When It Comes to Sales, Here’s Why Simple Integration Is Better

4 ways to help your sales team maximize the value of data

Key Takeaways:

• A manufacturing sales team may be overwhelmed by data, but SAP integrations are available to help sales professionals get the most value out of this information.
• Sales professionals can use SAP configure, price, and quote (CPQ) solutions to provide accurate, up-to-the-minute pricing to customers.
• Together, SAP and Salesforce can help your sales team quickly respond to customer requests and improve customer experience (CX) levels.
• A sales team can use an SAP CPQ integration to generate insights it can use to find ways to achieve its short- and long-term goals.

Manufacturing sales teams often use a wide range of tools to meet or exceed quotas. These tools can help team members monitor and organize myriad data, but even with a large collection of data at their disposal, team members may struggle to transform this information into actionable insights.

Failure to get the most value out of data can hamper your sales team’s success. However, integrations are available to simplify the sales cycle, and sales professionals can use these integrations in conjunction with everyday tools to seamlessly capture and analyze data. As a result, integrations help sales teams realize the full value of the data at their disposal.

Tips to simplify the sales cycle

For manufacturing sales teams, integrating customer relationship management (CRM); configure, price, and quote (CPQ); marketing automation; pricing; and service systems is a must. Together, these systems streamline the sales process and increase sales team efficiency.

Now, let’s look at ways to use the aforementioned integrations to increase win rates, deal sizes, and revenues.

1. Fast quoting process

A manufacturing sales team may use middleware to integrate quote tools and CPQ systems into their SAP ERP, but doing so requires the team to maintain a duplicate set of prices. It also involves rebuilding customer-specific pricing, rules, logic, and other pertinent sales data and managing that in the front-end.

SAP CPQ solutions are available that eliminate these issues. The solutions provide real-time pricing from any front-end without the need to store any SAP data. That way, a manufacturer can let its sales team use cloud-based mobile apps to access up-to-the-minute pricing data from any device. This ensures that everyone on the team can quickly produce quotes, pricing, and correct answers to product queries. The result: Your sales team can respond to questions and requests from prospects and customers faster than ever before.

2. Accurate pricing

Complex, built-from-scratch integrations for SAP and Salesforce can take months or years to complete. The integrations commonly require middleware, replication, batch loads, or other custom development projects to migrate SAP processes into Salesforce. In addition, the integrations may require multiple integration layers that make it virtually impossible for a manufacturer to keep pace with today’s always-on, always-connected global marketplace.

A CPQ integration between SAP and Salesforce ensures a manufacturing sales team can consistently provide its customers with accurate pricing. This is due to the fact that the integration uses a single, standardized, native layer of real-time integration at all points between SAP and Salesforce. The integration allows your sales team to access up-to-date pricing in real-time, 24/7.

3. Enhanced customer experience

Manufacturing sales team members must be able to access customer data at their convenience. Otherwise, the longer it takes to look up customer information, the longer it takes a sales professional to respond to a question or request. And, if this professional takes too long to respond, a customer may look elsewhere for products, services, and support.

With SAP and Salesforce integration, a sales team can easily access a customer’s order history, product inventory, and other relevant information. It can retrieve this information upon request and instantly share it with your customers to improve the customer experience.

SAP and Salesforce integration can be leveraged to provide customers with self-service options, too. Your sales team can educate customers about these options, so they can place orders, track shipments, and view their order history. Self-service options provide customers with the latest pricing information, as well. Self-service options further enhance CX with customers who would prefer not to go through a salesperson. This also frees up time your sales team can use to explore ways to help manufacturers meet or surpass their sales goals.

4. Comprehensive sales insights

Data helps a manufacturing sales team identify which products and services are most popular. When leveraged properly, this information helps the team track customer patterns and trends. Over time, it can empower the team to identify and capitalize on growth opportunities to help a manufacturer optimize its earnings.

Your sales team can use an SAP CPQ integration to generate business insights. The team can leverage these insights to identify its sales strengths and weaknesses and find ways to drive cross- and up-selling. In the long run, the insights help accelerate growth and ensure your products and services hit the mark with customers.

Ready to simplify your sales cycle? enosix can help

enosix offers a platform that simplifies the sales cycle for manufacturing sales teams. Our platform runs in the application layer of SAP, does not require IDOCs or the JCo connector, and leverages Rapid Integration Objects that encompass common queries and transactions. As a result, our platform provides superior code reusability across different front-end systems and can be deployed in 70% to 90% less time than comparable options.

Request a demo today or contact us with questions, and we’re happy to teach you about our platform.