5 Ways to Create Greater Customer Engagement with CPQ in Salesforce and SAP

Complex selling requires Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) in Salesforce. Real-time integration that gets customers the data they need, when and where they need it is the most powerful catalyst driving this change. Real-time integration is also driving greater customer intelligence and insights. Here’s how to create greater customer engagement with CPQ.

• Purpose-optimized integrations scale business logic, pricing, product availability, production, fulfillment and services data between ERP and CRM systems as a leading indicator of CPQ’s future growth.
• Best-in-class CPQ strategies today capitalize on Salesforce’s known user interface and usability to increase adoption, strengthened by business logic, pricing, and production data from SAP ERP systems.
• Enabling real-time integration between Salesforce and SAP systems creates entirely new opportunities for greater customer engagement while eliminating errors caused by swivel-chair integration.

Real-Time Integration Is Opening Up New Opportunities For Customer Engagement

The key to accelerating sales cycles is having the flexibility of configuring, pricing and quoting exactly what a customer wants, anywhere, anytime on any device. Sales teams whose CPQ systems are built on real-time SAP to Salesforce integration can sell faster than competitors and scale across more channels easily. And they can get more done using the familiar Salesforce interface that simplifies quoting, pricing, configuring to get quotes out faster than competitors. Combining selling speed, scale and app simplicity opens up the following opportunities for greater customer engagement with CPQ:

1. Create Real-Time Quotes and Eliminate Roadblocks with CPQ in Salesforce

Remove the roadblocks of having to rely on physical, bulk and batch movement of data. Slowness and lack of response are the most formidable competitors any sales team faces on a daily basis. Deals are lost when quotes take weeks to get done and won when sales teams can respond in real-time. It’s often the first sales rep to provide a complete quote that wins deals. Real-time integration between SAP and Salesforce is a must-have to accelerate sales cycles and defeat one of the toughest internal competitors any company has, which is slow and incomplete responses on quotes.

2. Reduce Dependency on Manual Integration 

Improve quoting and order accuracy, product quality, and on-time delivery performance by resolving to get free of all swivel chair integration. Going beyond manual integrations and having your ERP and CRM system integrated with real-time data drastically improves customer engagement. Middleware creates another system to have to maintain, and troubleshoot when connections inevitably fail–data virtualization is the right way to go.

3. Optimize Multi-Channel Customer Buying Experiences 

Deliver the same intelligent, contextually relevant buying experience to customers regardless of the channel they choose to purchase. The world is multichannel and companies must adapt and redefine their ERP, CRM, and sales automation, e-commerce, and analytics systems to this reality. Customer expectations around the ability to use any channel, anytime and have the same excellent experience are the new normal. Leveraging real-time integrations between enterprise systems, specifically, SAP and Salesforce, is critical to delivering an omnichannel experience..

4. Provide Support to Customers Regardless of Device or Location

All customers expect 24/7 access to support, service and returns information. There’s an always-on expectation. With real-time SAP to Salesforce integration, any company can be responsive and provide exactly what customers want, when they want it. 

5. Real-Time Integration Delivers New Insights into Future Customer Goals

Real-time integration enables entirely new opportunities to learn what customers want before they specifically ask for it. Predictive analytics and machine learning can be used to forecast which customers will buy when and why. Real-time integration becomes the enabler of greater customer intelligence