SAP CRM

What is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer relationship management (CRM) includes the practices and strategies that companies utilize throughout the customer lifecycle. Companies interact with customers in a variety of ways — sales, marketing, and customer service — with the intent to retain the relationship and increase sales growth opportunities.

Technology plays a critical role in CRM initiatives. Insights from data and analytics provide a myriad of opportunities to enhance customer relationships.

Key benefits of CRM systems include:

• Improved customer experience
• Increased customer retention
• Higher sales revenue
• Greater process efficiency

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders

What is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer relationship management (CRM) includes the practices and strategies that companies utilize throughout the customer lifecycle. Companies interact with customers in a variety of ways — sales, marketing, and customer service — with the intent to retain the relationship and increase sales growth opportunities.

Technology plays a critical role in CRM initiatives. Insights from data and analytics provide a myriad of opportunities to enhance customer relationships.

Key benefits of CRM systems include:

• Improved customer experience
• Increased customer retention
• Higher sales revenue
• Greater process efficiency

Key Considerations for SAPinsiders

• Ensure your SAP CRM system has clean data and is updated. When sales opportunities arise, they are entered into SAP CRM, initiating the beginning of the sales cycle phase. Customers may be at different phases, such as learning about the company’s products or in the decision-making phase of selecting a vendor.

John Burton, Director of Product Management at SAP, and William Pritchett from Dow Corning Corporation, share their insights about SAP CRM sales stages and keeping records updated. “The value in the Sales Stage field is used to indicate the current phase in the buying cycle. This field can also be used to indicate automatic closure of opportunities that have not been updated within a specified period,” they write. Read the full article to learn how to keep SAP CRM opportunities clean.

• Integrate SAP CRM and SAP ERP projects successfully to assure data synchronization. When replicating data between SAP CRM and SAP ERP, there are several critical decisions and enhancements required to ensure optimal system performance post integration. Don’t underestimate time-tested techniques and strategies that lead to seamless integration.

Allen Roholt, SAP Consultant at ECENTA, answers questions about how to apply these proven techniques that drive enhanced user experience. Such user experience “encompasses comprehensive visibility into the data they interact with, as well as seamless transference of data between systems, allowing for sales and services processes to flow uninterrupted.” ﷟HYPERLINK “https://sapinsider.org/optimizing-sap-crm-and-sap-erp-integration-qa-on-improving-data-transfer-user-experience-and-customer-service/”Read the full article to learn more about customer engagement and commerce integration projects.  the full article to learn more about customer engagement and commerce integration projects.

• Leverage the sales features that exist within SAP CRM. Adapting the standard sales functionality of SAP CRM could lead to missed opportunities that support the specific needs of key accounts.

Dr. Ahmed Hezzah, Senior Manager at Accenture, provides his insights on implementing a key account management solution for a global organization that leverages the sales features already available in SAP CRM. He answers “marketing and sales questions on implementing effective campaign execution and lead generation processes across marketing and sales within SAP CRM to identify and close more sales opportunities, enhance key account processes, and support lead qualification and routing processes.” Readthe full article to glean Dr. Hezzah’s strategies.