London, March 5, 2024 – Market research and strategic consulting firm PAC presents its PAC INNOVATION RADAR “Salesforce-related Services in Europe 2024”, which is designed to help Salesforce clients and prospects in the region identify the right services partner for the needs of their business.
PAC has evaluated the leading IT services partners of Salesforce in Europe across the company’s six most important industry sectors. The report covers a diverse set of consulting and systems integrator companies, from global IT services powerhouses, business consultancies, digital agencies, and regional specialists. The assessment evaluates their overall Salesforce delivery capabilities – as well as separate assessments for their industry domain capabilities within the following industries: communications & media; energy & utilities; financial services; manufacturing; public sector; and retail.
Salesforce continues to be one of the fastest-growing platform providers in Europe, and the region has consistently ranked as one of the company’s best-performing territories. At the heart of this growth has been the company’s partner ecosystem, which plays a critical role in providing advisory, implementation and managed services around the vendor’s evolving technology stack.
The key trend that is reshaping the partner community is the need to adapt these services to deliver the business outcomes that will give the client the greatest value. Being able to provide top-level Salesforce technical skills remains a valuable proposition, but clients are increasingly looking for partners that can help them harness Salesforce in a way that transforms and enhances critical areas of their business.
“Salesforce has been working closely with its ecosystem in Europe to help it better address the technical and business challenges specific to different industries. This study showcases the progress that its leading partners have made in building propositions and delivering engagements that are truly geared to transforming the most critical processes and areas of different vertical markets,” says Nick Mayes, Principal Analyst at PAC and Lead Analyst of this PAC INNOVATION RADAR.
Business Outcomes, Not Resourcing
PAC estimates that three quarters of large Salesforce projects now require the services provider to have industry domain-specific knowledge or experience or in working their vertical market. The most successful services partners currently operating in Europe are those that have developed the skills, assets, and propositions that enable them to deploy Salesforce to drive the right business outcomes, rather than taking a resourcing-centric approach.
To highlight a couple of examples of enterprises that encapsulate this market dynamic, Reply continues to rank as an important partner for Salesforce across multiple industry sectors. The company is at the forefront of exploring the potential of Generative AI and has been one of the first partners to implement innovative Salesforce GPT applications to support the needs of different industry sectors.
This is the second iteration of the RADAR study and one of the key takeaways from the latest view is the increasing rise to prominence of global consulting firms such as PwC, which are building Salesforce practices designed to support the needs of their core industry sectors. PwC has developed multiple domain-specific offerings based on Salesforce including a Customer Vehicle Intelligence Platform for the automotive sector, and a solution based on the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud to help client relationship managers gain a better view of customer behaviour and books of business.
Another notable dynamic in the latest study is the rise of digital agency specialists such as Merkle, which have doubled-down on their ability to enable clients to harness the full potential of Salesforce. Merkle has developed a very strong position across multiple industry sectors, including retail, where it has helped many brands leverage Salesforce to drive major improvements in retention and loyalty to deliver more connected customer experiences. Merkle also works with clients to tackle critical underlying issues such as siloed data, disconnected processes, legacy technology and integrated channel activation, to help them take full advantage of the Salesforce platform and drive towards client outcomes.
Other notable vendors covered in the analysis include Eviden, which has carved out a leadership position in several sectors in developing industry-specific Salesforce solutions, including the public sector, which is one of Salesforce’s fastest-growing markets in the region.
More information on the PAC INNOVATION RADAR “Salesforce-Related Services in Europe 2022”