As ASUG read­ers may have already seen in our SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence pre­view, SAP is mount­ing a new dri­ve to make cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) a key ele­ment of its still-expand­ing soft­ware stack. If you are ques­tion­ing (or casu­al­ly ana­lyz­ing) this move, you may be won­der­ing why the strate­gists back in Wall­dorf think they can take on the heavy hit­ters in the CRM space, Sales­force and Ora­cle, or even go up against the small­er play­ers like Pegasys­tems, Dynam­ics 365, and Verint.

It Goes Back to the Cloud

The answer leads back to SAP’s recent acqui­si­tion of Cal­lidus Soft­ware. Its Cal­lidus­Cloud prod­uct is tai­lored to help­ing sales­peo­ple on the ground link and inte­grate sales-relat­ed infor­ma­tion, such as pric­ing, incen­tives, and com­mis­sions, back to enter­prise resource plan­ning (ERP) sys­tems. So, the log­i­cal CRM-to-ERP link is now there. But how SAP fus­es these new capa­bil­i­ties with its oth­er sys­tems remains to be seen.

CRM 101: The Basics

Tak­ing a step back for a moment, let’s remind our­selves what CRM is. For most of us on the con­sumer side, our first expe­ri­ence with CRM is some­thing like our super­mar­ket loy­al­ty card start­ing to rec­og­nize which brand of soap, beer, or break­fast cere­al we buy. The super­mar­ket then sends us relat­ed coupons, either in the mail, along with our receipts, via email, or maybe even to our mobile phones. The idea is that we’ll start to feel warm and fuzzy because our rela­tion­ship with the store is being rein­forced, all while we’re incen­tivized to return and pur­chase more of what we like. 

Stitch­ing Togeth­er Cus­tomer Touchpoints

CRM in 2018 has the poten­tial to go even fur­ther, incor­po­rat­ing cus­tomer data chan­nels includ­ing every­thing from tele­phone con­tacts, emails, live chat­bot chats, and con­tent that cus­tomers engage with on a company’s web­site. We often think of con­sumer-based exam­ples first, such as the super­mar­ket loy­al­ty pro­gram, but CRM is used heav­i­ly to dri­ve busi­ness-to-busi­ness sales, espe­cial­ly now that B2B buy­ers con­duct so much upfront research before ever pick­ing up the phone to con­tact a sales­per­son. These dig­i­tal leads are crit­i­cal to today’s sales pipelines.

Omnichan­nel, Dig­i­tal, and Personalized 

Back to SAP then. The com­pa­ny views con­tem­po­rary best-in-class CRM soft­ware sys­tems as ones that pro­vide addi­tion­al tools for cus­tomer ana­lyt­ics, per­son­al­iza­tion, e‑commerce, social media, and col­lab­o­ra­tion. All with the ulti­mate goal of dri­ving omnichan­nel cus­tomer engagement.

SAP’s exist­ing stack of soft­ware fea­tures por­tions of CRM in many of its chan­nels. Key among these is SAP Hybris, often referred to as a ​“mar­ket­ing cloud,” with rev­enue and billing solu­tion com­po­nents for com­merce, mar­ket­ing, rev­enue, sales, and ser­vice. Let’s also remem­ber that SAP added Gigya to this mix, a firm it pur­chased at the end of 2017 to inte­grate its core capa­bil­i­ty in cus­tomer iden­ti­ty and access management.

As not­ed when it was pur­chased, Gigya’s cus­tomer iden­ti­ty man­age­ment plat­form helps com­pa­nies build dig­i­tal rela­tion­ships with their cus­tomers. Its plat­form allows com­pa­nies to man­age cus­tomer pro­files, pref­er­ences, opt-ins, and con­sent set­tings, with cus­tomers main­tain­ing con­trol of their data at all times. Now that the GDPR is in full effect for data from EU cit­i­zens and that there’s grow­ing scruti­ny of how com­pa­nies are han­dling their cus­tomer data in gen­er­al, this sure­ly will come in handy for SAP users.

SAP Has Tak­en Seats at the CRM Table 

SAP’s CRM vision is com­ing into focus right now. Cal­lidus is the new baby, teenag­er Gigya is already at the din­ner table, seat­ed next to moth­er and father SAP Hybris, while grand­fa­ther (in def­er­ence to Dr. Has­so) SAP HANA is carv­ing the turkey.

