CRM for SAP Businesses | Elixir Solutions

Having the right CRM is key to make your sales team more performant and to deliver the best customer experience. However, it is likely that your sales reps keep seeing your CRM as time-consuming and not efficient. Even more, they probably see it as a monitoring tool benefiting only the management. A common belief in sales teams is that working with the CRM and keeping it updated prevents them from actually selling.

As a sales manager, it is time to find the good software that your team will adopt. As your business is running on SAP, the challenge is also to find the right solution architecture. To help you, we listed below the important features you should look for when choosing a CRM.

The easier, the better!

The first thing to do is to make an assessment of your sales process. What are the key elements that are important to have in the system?

The sales reps usually hate to manually add information that are not key, as it makes them loose their time. Therefore, you should avoid having a system that is too complex to use. Why? Because it takes time to enter the information. And that can lead to your team giving up.

The easier it is to enter a new contact, phone call, email… the better. For example, entering a new contact via a business card, a company via the website or a direct integration of emails without any clicks needed. This will not cost a second to your sales rep.

For the sales rep on the road, it is also important to have a mobile device to directly enter the information.

Gain time

Rise the Automation

Make your sales rep gain time by automating the repetitive tasks. There are many tasks in the daily routine of a sales that could be automated, like sending follow-up emails… So, you need to choose a CRM that includes automation tools.

For example, we all know that following up on any interaction with the leads and prospects is super important. With the right CRM, you can automatically send follow up emails. Those should also be set up for different scenarios, so that you can adapt the follow up to the situation, and make sure that you send the adequate email.

Easy access to the information

Being able to find quickly the history of your interactions with the prospect, like what you talked about previously with them is a key element. It will only help in the sales process. With a CRM, everything is available from one place: emails, phone calls, tasks, even notes on the previous meetings. This avoids having to open 4 windows to get the information.

Gain of quality

Better Customer experience

With a good CRM, you should be able to have access to the relevant information that will help you close more easily your deals. How? Customers like to have a personalized approach. They are much more inclined to answer if they feel listened to and do not have to repeat twice.

• Having a view on the company they work for, the last time that they were contacted, what was said during the interaction and what was the outcome of it,  when you plan on contacting a contact again, is key.
• Knowing also on which marketing activity and material they engaged will help your sales reps to understand better the interests of the contact.
• Being able to see the options that can be proposed to the contact is also a winning possibility. If you now have a system that helps you see which product you can suggest and its attributes like the location, the stock or even the description of it, the interaction can only be enriched. For that you need a view on the back office, on the resources  available to the customers. 
• Small things that are making it easy for the prospect to interact with the sales rep, like an easy way to book a meeting,  will boost the customer experience. 

All of this is also about targeting the right customer at the right time. By reviewing all the stages that have already be taken, and setting up automatic reminders, you can find the best timing to contact your customer. Spot the key timings like when they need to renew their contracts, when to replace their product, etc. set up alarms and contact them to suggest an upsell when the time is right.

Personalize the interactions

Making sure that you have personalized interactions with the contacts is also essential. It will help providing a good customer experience. In order to do that, make sure that your CRM enables you to easily personalize and keep the human touch.

• Communicating through videos on a one-to-one basis is a good way to do it. So the system should enable you to record easily a nice video, to send it and for the contact to watch it.  
• The ability to send out quotes that are branded and personalized to your prospects is also something that you should look for in a CRM.

Align with the rest of the business

With a company using SAP as an ERP system, this is definitely a point that you should take into account. The most important thing is to choose the CRM that will support - and be used by - your team. And that should be found in a CRM that integrates well with your SAP back office system. The logical thinking would be to purchase a SAP C/4 HANA offering. But if it doesn't match your needs or that your sales team doesn't work on it, you should look for a CRM that integrates or that you can integrate with it. Indeed, an integrated system will give you the following advantages : 

• having access to all of the relevant information available on the systems used by the other teams (marketing, service, installed based...) 
• increase collaboration between teams and the experience delivered to the prospect and customer
• better chance of learning the winning elements and following up with the results
• overview of the impact of your sales activities on the business

Conclusion

Our best advise to Sales managers, in a business running on SAP, is this : choose carefully your CRM, in order to be sure that they will use it. Only then, it will maximize the results of your sales reps. We all know that some well known CRMs  are not the most user friendly ! It is thus important to choose your CRM on the basis of the easiness to use it and on the (visible) added value for your sales team.

Make sure that you enroll your team into the discussions to ensure that they see which gain of time and quality they will make.  And, last but not least, choose a CRM that you can use with the SAP Erp system on which your company is running. This way, you will increase the collaboration and the experience that you deliver to your prospects.

Is your sales team engaged on your CRM? Take the quiz!