In recent years, cus­tomer expe­ri­ence has become a hot top­ic in the enter­prise soft­ware world. And SAP is no excep­tion, as it offers solu­tions for what it often refers to as ​“the expe­ri­ence econ­o­my.” In 2018, SAP intro­duced its SAP C/4HANA suite to help build trust­ed rela­tion­ships between brands and customers.

ASUG inter­viewed the SAP C/4HANA Cloud lead­ers to learn more about each plat­form and how they work togeth­er to help build a bet­ter cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. We’ve dis­cov­ered how the SAP Com­merce Cloud pro­vides cus­tomers with a com­plete dig­i­tal brand expe­ri­ence. But before you can improve your customer’s over­all expe­ri­ence, you need to first acknowl­edge how your sales force is equipped to con­tribute to indi­vid­ual cus­tomer interactions.

Giles House, GM for SAP Sales Cloud, talked with ASUG News about how the plat­form offers sales teams the tools they need to deliv­er the expe­ri­ence that will win trust and keep cus­tomers com­ing back for more.

ASUG News: Could you walk us through how an SAP cus­tomer would use SAP Sales Cloud?

Giles: The chal­lenges our cus­tomers are try­ing to solve, first and fore­most, have to do with sell­ing more and sell­ing faster. So, being able to bet­ter exe­cute deals is key.

SAP Sales Cloud allows cus­tomers to onboard and empow­er reps, chan­nel part­ners, and bring to mar­ket new prod­ucts. It allows them to dri­ve the right per­for­mance and behav­iors with incen­tives. Last­ly, it pro­vides our cus­tomers a 360-degree view of their cus­tomers. They can see every­thing in one cen­tral place, whether it’s infor­ma­tion com­ing from activ­i­ty on a web­site, from mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives, or social media engage­ment. They have a com­plete view.

ASUG News: How does the SAP Sales Cloud bring order to what can be the chaos of man­ag­ing sales teams, leads, and clos­ing business?

Giles: Tra­di­tion­al­ly, peo­ple have thought of a CRM plat­form sim­ply as a sales force automa­tion tool. They invest in new tech­nol­o­gy and then are sur­prised when no one wants to use it. But a sales force automa­tion tool does not help the main user, which is the sales­per­son, do a bet­ter job in front of the cus­tomer. It doesn’t help them pro­duce their quote or under­stand their incen­tives. They instead see it as an admin­is­tra­tive task.

SAP Sales Cloud is dif­fer­ent. It’s not only a place to store infor­ma­tion about your cus­tomer, it’s also active­ly col­lect­ing data through­out all your inter­ac­tions with that cus­tomer. Every­thing from quotes to dis­count lev­els and prod­ucts you’ve pro­posed is auto­mat­i­cal­ly stored in the CRM. When you go through a con­tract­ing process, you can keep track of how many iter­a­tions of the con­tract there’s been.

A sales­per­son can track all the ways their cus­tomer has engaged, whether it’s watch­ing videos on the company’s YouTube chan­nel or down­load­ing a white paper from its web­site. SAP Sales Cloud con­tin­ues to col­lect and store data through­out the sales cycle so that the sales team isn’t dupli­cat­ing these efforts.

This allows the sales­per­son to work the lead as opposed to man­age the lead. Every touch point with the cus­tomer is cap­tured on SAP Sales Cloud. A sales­per­son no longer needs to man­u­al­ly update the CRM with, ​“Had a great meet­ing today,” or man­u­al­ly move the prob­a­bil­i­ty of clos­ing the sale from 10 per­cent to 15 per­cent, or from qual­i­fied inter­est to eval­u­a­tion. The auto­mat­ic col­lec­tion of that data is what sep­a­rates SAP Sales Cloud from com­pet­i­tive products.

That’s what helps bring order to the tra­di­tion­al rep-dri­ven chaos. SAP Sales Cloud gives sales­peo­ple the tools they need to get the job done.

ASUG News: As a past CMO, what have you learned are the biggest pain points when align­ing mar­ket­ing and sales? How does SAP C/4HANA help alle­vi­ate those?

Giles: One pain point is not under­stand­ing what real­ly qual­i­fies as a lead. This is key. Sales­peo­ple will nev­er say they’ve got too many leads, but the prob­lem is that they’re not always good leads. So, this ruins the report­ing and the CMO then begins the fin­ger pointing.