Just how far will SAP push its CRM ambi­tions? Com­put­er­world UK edi­tor Scott Carey notes SAP CEO Bill McDermott’s com­ments made dur­ing a Q1 2018 earn­ings tele­phone brief­ing. ​“Basi­cal­ly, we are going to rebrand the whole CRM cat­e­go­ry. It’s going to be a mas­sive move­ment at SAP­PHIRE NOW and we’re going to show every cus­tomer that they can be a best-run busi­ness by run­ning SAP and no longer do they have to be rel­e­gat­ed to an out­dat­ed sales plat­form with com­plex inte­gra­tion lay­ers try­ing to get that data out of the ERP sys­tem,” said McDer­mott, as report­ed by Carey.

What the Next-Gen­er­a­tion CRM Plat­form Might Look Like

Carey fur­ther notes McDermott’s thin­ly veiled swipe at Sales­force, the top cloud-based CRM plat­form provider. The SAP chief has called the market’s exist­ing ​“so called cloud CRM” soft­ware noth­ing more than over­priced soft­ware run­ning on first gen­er­a­tion soft­ware as a ser­vice (SaaS) archi­tec­ture. Whether this opens up a war of words with Sales­force CEO Marc Benioff remains to be seen. SAP cer­tain­ly has the inte­gra­tion capa­bil­i­ties to bring these new­er ele­ments under the SAP S/4HANA umbrel­la with, pre­sum­ably, SAP Leonar­do as a key go-to-mar­ket mech­a­nism to help engi­neer a deep­er thread of CRM into SAP cus­tomers’ design think­ing strate­gies. Cur­rent, clean, and com­plete cus­tomer data is the holy grail for mar­ket­ing and sales, and SAP sure­ly knows data inside and out.

Build­ing Out SAP’s CRM Vision

As SAP begins to build out its own vision of CRM, we can agree that the Cal­lidus acqui­si­tion makes a lot of sense. The Cal­lidus­Cloud plat­form fea­tures the ​“Lead to Mon­ey” soft­ware suite. This area includes solu­tions for Sales Per­for­mance Man­age­ment (SPM) and sales exe­cu­tion, includ­ing Con­fig­ure-Price-Quote (CPQ) appli­ca­tions. There are also sales enable­ment tools such as learn­ing appli­ca­tions, cus­tomer engage­ment tools, and ana­lyt­ics. So it real­ly is becom­ing more than just CRM at SAP: It’s CRM from the sales end AND the cus­tomer end.

“Cal­lidus­Cloud SPM solu­tions give sales­peo­ple instan­ta­neous knowl­edge of their com­pen­sa­tion asso­ci­at­ed with par­tic­u­lar prod­uct and pric­ing con­fig­u­ra­tions and reduce errors in cal­cu­lat­ing sales com­mis­sions and com­pen­sa­tion arrange­ments. Cal­lidus­Cloud CPQ solu­tions enable sales­peo­ple to iden­ti­fy and con­fig­ure prod­uct pack­ages that have built-in rules for dis­counts and that can gen­er­ate pro­pos­als for the cus­tomers on the spot and dur­ing the con­ver­sa­tion with the cus­tomer,” not­ed SAP in its acqui­si­tion state­ment.

A More-Con­nect­ed Cus­tomer Experience

SAP’s core ​“what is CRM” descrip­tion broad­ens CRM into a dis­ci­pline that covers:

• CRM for sales 
• CRM for marketing 
• CRM for commerce 
• CRM for service 

It’s this broad­er view that could help com­pa­nies deliv­er a more-con­nect­ed cus­tomer expe­ri­ence across the entire rela­tion­ship, from the first online inter­ac­tion through to the post-sale sup­port and repeat pur­chas­es. Giv­en the focus as it first appears, let’s hope that the SAP CRM dream keeps cus­tomers at the heart of its con­cerns while it con­tin­ues to build its com­peti­tor-bust­ing tech­nol­o­gy propo­si­tion. What hap­pens next will be inter­est­ing to watch.

Inter­est­ed in how SAP can help you enhance your cus­tomer expe­ri­ence? See the agen­da for the Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Inno­va­tion Forum, our newest event for retail­ers, con­sumer prod­ucts com­pa­nies, and whole­salers look­ing for ways to delight their customers.