Oracle Seeks to Unseat Salesforce as CRM King

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Salesforce has a huge target on its back as the global CRM software leader. With a 23.8% market share in 2021, the company has repeatedly staved off the competition for years. However, its latest challenger appears to have an edge in regard to the technology it leverages.

Oracle is geared to release Fusion Sales, a CRM and sales platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate tasks, identify viable sales opportunities, and increase productivity. With this, the software giant has dubbed it “the future of CRM.”

Oracle Fusion Sales builds on the sales forecasting features and robust integrations of traditional CRM platforms. Besides the aforesaid capabilities, it leverages AI to help sales teams plan campaigns, identify the most suitable leads to target, and manage sales initiatives alongside advertising, campaign management, and sales orchestration. In addition, Oracle asserts that the new platform automates tasks that sellers loathe the most.

In developing Fusion Sales, Oracle conducted a survey whose results serve as a basis for its CRM platform’s competencies. According to the report, 33% of sellers struggle to reach their sales targets. The possible stumbling blocks include wasting too much time working with various technologies (39%) and dealing with laborious manual tasks (27%). Moreover, 59% of sellers believe that their company does not have sufficient sales processes and technologies to help them meet their goals.

As for the requested sales and CRM features, new CRM software statistics reveal that tools for automating data entry and generic tasks, with a share of 78%, were the most coveted by sellers, followed by shared content recommendations to customers (74%), recommendation of workflow succeeding steps (73%), and tools for automatically qualifying leads (67%).

As a result, Oracle developed Fusion Sales with these in mind and innovated new solutions.

Going for the Crown

Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president and GM of the company’s Fusion Cloud Customer Experience, recognizes that Oracle is “not the largest provider of CRM tools,” a title that belongs to Salesforce. However, he believes that if Oracle continues innovations as it did with Fusion Sales, the company can “raise the bar for the rest of the industry,” including the market leader.

Oracle is confident that its new CRM platform is a game changer, and its adept use of AI and ML supports this claim. Recent figures show that 65% of sales groups will eventually move from intuition-based initiatives to data-driven ones centered on powerful analytics and intuitive workflow creation and streamlining.

Oracle Fusion Sales appears to be a trigger of this trend with its remarkable capabilities. Salesforce also leverages AI and ML but is not as mature as what was adopted by Fusion Sales, according to Oracle. In fact, a PR representative of the company even mentioned that Oracle’s CRM software “stomps all over Salesforce’s territory.”

It’s too early to tell if Oracle will indeed challenge Salesforce for the CRM crown. At the end of the day, Salesforce holds a commanding share of the market and has made a habit of acquiring software enterprises whose technologies expand its platform’s capabilities like Slack and Tableau. It could eventually replicate or even improve on what Oracle Fusion Sales has in store. What Oracle can do now is promote its product to the moon before Salesforce can react and try to gain a significant slice of the CRM pie.