clouds in 2024. Salesforce rolled out a new Life Sciences Cloud this summer. I expect vendors to announce new industry clouds, industry-specific LLMs and new verticalized go to market approaches at their events.
- Data strategies and data clouds. Customer data is still locked in operational silos, making it hard to create a customer 360. Data clouds can solve this problem. And they can also enrich customer data and make it usable to every organization. I expect all vendors to lean into their data strategies and highlight customers that use data clouds beyond marketing and personalization scenarios.
- AI Agents. Conversational AI-powered bots now replace deterministic chatbots. And, vendors will go a step further and create AI agents which combine process management and gen-AI conversational responses. These will be used to help automate job functions like sales development and Tier 1 customer service agents. Early versions have already been released and I expect all vendors to highlight customer stories at their events.
- Blurring of functions in CRM. Customer journeys, enabled by CRM span many organizational silos. As a result, vendors extend CRM into adjacent areas to support for example revenue operations, asset management and RMA processes. I expect vendors to announce their support more of these end to end flows – often with an industry layer to them.
- New pricing models. CRM is expensive and it takes a long time for deployments to generate value. Some vendors now bundle more products together in a single seat-based license; others offer “customer choice” for pricing – seat-based, consumption or outcome. Others pivot to product-led growth (PLG) motions . I expect to see new commercial models that combine seat-based and consumption based pricing together to address the growing impact of AI in CRM.
Once the fall conference season is over, I’ll report back on my observations. Stay tuned! Read our CRM trends report for more information about these topics, and connect with me over inquiry.
