Today's customer no longer want, or have to, go through a predetermined sales process that is determined by the seller. Customers today have much more choice and power than ever before.As a consequence, research from Sales Executive Council states that 57% of buying process occurs before a potential customer first engages with a sales rep. A buyer does research on the Web, leverages their business social network and online communities to get guidance and the inside scoop on how to address their challenges. Ultimately, while the customer still needs to complete their own traditional activities to make a decision; the way they do it, moving forwards and backwards through buying process, engaging socially, is different than ever before.It is therefore crucial salespeople have the tools that deliver the insight needed to quickly establish an understanding of who the customers is, what their distinct pain points are and what is possibly driving them and their organizations decision making process.
Yet, sales force automation or CRM tools that are in use today are designed on the traditional CRM paradigm, and weren’t designed for how salespeople need to sell today. Instead, they were designed to provide management visibility and to control sales behavior. CSO Insights reports 74% of sales organizations have poor SFA adoption. So we need a tool that Salespeople will use, a tool to help them better understand their customers, have more meaningful interactions, and ultimately drive more revenue.
Looking at a typical sales reps calendar gives us initial insight as to why a new approach to CRM for sales is needed. Without the right tools, we as sales people spend on average 65% of our time NOT selling. The red and orange activities are customer interactions. Everything else is the time we spend on other non-customer facing activities.
And we can’t afford to waste time. Although existing sales methodologies provide a process and framework, they don’t address the non-structured activities that consume a large chunk of a salesperson’s day, which includes activities such asFinding the right customer contacts & people in my social network who can provide a warm introduction Learning my prospect’s personal preferences, what he cares about, what’s being said about his company that impacts his organization?Searching my own organization for the right experts who know my customers’ industries, or other salespeople who have won with customers similar to mineSearching for relevant presentation, product information, competitive reports that will help me communicate unique value to each of my customersCommunicating and orchestrating my extended sales team in order to drive the team sell/complex sellMaking phone calls & firing off emails to find the latest pricing, quotes and sales orders so that we’re prepared for every call and every closeLosing precious minutes and hours on the road where we could be productive if only we had the right toolsThese are just a few of the activities a salesperson does on a daily basis in an effort to have meaningful engagements with a customer, while also tracking their business and keeping an eye on their sales target. In order for sales people to be effective, they need to leverage their extended sales network and new tools designed to help them complete this myriad of unstructured activities faster and with better results.
Through a series of customer co-innovation sessions, we learned that rather than focusing on Sales Automation, we needed to focus on Sales Effectiveness. To empower salespeople they need tools: Collaborate in Context: rapidly with their extended sales team in the same place where they keep relevant customer information so that everything is one place and everyone is on the same page in real-time. Collaboration is occurring but it is outside of the sales tool, resulting in information being lost. Crowd Source Sales Wisdom: Tap into the tribal knowledge of the sales organization, to easily find those best practices, those winning tips, those sales experts who can help them have meaningful, differentiated engagements with customers and close business faster. Be informed with Less Effort: harness complete insight about your customer in real-time: front-office, back-office, transactional, external, social networks & communities -- so that you’re wow’ing your customers, exceeding their expectations and standing out from the competition without spending hours digging for it, picking up the phone or shooting off emails Spend more time selling: Because they have a tool that allows them to be productive no matter where they are. They have the information they need to be informed while management still has the visibility they need.
And that is what we have strived to provide with SAP Cloud for Sales. A sales-oriented solution that is:Engaging – fast to use, easy-to-use, from whatever device they want to useConnected – connected to the people they need crowdsource sales best practices from internal experts and successful sales reps; natively connected to core business systems in order to evaluate the complete customer picture. No matter where they are, they are connected to the information they need. Insightful – providing new insights in real-time, helping sales reps find ways to get more value out of their time and for management to align resources to drive the most success. Insight that helps gain the complete customer view. Cost-effective – more cost-effective than other cloud-based sales applications (e.g. SFDC)
To review what you just saw, here is a recap of 6 key areas of Cloud for Sales that set us apart.User experience: designed from the ground for salespeople, it’s easy and to use, and fast to get things done. Adoption rate will be high.Collaboration: You go one place to plan/prepare with your internal team & extended network, get coaching help from managers, get updates, competitor information etc. Sales Process & Intelligence: tracking acct/oppty/activity status is done in seconds. You get great real-time sales intelligence, guiding selling, customer contacts and insight to customer preferences.Sales Productivity: Google maps built in for quick planning and navigation to customer meetings. Sales information and contacts/appointments/messages effortlessly in synch with your Outlook calendar.Analytics: Out of the box reporting removes the headaches of countless hours in Excel. You can also easily tailor a library of pre-delivered reports and create new reports that meet your specific needs.ERP & CRM Integration: Only SAP can provide native SAP ERP integration for no-hassle, out-of-box visibility to Quotes, Sales Orders, Shipments & more. You can also extend your existing investment in SAP CRM by giving sales people an easy-to-use, collaborative/social/insightful solution that’s fast-to-deploy but also taps into and stays in synch with your existing SAP CRM solution.
