Gartner Names SAP a Leader in 2020 Magic Quadrant for Sales Performance Management

Reprinted from the Gartner Published 18 February 2020

Gartner’s view of the sales performance management (SPM) market is focused on transformational technologies or approaches that are delivering on the future needs of end users. It is not focused on the market as it is today.

 SAP is positioned in the Leaders quadrant. Its SPM offering, SAP Sales Cloud, is deployed as SaaS only. SAP offers all the core SPM functionalities, including ICM and territory and quota management. It also offers other near-core functionalities such as gamification, quota and territory planning, and advanced analytics.

SAP has opened its APIs to be public facing and continues to innovate after the acquisition of CallidusCloud in 2018. It has a broad product offering that is complementary to SPM, including revenue management, CPQ and sales force automation (SFA). SAP Sales Cloud suits a range of buyers, from midmarket companies to large enterprises with global deployments. It is one of only a few vendors with proven abilities to handle complex compensation for the large enterprise with large transaction volume.

SAP has completed the migration of the CallidusCloud Commissions product to SAP HANA and has improved its ability to process compensation quickly.

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Sales Performance Management
A Leader 6x Running in Gartner's SPM Magic Quadrant
Strengths
  • Product strategy: SAP has a broad range of offerings related to SPM. It has seamless integration of hierarchy management and payment processing with SAP SuccessFactors. It has vertical products for insurance, telco and mulitlevel marketing. Through its Sales Cloud Analytics, sold separately, SAP delivers predictive and prescriptive analytics with no coding.
  • Business Model: SAP employs direct sellers, portfolio SAP sellers and an entire network of third-party value-added resellers such as Accenture and OpenSymmetry. It continues to experience healthy year-over-year growth. SAP maintains the largest payee base of all vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Product: Customer references noted the flexibility of SAP’s ICM, saying that it was easy to administer, had great flexibility in rule creation, and was good for organizations with complex structures and rules.
Cautions
  • Implementation partners: Customer references mentioned issues with some partner-led deployments, saying that they needed to bring SAP resources in to fix or restart the implementation for successful completion.
  • Pricing: SAP has one of the highest list prices for its SPM bundle of all vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Some customers have found contract negotiations difficult and SAP sales reps lacking knowledge about the product offering for SPM.
  • Business model: SAP delivers the SPM product as a set of modules. There are separate modules for commissions, territory and quota, and advanced analytics. Buyers must understand which modules they will need to meet all their requirements to include them all in the purchase decision.