Describing Presales Activities

The goal of this process is a sales document. A sales document gathers all important data and keeps a record of the business transaction. Throughout the business process, each document can be linked to the next to show the flow of the process – the big picture.

This lesson introduces SAP Sales Cloud. Integration with SAP S/4HANA provides a clear 360-degree view of customer interactions for marketing, sales, and distribution activities.

Let’s get familiar with the scope items for this lesson.

The Bike Company has sales teams out in the field. They need a way to easily access their customer information, even when they are offline. They also need a way to quickly create quotes and sales orders without a laptop, as well as looking up past orders and delivery information for their customers. Meetings and interactions with their customers aren’t tracked or linked to any active sales targets. Another important need is to know what bikes are in stock so that they don’t sell what they do not have. Stock visibility is key!

With SAP Sales Cloud, sales representatives can use a mobile app to store customer master data, enter sales documents, or look up past sales documents to check their delivery status. There is also integration with Outlook, Gmail, and Lotus Notes for calendar, email, contact, and task synchronization. Any meetings with a customer can be linked to the sales document or deal they are referencing, better track the sales cycle, and be used in analytics and reports. Stock availability checks and credit checks can be performed to ensure the sales representatives are selling in-stock products to customers with a favorable payment and credit history.

SAP offers the SAP Sales Cloud to capture presales related data. This way, the entire relationship and all interactions with a customer are recorded. SAP Sales Cloud is part of the SAP Customer Experience (CX) Portfolio.

SAP Intelligent Sales Execution is the built-in analytics of SAP Sales Cloud. It provides embedded graphical analytics that monitor sales opportunities. Machine Learning is activated for Lead and Opportunity scoring, showing a numerical value for the statistical chance of the Lead or Opportunity becoming a firm sales order.

Ivan had a first glance at SAP Sales Cloud and wants to know more about it.

Start the next interaction to see what Symona has to say.

Let’s start with an introduction into the Sales Cycle in SAP Sales Cloud. Here you can see the steps:

The first sales document we will learn about is a lead. When a lead is created, it can occur in many ways. This lead could come from many types of interactions, such as marketing promotions, clicking on emails, or even trade show interests shown by a prospect or existing customer.

Once the lead is qualified, another sales document - an opportunity, can be created. An opportunity might have many sales representatives or an entire sales team working simultaneously. So having a sales cycle is very important to assist each sales employee with their activities required to reach the quotation phase and an agreement for sales order.

The entire process can be monitored for analysis.

A lead is a potential sales contact. It can be for an individual (B2C) or organization (B2B). Leads are generated through a referral or through a direct response to an advertising or marketing campaign.

​​Let’s look at the functions in SAP Sales Cloud.

Qualified leads can be converted to opportunities, with all the key information flowing automatically from lead to opportunity for further processing​​.

A link between the two documents is established for referencing, as well as reporting. An audit trail of changes is logged automatically for key information updates. Feeds are posted automatically for these changes, and key stakeholders and people following the leads are automatically notified of the changes.

Symona will explain the process from Lead to Opportunity:

An Opportunity is a sales document that collects the customer (sales prospect), their requested products and services, the total volume of the customer project, the expected sales volume, and an estimated sales probability. ​

This information becomes more and more concrete throughout the sales process and is updated regularly.​

Here you can see an Opportunity in SAP Sales Cloud:

​Collection of this data allows for the correct sales team to be formed in order to win the deal. Once the sales team has been formed, a sales methodology, or sales cycle, can be followed. A sales cycle is broken down into phases, each phase with specific tasks and activities that need to be performed in order to further the deal. ​

You can connect business opportunities with tools to manage activities, sales teams, competitors, surveys, and relationships.​ You can use the Buying Center to manage relationships and understand the influencers of a particular deal. But most importantly, you can enable guided selling. This enables you to walk your sales team through the steps required to create quotations and sales orders. Knowing the steps and tasks needed to complete the process is key for streamlined information gathering, fast turnarounds, to evolve the opportunity, and continue the sales cycle.​

Once you have qualified an opportunity and created a value proposition for the sales deal, you are ready to create a quote.​

​To keep a full sales cycle document flow, converting an opportunity to a sales quote captures the full history of the business interaction.

Symona will show you how to convert an opportunity into a quote.

Flexible quoting capabilities enable you to deliver compelling offers to customers and prospective customers, provide consistent accurate pricing, and streamline the sales process​.

Once a sales quote is accepted, it can be converted to a sales order. Any details, products, or pricing you have in the quote will be replicated to the order in SAP S/4HANA. A document flow captures all documents in a lead-to-cash business process and their document statuses. The documents are linked together in chronological order for easy interpretation of what occurred on certain dates in the business process. ​

Here you can see a quote in SAP Sales Cloud:

A quotation could be a follow-up document for a sales lead or opportunity. This would link the quote to those documents, as well as any activities, such as phone calls or appointments, that were made about the quotation. After the quotation is created, subsequent documents, such as sales order or other activities could be linked to maintain the process flow. ​

Once a sales order is replicated to SAP S/4HANA, the delivery documents and billing documents can appear in the document flow of the sales order. This will show a PDF overview of those documents in SAP Sales Cloud. This is a great way for a sales representative to understand the entire flow of the business scenario surrounding a certain customer. ​

​Symona will show you how to convert a Quote into a Sales Order.

Because we have two solutions for Sales, the challenge is to understand how these solutions work together. Quotation, Order, Pricing, and Material Availability data is shared between both systems, so document creation is seamless.

A possible process flow by integrating SAP Sales Cloud with SAP S/4HANA could be the following:

Here you see that sales quotes and sales orders can be created in either SAP Sales Cloud or SAP S/4HANA. Once they are created in one of these systems, they are automatically created in the other. Therefore, no matter where they are created, they will always be in both systems. This means that the sales representatives do not have to log into both systems to view sales-related data. As a result, sales teams out in the field on their iPad can do their job making the sales and can trust that the warehouse team is receiving the delivery orders for shipping to their customers.

When this integration occurs, it's possible for supply chain and billing information to synchronize with SAP Sales Cloud. This gives a sales rep visibility over the entire business process, even when they are in the field.

This also allows for accurate and consistent pricing to be used from SAP S/4HANA, stock can be checked, and even credit can be checked.

Let’s see how the integration is done in the system:

As part of the integration strategy in SAP Sales Cloud, documents created in SAP Sales Cloud can be replicated to SAP S/4HANA for order fulfillment, logistics execution, and finance to occur.

Sales quotes and orders can be sent to the EPR system. Any further processing in the ERP system can be sent back to SAP Sales Cloud for complete visibility of the entire process. ​