Work patterns: How SAP Jam helps sales teams connect the dots

If there was ever a worker that needed to connect the dots, it’s a sales person.

Sales professionals – on top of the stress of knowing that their productivity has a direct impact on their company’s top line – have to juggle the expectations of their customers and prospects  while communicating and coordinating with a multitude of colleagues on other teams like product management, marketing, finance, and customer service, just to name a few.

The information and documents that they interact with – product spec sheets, presentations, quotes, contracts, and much more – add to the complexity. Keeping all of it in order without going crazy is a challenge in and of itself. And that’s just before a deal closes – once it’s done, a slew of new processes kick off, often including external partners, consultants, and vendors.

CRM systems were supposed to come to the rescue – and to a large degree, they have. But outside of their CRM systems, sales people still routinely have an ample stock of uncorralled documents, communications, and exceptions that contribute to their stress – often driven by the fact that not everyone in their organization has access to or familiarity with their CRM system.

What’s needed is a way to connect the dots – people, documents, data, applications, and processes – so that everyone can stay on the same page, make rapid, informed decisions, and act on them to deliver results.

Work Patterns

With this in mind, we’re introducing work patterns in SAP Jam: They’re pre-built collaborative processes that combine expertise, content, and best practices with real-time business data and applications. Work patterns are designed to help you:

• Obtain a complete picture of the situation or project
• Get access to experts who can help you get things done
• Create a fast, repeatable approach for your work, so you can quickly drive it to completion
• Be flexible so you can change processes to meet the needs of your work

We’ve selected the first set of work patterns to support collaborative sales and service processes with SAP CRM. They bring together SAP Jam with SAP CRM data and objects to support the things sales people most frequently need to do.

• Account management
  View and manage all details related to a particular customer account

• Opportunity management
  Manage all sales opportunities related to a customer account

• Deal rooms
  Manage tasks, discussions, and processes related to a single sales opportunity

• Customer engagement
  Communicate and share documents with the customer before an opportunity closes

Account management

It’s often important to view all information available for a customer account – particularly if it’s a large organization and has more than one opportunity in progress. With the account management work pattern, you’ll be able to see not only a list of all sales opportunities but also a list of all open service requests from the customer – so you can help fend off problems as they arise and increase the chance of your deal succeeding. Data is pulled directly from SAP CRM, and you can sort requests to see which ones are the latest, are overdue, or have high priority.

You’ll also have a place to store official documents and reference materials related to the account – and a place to store user-contributed information about the company, like videos and documents. In addition, the home page of the template automatically shares important overview information about the group to help keep you up to date, including:

• The latest comments in a discussion
• Details about the company
• Key members of the group
• New tasks that have been assigned

Opportunity management

The opportunity management work pattern is perfect for keeping tabs on the details of all sales opportunities you have with a particular customer. You’ll see a list of:

• Newest opportunities
• Opportunities with the highest value
• Opportunities closing within 30 days
• Opportunities with a high chance of success

The data is pulled live from SAP CRM so you can be sure it’s always up to date. Plus, you’ll be able to see a “quick view” card for each opportunity that dynamically shows detail about each opportunity in real time. If you want to collaborate further on a specific opportunity, you can create a deal room directly from the quick-view card.

Deal rooms

Before a deal closes, sales people often have to consult with other colleagues – to discuss the sales strategy, work on a presentation, or engage with experts across the company to answer specific questions about product or contract issues.

Using the deal room work pattern, sales people can engage with not only their own team but also other colleagues who wouldn’t typically have access to SAP CRM – like experts in finance, legal, or product management. The deal room allows people from outside sales to take part in the conversation directly, without resorting to side conversations via email, which can be difficult to share and capture.

To encourage best practices and help drive closure, the deal room automatically includes widgets for:

• Customer-related documents
• Presentation materials
• Key team members
• A strategy discussion

To make sure that everyone has the very latest information about the status of the opportunity, the deal room also includes live opportunity data from pulled directly from SAP CRM. For instance, if the lead account executive determines that the likelihood of closing the deal has increased from 20% to 60% – and updates the “chance of success” figure in SAP CRM – that new figure will be shown in SAP Jam automatically.

Customer engagement

While an opportunity is in progress, it’s important to keep the customer up to date. Instead of sharing documents, forms, quotes, and other materials by email – and never being sure what version they have – invite your customer to connect within SAP Jam. Right in front of you, you’ll have all the latest documents that you’ve provided to the customer and any they’ve provided you in return. You’ll have a single place that you can easily check for updates – rather than herding multiple emails and documents into folders.

This template is designed to exclude details from SAP CRM that only you and your sales team should see, so you can feel secure that customers won’t be able to view any sensitive information.

And if your sales team is reorganized and you move off the account before the deal closes, you can easily share the status, documents, and conversation with the new sales rep who’s taking the account over from you.

Repeatable, flexible, and efficient

Work patterns are designed to be a fast, repeatable approach for you to kick off work, manage it, and drive it to completion – taking advantage of best practices and prior experience. Not every business activity is brand new, so why start from scratch?

But we’ve also made sure that the experience is easy to customize, since not all projects are identical. You have the flexibility to adapt the process to suit your specific needs.

With these work patterns for sales teams, we’ve created a way for you to bring everything together so that you get the full picture – and you’re ultimately able to resolve your big challenges more efficiently, more thoroughly, and with more transparency.