Research Outline

Sales and Marketing Software Investment

Goals

To assess the market capitalization of sales and marketing software vendors in the US, which consists of both public and private businesses; and to assess the total private investment into both public and private companies in the US sales and marketing software market.

Early Findings

  • According to BCG, the top 20 global value creators in the enterprise software market held a market capitalization of approximately $1.9 trillion in 2018. Among the top 15 value creators, 12 of them were US companies, representing 80% of the market capitalization.
  • In the enterprise or business software market, sales and marketing products are among the top growth drivers and the US market is perceived to be the largest market in the world.
  • While cloud and digital marketing are expected to be the main components of the sales and marketing software segment, emerging and innovation-driven technologies, such as AI and blockchain, are expected to see increasing share in private investment. Between 2014 and 2018, the amount of private investment for funding new startups in enterprise software increased from $62 billion to $145 billion. Within these investments, the amount devoted to sales and marketing software declined from 18% ($11.16 billion) to 10% (14.5 billion).
  • Although there was an increasing trend of investment in new startups in emerging markets between 2014 and 2018, such as China and India, there was also an indication that the trend was cooling down over the past two years.
  • Within the US sales and marketing software market, some subsegments are expected to see noticeable growth opportunities or dominant revenue market share in the future, namely digital marketing software, marketing automation software, email marketing software, sales enablement platform, and sales intelligence software. According to recent market research reports, the US technology vendors are expected to have the dominant market share in these markets.
  • The market capitalization of Salesforce, one of the leading, global sales and marketing software vendors, reached 225.54 billion on October 2, 2020. On the same day, Adobe (now owns Marketo)'s market capitalization reached $229.78 billion.

Summary of Early Findings

  • Due to limited publicly available information, we found the market capitalization value for a group of 15-20 large companies in the enterprise or business software market. We could not locate information on the total market capitalization value for sales and marketing software vendors.
  • In terms of private investment, such as venture capital and private equity, there are only some statistics on the global market, regarding sales and marketing software. These data cover the global market and are driven by new startup businesses, hence we could not locate information on private investment in the US market for all types of companies.
  • Early findings could indicate the maximal level of private investment in new startups in the US sales and marketing software market.
  • Further research focuses on the leading technology vendors in the above-mentioned subsegments of the US sales and marketing software market; estimating their market shares, revenues and/or market valuation multiples, which are used to calculate their market capitalization values.
  • We also continue to research the private investment values in sales and marketing companies, such as new startups, private and public companies, however, this information is expected to be limited.