I still remember the good old days when I used to sell financial products for an NBFC. Selling used to be a tough chore then. Most of my time used to be spent in maintaining my prospects database and handling other administrative tasks. It was a big challenge to manage my time and close targets. There was hardly any visibility into my opportunities and no way I could track my KPIs. Coordinating with the back office and getting relevant and accurate information was a nightmare.
It was a big challenge to manage my time and close targets. There was hardly any visibility into my opportunities and no way I could track my KPIs. Coordinating with the back office and getting relevant and accurate information was a nightmare.
Thank heavens that times have changed and today — with the advent of SAP Sales Cloud — sales reps are able to sell smarter rather than harder. In this era of digitalization, every organization needs refined and up-to-date information about their customer regardless of channels and devices. Sales can happen anywhere, anytime. Organizations want to improve the productivity of their Sales teams and get more deals closed in the shortest possible time in this competitive world.
Ideally, sales reps should be able to get any information about the customer, product, and competitor offering in a matter of clicks. And most organizations now know that a solution like SAP Sales Cloud is vital for them to build an ample competitive edge in the digital economy.
Making Sales Easy (Yes, Really!)
Some of the features of SAP C/4HANA that have impressed me and I think will make life easy for Sales teams are listed below:
KPI and To-Do tasks based home page:
Imagine a scenario where sales reps can just open their laptops and the first screen they see, i.e. the Home Screen, provides them with visibility into their KPI and also notifications on their to-do items. Such a scenario will give sales personnel a better idea about how to plan their days and achieve their KPIs. It also helps them stay more focused.
Account & contact management and intelligence:
You meet a person while travelling or in a pub. While interacting with them, you sense a business opportunity. You exchange business cards. Once this is done, you can promptly scan the business card using your mobile device to generate a lead or opportunity on SAP Sales Cloud.
With Sales Cloud, you will gain a 360-degree view of your customer. And in Sales, what could be better than to view all customer details along with the list of open opportunities, quotes, and last-closed orders? This is what Cloud for Sales arms you with, thereby enabling your Sales teams to make more cognizant decisions.
Integration with Google Map:
With SAP Sales Cloud, representatives can schedule visits to the customer and use Google Maps to figure out the best route to cover maximum number of customers in a date, thereby saving them a lot of time.
Opportunity management and pipeline insight:
Sales reps can accelerate sales wins by working on system-guided activities that lead to closure of opportunities. They can view their pipelines and make their forecasts, based on which they can easily plan to achieve their sales targets. SAP Sales Cloud makes it significantly easier for sales reps to track their performance in real-time and proactively accelerate the appropriate opportunities to close. Sales reps can even forecast with ease and perform what-if analysis to understand where they should focus their efforts more.
Back Office Integration:
The biggest challenge sales reps face is in connecting with back office data. This means that sales reps have zero idea about the state of the inventory and, therefore, struggle to commit anything to the customer. SAP Sales Cloud provides insight into the ATP while creating a quote or a sales order. Sales reps can also check the credit limit of the customer while creating the sales quote.
Integration with Outlook/Gmail:
Integration with Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Lotus Notes, and Evernote means that there is no possibility for double data entry. Moreover, key customer information and notes stay automatically in sync. Sales reps can synchronize tasks, appointments, and contacts (including their attachments) between Microsoft Outlook and Cloud for Sales and vice versa. This enables them to access all the data created in SAP Sales Cloud from the Groupware client.
Collaboration and Social Selling:
What is one of the biggest challenges faced by sales reps of today? The lack of means for proper collaboration with other teams. But if the results observed by my team and customers are any indication to go by, SAP Sales Cloud can help sales reps advance the sales cycles by collaborating efficiently within their team and with in-house experts, customers, and partners. All of this is possible in the context of their accounts and opportunities with built-in integration to SAP JAM, for enterprise social collaboration. And it is no surprise that the solution helps sales reps form enduring associations by engaging customers in kick-off meetings, requirements collection, or issue resolution.
SAP C/4HANA Mobility:
Sales reps do not have to lug their laptops around anymore as they can access all relevant information about customers and products on their handheld devices. They can create opportunities, leads, and sales quotes directly from their mobile devices —be it iPads, iPhones, or Androids. They can also work in the offline mode and have their data get automatically synced with the SAP C/4HANA application once they are online again.
Now, I am sure we all can vouch with certainty that the traditional way of selling where the sales reps have to push themselves hard have ended. Rather, now is the time to work smarter, sell better, and win more deals.
In the meantime, happy selling!
