The modern business environment is characterized by relentless competition and drives organizations to constantly innovate. When empowering businesses with proper tools, the platforms may offer an unparalleled approach to efficient sales developments, reducing the sales cost operation, facilitating better relationships with the customers, and in turn, generating more revenue for your company.
SAP Commerce and Sales Cloud serve a significant purpose geared towards achieving the same objectives – user experience and process efficiency, increased order value, improved conversion rates, and improved sales
This blog explores the useful capabilities of these two interconnected SAP solutions, explaining the business benefits, personas, industries, business processes, and quotation efficacy as the key elements
So, without further ado, let´s dive into the value proposition of this blog!
Business Benefits:
- Improve the user experience and process efficiency in sales and service.
- Increase order value, conversion, and retention of existing customers by enabling personalized B2C-like B2B experiences.
- Lower implementation time and costs through pre-built integration.
- Customer lifetime value
- Fully integrated solution for Commerce and Sales Cloud.
- Go beyond traditional CRM with e.g. true interactive selling and Personalized Offers.
- And much more…
Features included:
- Synchronize customer data from SAP Commerce Cloud to Sales / Service Cloud.
- Single Sign-On enabled highly scalable enterprise solution.
- The described scenario with Commerce & Sales Cloud covers the quotation process for standard products (CPQ – Configure Product Quotation is not considered as part of this process)
- SAP B2B Commerce Cloud and Sales Cloud with seamless customer experience.
- Enhanced quotation management process.
- Automated workflows.
- SAP CX AI – Recommendation linked to the Intelligent Sales Execution Add-on.
- Out-of-the-box plugin integration between SAP Commerce and Sales Cloud.
Personas
- Joe Wills is a buyer working for the CBond company under the Pumps Industry.
- Adrian Chase is the sales representative working on the SAP Sales Cloud Solution for the Best Run Pumps
Industry
- This blog focuses on the B2B Pumps Industry / Machinery – Although this scenario can be applicable across industries.
Business process flow:
Now, let’s talk about a real business scenario where your company may apply this solution. Depicted below is the process this blog will tackle:
Here, we see the process flow of the End-to-End Quote negotiation scenario. In fact, the quote can be initiated either by Sales Rep Adrian in SAP Sales Cloud or by the buyer – Joe Wills in the Commerce storefront. In this blog, the focus is to start from the Commerce Solution although the Sales Cloud Scenario is particularly similar during the negotiation. Also, in both cases, the Quote is replicated asynchronously between both systems (via CPI Cloud Platform integration under the BTP portfolio).
With that said, let’s have a closer look and go through the different steps.
Joe Wills is a buyer working for the CBond company (Pumps/Machinery Industry*). In his role as a buyer, he typically searches for relevant products, negotiates quotes, and places orders on behalf of his company.
STEP 1 – Search a product - In our scenario, Joe searches for the Pump product on SAP Commerce Cloud Best Run Pumps, and selects the suitable one for the CBond Company. * For more CX industry-tailored information, please check here: SAP Customer Experience: Delivering Growth with Intelligent Industry-Tailored Solutions.
STEP 2 – Submit a quote request – For the selected product(s), Joe submits a request for a quotation by adding the product to a cart and then submitting the quote. From SAP Commerce Cloud, this quote replicated to the SAP Sales Cloud.
Adrian Chase is a sales representative and the Account Owner for CBond. He is responsible for sales, negotiating, and offering the best deals to buyers generating sales revenues for Best Run Pumps
STEP 3 - Adrian Chase receives the quote request and modifies it to make an attractive offer to Joe (Approval process, workflow rules notifications can also be considered to speed up the negotiation)
STEPS 4 - Joe Wills receives the quote back for review.
STEP 5a and 5b – Accept/Reject the offer from the seller. In SAP Commerce Cloud, Joe may accept the quote or ask for a better offer. In case he rejects it, Adrian Chase will receive the quote request back in SAP Sales Cloud and can modify it. Along with modifications on the price or discount, AI-based product recommendations can also be added to the quote. This allows the seller to make the offer more attractive and have opportunities to cross-sell and increase revenues. (For more AI SAP Sales Cloud scenarios, please take a look here: Intelligent Sales Execution)
Finally, Joe Wills accepts the quote and converts it to an order.
STEP 6: The Order is replicated to the SAP Backend (ERP, S/4HANA) for fulfillment and follow-up processes.
Business scenarios flow in Details - Advancing Quotation Efficacy!
