If you’re an executive with a marketing or sales suite, and you have some responsibility for marketing or selling that suite, you use the solutions within the suite to make your life easier. Unless there’s something very wrong with what you’re selling, of course. And your success and failures teach you how the suite needs to be improved.
This infinite mirror situation comes up in many conversations I have, but it’s especially intriguing to find someone using a marketing and sales suite not just to sell that suite, but to sell a vast portfolio of software solutions, front- and back-office. In very broad terms, that turns out to be a part of Bertram Schulte’s job.
Schulte is Chief Digital Officer with SAP (the global company), and he’s learning how to leverage SAP CX’s C4/HANA platform achieve his business goals. I spoke with him at SAP CX Live last week. First, how would he describe his role?
King without a land
“I’m the king without a land,” he said. “Meaning I’m responsible for augmenting how we deal with our customers and partners in a digital fashion, but I’m neither responsible for sales, nor for the partner organization, nor for product. I do own all the digital properties that are required.” He brings together key stakeholders, such as Alex Atzberger, president of CX, as well as the sales, pricing, and legal teams necessary to make digital sales happen.
“I can sell Sales Cloud [part of CX] via the web, in various countries, making our prices available publicly — a surprise to some — and even part of the discounting structure. That’s the most basic case.” It’s integrating that transaction with all the parts of the company which need to be involved is Schulte’s responsibility. “It’s orchestrating digital as a sales process across SAP,” including SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, and so on.
Experience is the key
Schulte is on record as saying that experience is the key to building a customer-first organization in the digital landscape. I asked him to expand on that. “Without experience, everything is nothing. If you fail to make it simpler for the customer, it just won’t happen. One of the first things I changed when I took over was to create an experience group to be an advocate of the customer. Within that group we created a customer research function, to do real research. The north star cannot come from the next sales trick SAP wants to do; it has to come from the customer.”
One use case where digital can help the sales force is assisting customers who want to purchase limited solutions from SAP, for example just an instance of the Analytics Cloud. A second case is upselling: e.g., having purchased 100 user seats, a client now wants 10 more. “It’s a highly structured transaction, derived from the original contract, so there’s no need for negotiation. It’s not even incredibly interesting for the account executive; for the customer it could be a pain in the neck; to offer them the ability to do it in three steps, in two minutes, is a huge value add.”
Cutting a six week sales process to a transaction which can be completed online in minutes is a way of improving the experience. There’s an increasing volume of smaller transactions, and those should be handled digitally, Schulte said.
Winning at B2B commerce
“I’m the first customer, and since Alex [Atzberger] took over [SAP CX] it’s been really exciting for me, because his strategy really approaches my pain point. I can display the whole supply chain. For example, when is a consultant available to do your implementation? Is the data center staff available for an upgrade? This might seem normal for us, as a digital business, but for a manufacturer, who may need to look at his supply line as well as his production line, to give a delivery date, the integration across the supply chain — if Alex does that, he will have won B2B commerce. That is why I’m getting excited, and that is why I’m here, because we are now convinced users of our own software.”
Is experience really that important in a B2B context, as it obviously is in B2C? “I think it’s even more important,” said Schulte. “The power of the [individual] purchaser in the B2B world is much bigger than the B2C world. They will always choose their preferred channel; if you don’t offer at least one good channel, you will lose the deal. Historically, account executives know how to wine and dine people in order to create a good experience; and they know the power structure of the customer, and who is the boss. Most of that I don’t have, so I need to excel in different dimensions to make the deal: simplicity, speed, price-points. We offer the customer an easier way to their objective. I can deal with customers who want to first buy small, then I can grow them — at scale and cost-effectively.
Digital transformation starts at home
The impression I gained was of ongoing digital evolution and transformation within SAP. “Yes, we are a 46 year-old company with established processes. We are in the process of digitally transforming, and in parts — as a software company — we are further along the way. In other parts, we are just as conservative as any other B2B player. It’s hard.”
SAP CX covered DMN’s expenses to attend SAP CX Live 2018.