Once you have a foun­da­tion for under­stand­ing what makes for a good lead, then you can actu­al­ly begin to track how many of these qual­i­fied leads sales is accept­ing. You can then under­stand how many of them the team is work­ing, and how many of them are con­vert­ing into real oppor­tu­ni­ties and then closing.

SAP C/4HANA includes SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Mar­ket­ing Cloud, SAP Ser­vice Cloud, SAP Com­merce Cloud, and SAP Cus­tomer Data Cloud. It allows intel­li­gent appli­ca­tions to come in and help cap­ture, sort, and pri­or­i­tize leads. It makes for a bet­ter con­ver­sa­tion than, ​“Here are your leads, and now go sell.” With the SAP C/4HANA plat­form, you know the health of that lead and you can begin to have bet­ter sales conversations.

ASUG News: How much of Cal­lidus­Cloud has SAP Sales Cloud inte­grat­ed into today’s offer­ing? What’s the road map for bring­ing these together?

Giles: Think­ing back to when each was a sep­a­rate com­pa­ny, SAP was, in fact, a cus­tomer of Cal­lidus­Cloud. Togeth­er, they rolled out incen­tive com­mis­sions to the glob­al sales teams, and then they worked on the jour­ney to Con­fig­ure Price Quote (CPQ) soft­ware. The two already had a head start on the inte­gra­tion. By the time SAP pur­chased Cal­lidus­Cloud, a num­ber of these prod­ucts were already inte­grat­ed. Today you can have an inte­grat­ed SAP Sales Cloud expe­ri­ence. The goal is to make the inte­gra­tion tighter and more seam­less. We plan to work on that over the next 12 months, but we’re already in pret­ty good shape now.

ASUG News: How does SAP Sales Cloud fit with­in SAP C/4HANA?

Giles: With SAP C/4HANA, busi­ness­es have a full suite to engage with their cus­tomers, whether it’s through mar­ket­ing, sales, prod­uct, or ser­vice — regard­less of the chan­nel they come through. SAP Sales Cloud gives the sales­per­son a 360-view of those cus­tomers and that engagement.

There are sev­er­al dif­fer­ent start­ing points for a customer’s jour­ney. Being able to keep track of them across all these dif­fer­ent chan­nels is crit­i­cal for suc­cess. The SAP Mar­ket­ing Cloud lets us know what’s grab­bing someone’s inter­est and what they’re engag­ing with. The SAP Com­merce Cloud lets you know what your cus­tomer is buy­ing or think­ing about buy­ing based on their online actions. The SAP Ser­vice Cloud gives you a view into your customer’s pain points and an oppor­tu­ni­ty to solve them with some­thing bet­ter. And the SAP Cus­tomer Data Cloud gives your cus­tomers con­trol over how you col­lect their data and how you can use it. All of this infor­ma­tion gives the sales­per­son the tools they need through SAP Sales Cloud to start that con­ver­sa­tion and close that deal.

The win­ners in this expe­ri­ence econ­o­my are going to be the orga­ni­za­tions that can pro­vide a great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Two of the biggest ingre­di­ents of that great expe­ri­ence are trust and speed. If a busi­ness can get those two things right, that’s what will sep­a­rate the win­ners from the rest of the pack.

ASUG News: How can the SAP Sales Cloud work with oth­er SAP offer­ings to help orga­ni­za­tions become intel­li­gent enterprises?

Giles: We just talked about the start of the jour­ney, which is what we usu­al­ly refer to as the front-office expe­ri­ence. But the back-office expe­ri­ence is also a key part of the customer’s journey.

For exam­ple, you may have a cus­tomer who is try­ing to pur­chase some­thing from you and asks if you have it in stock or wants to know when it will be deliv­ered. You want to give your sales­peo­ple the tools to be able to get and deliv­er that infor­ma­tion quickly.

I think the biggest thing about an intel­li­gent enter­prise is hav­ing an intel­li­gent sales process and sales team. That means giv­ing them the right tools. It means con­nect­ing the back office with the front office — SAP S/4HANA with SAP C/4HANA. As a leader or man­ag­er, you need to make sure your teams can see the full picture.

If you missed our sales and e‑commerce ses­sions at ASUG­FOR­WARD, you can catch up by view­ing them on demand. ASUG mem­bers will have unlim­it­ed access to all of the week’s ses­sions on-demand, while non­mem­ber reg­is­trants can view them until Sun­day, June 28 at 11:59 p.m. CT/​Monday, June 29 at 12:59 a.m. ET.