Let’s simulate in detail the above-presented process.
Joe Will is searching through the SAP Commerce Cloud site – Best Run Pumps. As a buyer working for his B2B company, he is seeking the best deal in terms of value for money. As usual, the B2B buyers know what they are looking for. Joe, being quite experienced in the industry, is searching for Multi Eco Pumps:
After reviewing the SAP Commerce Cloud site – Best Run Pumps products, and checking its specifications, Joe decides to get a quote for 10 pumps:
Joe requests the quote. Being a buyer interested in getting the best deals, he edits the quote comments and asks for a better offer. Eg: Considering Cbond would buy 10 pumps in one shot, he adds his comments asking for a better offer:
He then submits the quote:
Right after submitting the quote, Joe Will can look for his requests in the “My Quotes” section. This shows a history of his quote requests along with their status. The last one sent is shown here as Submitted (bear in mind that also E-mails can be sent via SAP Commerce Cloud. Such emails like customer registration and in our case, emails about quotation requests and order confirmation can be customized to better interact with the customer and improve the customer experience – Please see more here: Configuring Emails)
After the request is submitted, the Sales Representative Adrian Chase working for the Best Run Pumps in Sales Cloud receives this information and can continue with the business process. For a better experience and to speed up the negotiation process, a task can be created automatically in Sales Cloud to inform the Account responsible / owner (in this case Adrian Chase) when a quote request has been submitted. It is also possible to send a notification via email if necessary.
Following the Task notification in SAP Sales Cloud, Adrian navigates to it and sees the quote details like its notes and related items:
Adrian starts working on the quote, reviewing the customer's request for a better offer. Instead of simply offering a discount, he also checks if there are other products he could recommend as a cross-sell to further increase the revenues as well as add value to the buyer. He leverages the Machine Learning based Intelligent add-on. The Recommendations side panel proposes a list of recommended products for Multi Eco 33i. See more here how it works!
Adrian accepts the ML-based Product recommendation to add the Installation Service for Multi Eco 33i by simply clicking on the recommended products side panel. Furthermore, he adds a 10% discount on the pumps:
He saves the document. Adrian also updates the quote with comments to inform about the discounts offered:
Adrian submits the quote and clicks Create External Follow-up Document. This sends the document to SAP Commerce Cloud Best Run Pumps:
An email notification to the buyer Joe can also be sent, informing about the quote update immediately:
Joe can then log in to SAP Commerce Cloud Best Run Pumps and review the quotation:
After review, if the offer is acceptable, Joe can accept it and checkout. If not, he can re-negotiate and request further revision by editing the quote request. This would send it back to Adrian. In the negotiation process, approvals may be required when there is a higher discount amount or other strategies could be evaluated – eg Promotions (not covered in the flow once it would replay the same steps as stated in the same scenario).
In our scenario, Joe rejects the additional product recommendation of Installation services, but he is satisfied with the 10% discount offered. With that, Joe decides to accept and check the order:
Set up / more useful documentation:
- SAP Commerce Cloud - B2B Integration with SAP Cloud for Customer
- Business to Business (B2B)
- Replicating Quote Between SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Cloud for Customer
- Quote Integration from C4C -to- Commerce using APIs
- Commerce Quote documentation
- The seamless ticketing support journey between SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Service Cloud
Integration considerations:
- Usage of Commerce/C4C iFlows:
https://api.sap.com/integrationflow/CommerceQuoteOutbound
https://api.sap.com/integrationflow/CommerceQuoteInbound - More details can be found in the Commerce-C4C Integration Guide
- This scenario is focused on B2B customers and we exemplified the ERP as the leading system. So, the customers' records are integrated between ERP, Commerce and Sales Cloud.
- CPI – Cloud Platform integration (aka Integration Suite) is used as middleware.
Conclusion:
Seamless business processes across systems that are not siloed can bring about great efficiencies. Think of efficient and time-critical processes like negotiations. Buyers don’t have the time or energy to spend in long-drawn purchase cycles. Sellers don’t want to lose opportunities to add more value to their buyers, or opportunities for cross-sell. With integrated processes across SAP Commerce and SAP Sales Cloud (like negotiations), it can lead to faster deal cycles, improved customer experience, increased revenues, repeat purchases, and higher order value. Such integrated business processes can make your sales processes super-smart and quotation systems ultra-efficient to stand up to the dynamic nature of the digital marketplace
We hope you have enjoyed the reading,
Thank you,
Luciano Monteiro,
CX Solution Value Advisory team.
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