Today more and more customers see the necessity of a CRM system but need it now! They are afraid of long implementation time and high costs. They require a much faster time-to-value for their CRM implementations without loosing the possibility to enhance the application at a later point in time.
Most successfully operating companies have a streamlined process for sales quotation and order management in place. Typically these processes run in an ERP backend system seamlessly integrated into the logistics. Nevertheless in many cases the sales force does not have direct access to these systems. These companies have the demand to extend their existing IT infrastructure to the front office and enhance it seamlessly with pre-sales functionality to streamline the overall sales processes within their organizations.
However, especially in current economic times, many companies need to improve in the sales process and make them more efficient and effective, in order to achieve the following objectives- Secure customer data in a single database due to fluctuation in sales force. So all important customer information and information about interaction with the customers is saved in a central place. Even if sales professional leave the company all customer related information is still available within the company.
- Planning and tracking customer/prospect engagement (focus on most valuable customers and understanding their business needs). A 360 degree view on customers, their potential and their buying history allows the sales people to easily concentrate on the most promising prospects and customers.
- Pipeline transparency, judge the pipeline health with the goal to meets sales quota. To give a company wide picture of the anticipated revenue.
- More reliable forecasting based on Opportunity Management is a critical success factor for all companies.
- Efficient quote and order processing directly by the sales force with a low failure rate by creating them as follow-ups from opportunities
- Identification of new leads in a very early stage by introducing campaign and lead management with a streamlined targeting and qualification process.
- Increase of wallet sharing for existing customers by applying methods of up-selling and cross-selling.
The following picture illustrates the differences between a classical implementation project and an implementation leveraging pre-configured packages. The option to implement packages allows a much faster productive system, at a later point in time dependent on the users’ feedback, the system can be still adjusted or complete new sets of features can be enabled.
Benefits of CRM packages:
- Fast time-to-value
Implementation time and costs are reduced by using a CRM package - Lower risk
The supported CRM processes are pre-configured and offered with a fix price - Upgrade path
Enhancements and upgrades to a CRM package are always possible. The underlaying system is a standard SAP CRM system. - Componentized modules
Flexible choice of modules based on a building block principle.
SAP offers its customers a new express implementation service for SAP CRM at a fixed price:
SAP CRM express.
SAP CRM express is based on SAP Best Practices and SAP CRM 7.0 and particularly targets small and medium enterprise (SME) and large enterprise (LE) dedicated business units. As a jumpstart onto the CRM journey, this package solution enables fast profits and a continuous process improvement.
The various modules of CRM express are
- Account and Activity Management including a client-based groupware integration with MS Outlook.
- Lead Management
- ERP sales quotation and sales order in the CRM WebClient user interface
- Campaign Management
- Call Center Complaint Management