If you are currently using SAP ERP (ECC) as your back-end ERP solution, you may want to consider integrating it to a front-end CRM solution to automate and manage your entire Lead-to-Cash process.

Many organizations find that when it comes to sales force automation, including pipeline and activity management, they may require additional functionality to fully empower their sales teams.

If you are looking for full-fledged CRM functionality, you may want to have a look at SAP Sales Cloud, SAP’s next-generation CRM solution.

What is SAP Sales Cloud?

Deployed in the cloud and designed as a mobile-first solution, SAP Sales Cloud provides the tools and insights you need to understand your customers. Moreover, the solution automates critical selling processes, improve sales engagement, and grow revenue.  SAP Sales Cloud is a flexible and intelligent platform to enhance customer experience while empowering your sales force.

What are the benefits of SAP Sales Cloud?

According to the latest research from Forrester, organizations using SAP Sales Cloud were able to achieve a 10% uplift in their revenue. You can download the full report, here. There are many benefits to this solution, including:

1. Stronger Customer Connections

Empower sellers to be trusted advisors and create lasting relationships with a full view of every customer interaction, social insights, and selling guidance.

2. Greater Productivity

Engage customers strategically and make every interaction count by managing activities, advancing opportunities, and tracking performance offline and online.

3. Increased Win Rates

Boost sales effectiveness with AI recommendations tailored to each opportunity and intelligent automation of labour-intensive tasks, such as automatically capturing all interactions you have with clients.

Also read: SAP Sales Cloud & Machine Learning

What are some of the functionalities of SAP Sales Cloud?

Learn more about SAP Sales Cloud: Download the Solution Brief

What are the benefits of integrating your ERP into a CRM solution?

Businesses often purchase enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software separately.

CRM deals with front-end information, such as recording customer interactions, sales tracking, pipeline management, prospecting, and creating/evaluating marketing campaigns.  Whereas, ERP software handles critical backend processes; including purchase history, billing and shipping details, accounting information, financial data, and supply chain management details.

Since these two solutions have many common touchpoints, running them in siloes can lead to inefficient business processes and lower productivity for sales teams.  As such it’s strongly recommended to integrate your CRM and ERP solutions.  Some of the benefits include:

1. Single Source of Truth

For common touchpoints such as customer and product master data, the integration will allow you to maintain a single source of truth.  Since users may edit data in either solution, integration reduces duplicate data entry and ensures data consistency.

2. Customer 360

The notes for the latest meeting with the customer will be maintained in CRM, while their purchasing history will be maintained in ERP.  Bringing these two solutions together helps you get a Customer 360 view at the click of a button.  Notably, a fully integrated CRM and ERP solution provides employees with access to important customer information in real-time.

3. Efficient Quote & Order Management

Once a CRM Sales Quote has been confirmed and it’s time to create an order in ERP, having to switch systems and re-enter the data multiple times is neither time-sensitive nor practical.  So, an integrated solution helps improve productivity and efficiency.

4. Improved Customer Satisfaction

An integrated solution enables sales teams to proactively and quickly respond to customer requests, as well as meaningfully contribute as trusted advisors to their customers.  Thus, this helps improve the overall customer experience.

How does SAP Sales Cloud integrate with SAP ERP?

SAP Sales Cloud comes with native integration to SAP ERP (available as of ECC version 6).  This integration is configured via SAP Cloud Platform, a powerful middleware solution.  SAP Cloud Platform enables users to implement data, application, API, and process integration projects involving any combination of cloud-resident and on-premise endpoints.

Let’s start with the master data integration.

Interagration with SAP ERP Master data View

There are many different integration scenarios available, and you can choose to implement the scenarios that meet your business requirements.

Some of the core integration scenarios our team at Axxis Consulting typically implements for our customers are Product and Account/Contact integration.

SAP ERP Material Master is replicated to SAP Sales Cloud as “Products”.  These products can then be assigned to the various objects in SAP Sales Cloud, including Leads, Opportunities, Sales Quotes, and Sales Orders.  SAP ERP Customer Master is replicated to SAP Sales Cloud as “Accounts” and “Contacts”.

It also includes key partner functions and sales area details.  This integration can be bidirectional, which means that if a customer is created or updated in SAP ERP, it flows through to SAP Sales Cloud, and vice versa.

Now let’s move on to our transactional data integration.

Integration with SAP ERP Transactional data View

Again, there are many different integration scenarios available, and you can choose to implement the scenarios that meet your business requirements.  One of the core integration scenarios our team at Axxis Consulting typically implements for our customers is Quote to Order integration.

When a customer requests a product or service, you can create a quote in SAP Sales Cloud.  SAP Sales Cloud then calls SAP ERP to pull the pricing for items added to the quote from SAP ERP in real-time. Not only does it pull pricing (supporting the full flexibility of your SD module), it also returns key information like ATP (stock information) and customer Credit Limit Check.

Once the customer confirms the quote and is ready to buy, the quote is automatically pushed from SAP Sales Cloud to SAP ERP to create an order.

This order is then replicated from SAP ERP to SAP Sales Cloud.  This enables your sales team to do revenue and purchase history analysis via the easily customizable reports in SAP Sales Cloud.

The native integration also supports many other scenarios, such as Quote to Quote and Order to Order (if you want to enable your sales teams to directly create orders in SAP Sales Cloud, which is a useful function for certain industries like retail).

Bottom line

Sales teams are witnessing a more complex business environment than ever. If customer data is not managed properly, it will become the biggest pain point for efficiency with forecasting, decision making and ultimately – the sales process.  ERP integrated into SAP Sales Cloud is a very powerful solution that helps leverage customer data to improve your business processes and productivity.

SAP ERP & SAP Sales Cloud- the perfect combination for the digital enterprise! Contact our team today to learn more!

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