Many people recently have been asking me, Marco where did you end up. I ended up doing something totally exciting that will be a game changer again for SAP like SDN was a few years ago.
We have been building a social network and a really user friendly platform for our most strategic and loyal customers; a hybrid between the best of SAP Community Network, Linked-In, Facebook and YouTube but for a smaller subset of our SAP ecosystem. We have been co-developing it with our Premier Customer Network (PCN) customers over the last three months and they democratically baptized it to be named: PCN CONNECT
That PCN community brings together SAP’s top 300+ Global Customers Employees and SAP’s account teams and experts. Markus Indetzki, Head of SAP CoE at Bayer Business Services GmbH summed it up for me: As a member of the PCN Connect, we are part of an exclusive community of organizations with significant global scale and accompanying challenges. Membership provides ways to validate their SAP strategy, become more closely aligned over the long term and, in addition, connect us with other top SAP Customers who are walking that same innovative path, to share ideas and to influence SAP’s strategy on products and services
My decision to start this new venture after being part of building our SAP Community Network was driven out of multiple conversations we had with SAP Account teams, as well as with our PCN customers.
We found that those strategic customers have invested significantly in SAP and are often very advanced with innovating around the edges. They ask questions like: “has anyone else done this before”; “Is there someone like me that is looking at the same business challenges”;”How can I reach more of my business audience with my company that uses our SAP software and connect”; “Can you connect me with a similar enterprise /business architect beyond my industry dealing with similar business or IT challenges”
What we are building out is something that is unique and never been done before in the B2B world. A community that consists of our most strategic, mostly fortune 500 customers; each company and their employees get their own internal community portal, but can connect to others like themselves; they can ask questions directly to SAP Experts or the Account Team and have really a place not only to talk about Business and IT Related topics; Paul Greenberg, a leader in Social CRM and I talked about it as the starting trend of Vertical and more Private Specific Communities
Global Account Directors and seasoned Account Executives told me on different occasions that this is the best Christmas present they are getting this year, as it allows them to connect, scale and help more people within their Customer.
Key for us in the coming months will be to build out that sense of community both online and in person, getting people connected at exclusive PCN and our traditional SAP events.
So far we have around 25 Global PCN Accounts up and running and if you are an employee of a PCN Company make sure you visit PCN Connect and search if your company has a private community. If not you can request one and we will work with your key executive sponsor to get you up and running.
As said I am super excited about building out this exclusive community platform and get our most strategic customer employees connected, expanding their ability to reach our SAP Ecosystem and improve their ability to get the best out of SAP, accelerating their business.
It feels good to blog on SCN again. also if you ever are interested in the PCN Community we also have PCN Backstage that allows people that are not part of PCN to get a peek into the PCN world.
Marco