And Cloud for Sales is having a big impact on our customer’s business. It is helping them in 4 major ways.Engaging – The engaging experience is driving faster and deeper adoption than they see with other sales tools. This results in the business getting more value from the investment quicker.Connected – Cloud for Sales makes the organization more connected. This included collaborative selling for teams as well as the right connections with existing ERP and other systems. As a result, they are seeing improvements in the quality of customer interactions which is driving more business.Insightful – The analytics capabilities in the system provide deeper insight into customers, products, competitors, and sales performance. And, they are more confident in the accuracy of the information due to the increased adoption.Cost Effective – Not only are they getting more value from more usage, but our customers tell us our solution is one of the most cost effective available. Many of them are expanding their user community, involving other people that are involved in the sales process (like marketing managers), who they could never afford to equip before.If you are looking at alternatives, we encourage you to use these 4 criteria; Engaging, Connected, Insightful, and Cost Effective; to guide your decision making. We are confident that we’ll lead the way.
And this sampling of our customers are the source of much of these ideas and innovations
Cloud for Sales is a key pillar of our Customer OnDemand family, a set of cloud solutions that help you work with customers in the new business environment. Other products include Social OnDemand and Service OnDemand, that offer you more ways to manage social interactions.Those products are available and are designed to work hand in hand with Cloud for Sales.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What does SAP uniquely bring to the table for sales effectiveness vs. SFDC? Sales solutions designed from the ground up for sales people, easy-to-use, ones they want to use rather than are FORCED to use Complete sales effectiveness capabilities without the complexity/cost of existing cloud-based solutions Complete customer intelligence, analytics in real-time: back-office, front office, social -> know your customer, become the real sales challenger Connected to the people and other key enterprise apps you need: Back-office/ERP/Account 360 – pricing, quotes, sales orders, shipments, invoices, robust analytics/ HANA – in memory analytics, Travel & Expense Mgt, HCM Cost-Effective: more cost-effective and lower TCO than other cloud solutions Nearly 200,000 customers, world-class business process excellence & Industry expertise Why SAP CRM -> one size does not fit all, provide the right sales solution that fits the needs of different seller types and sales management needs across your organization
Predefined integrations to ECC (specifically SD) and CRM on-prem. VP – take advantage of collaborative framework and user experience Sales OD (Customer OD) delivers to users. Certain information will be synched – bi-directional or unidirectional. On Prem solution is the master data or system of record for key objects (specifically accounts). Pricing/Quotations use SD system of record. Many business flows have been enabled but can be done in a specific way depending on requirements.
Extend Customer from Key User to extend the application – reorder fields, add tabs, relabel, add to reports. Mashups – embedd data from an external system at UI level – HTML and data. HTML web browser rendered through UI. Content taken and rendered in native UI within application. Business Analytics – as a key user can create new data sources, personalize existign reports, new reports and publish to all users in an organization.Another way to extend – integration. Open API – objects have open APIs allow you to do SnapEngage – connected to application using APIs. Logic and application sits in external system and communicates through APIs.Extend business objects (business entities – accounts, contact, oppties, leads). All can be anhanced using SDK – be extended from backend prespective and extend UI. Extend an existing UI within the SDK. Customer speciric solution for one specific customer implementation. 2nd flavor is partner solution – partner can build something generic. Build it in one system, download it as a file, and distribute to many customer. Whatever you’ve done in OP you can bring to the cloud. Extend the applciation as you need it and then bring in your on premise data.
Predictably Plan and Eliminate Budget SurprisesGet Started Quickly without Breaking the BankSAP can help in specific ways in an as-needed basisStandard onboarding to get up and runningValue Add services for Data cleansing – use BOBJ which allows us to effectively & efficiently perform data cleansing (remove duplicates) and they don’t have to pay for cleansing toolERP Integration – data mapping between Sales OD and ERP is natively mapped
#1Three major data centers (Germany, US, #2 Strict security mechanisms including physical security using biometrics, video surveillance, and sensors#3Scalable operations through full Multi-tenancy enablementLatest blade technology with 144 GB – 2 TB Main memoryin-memory database will further improve performance and reduce costContinuous, proactive monitoringSAP Support Network