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Andrii Hrach
Team Lead SAP CX 

How SAP Sales Cloud empowers sales departments to stay on top and achieve their goals 

Our team of experts continues to reveal the powerful capabilities of SAP Sales and Service Cloud solutions. You can find our previous articles on the site, where we explore solutions and specific features that help businesses automate their customer relationship management processes.

In this (not-so-short, let's be honest) article, my goal is to walk you through the tools for managing deals with potential or current clients. And, importantly, to help you reduce the number of gray hairs you might acquire in those final weeks of the reporting period.
SAP Sales Cloud functionality helps managers stay in control throughout the entire process and gain timely insights for making adjustments.  

Let's start with a bit of a glossary to get familiar with SAP's object naming and terminology: 

1) Lead-to-Cash – This is the end-to-end process of interacting with a customer, from the very first contact to receiving payment for goods or services. This process encompasses all customer interactions, so it might involve other systems from the SAP Customer Experience portfolio. You can find a more detailed explanation of this process in Sergey Kozub's article "SAP Sales Cloud: Overview and Key Features".2) Lead – An object in the system that records the initial contact with a potential customer or a current customer regarding a specific product or service.  3) Opportunity – A deal. This is an object in the system that helps you manage deal information. It's a crucial object, and using it correctly allows you to keep a close eye on your sales pipeline metrics. It's primarily used in "long" sales cycles (more than a month with a complex structure of interactions). More details on this object below.  4) Pipeline Management – This refers to the process of managing the stages that deals go through in a CRM system, from the first customer contact to closing the deal. However, it's worth noting that SAP also has a feature called Pipeline Manager, which is a bit different from the general definition.  5) Pipeline Manager – In SAP, this feature displays Opportunities for a selected period, with aggregated expected revenues in the reporting period (month, quarter, year). It's a robust tool for sales managers, providing a clear overview of the team's sales representatives on an easy-to-understand chart. More details to come below. 6) Forecast Management – The process of forecasting sales. SAP Sales Cloud includes a Forecast Tracker feature. This allows you to compare the Sales Plan (Target) with the expected revenue from closed deals across the entire pool of Opportunities. A more in-depth description will also be provided later in the text.  

Let's start by diving into the Opportunity Management process through the lens of SAP solutions.

Once the initial contact with a potential customer has been made and the sales representative is confident that it's time to move to the next stage of the sale (a "long" deal), the Lead object in SAP Sales Cloud is updated, and a new Opportunity object (Deal) is created. This process is automated and simplified for the end-user of the system. 

Why is the Opportunity object (Deal) necessary in the system, and why should sales representatives invest time in filling it out?

If your sales process involves numerous sub-processes with ongoing communication, various control points, and takes more than a month on average – congratulations, you're in the real of typical B2B sales. Such a process might include phases like: customer needs identification, initial proposal development, commercial proposal approval, tender, contract creation, and deal closure. For this type of process, SAP recommends using a separate object in the system called "Opportunity." This object allows you to intuitively segment all the phases of working on a deal. It's not recommended to manage all of this within a single Lead object.  
During implementation projects, we advise users to break down their deal workflow into logical phases, determine the average time spent on each phase, and identify the activities that are mandatory or optional within the process. If your sales department doesn't have a clearly defined methodology, we suggest considering SAP's standard phase template*. Namely: 
1) Identify Opportunity. You need to identify the need, conduct an initial presentation, visit the customer's contact person, and enter the data into the system to move to the next phase.  2) Develop Value Proposition. In collaboration with the R&D department, you need to prepare a product sample and calculate the margin.  3) Quotation. The sales representative needs to align the Commercial Proposal with internal stakeholders and then with the customer contact.  4) Decision. It's important to engage your network of contacts to increase the chances of a successful deal.  5) Close. You need to sign the contract and ensure the first shipment of goods from the warehouse.  
It's worth noting that the set of phases can vary depending on the product, sales region, distribution channel, or other factors.  
*These unique phases, activities within each phase, processing time, and conditions are configured in the system through straightforward settings.  
To maximize focus for sales representatives when working on deals, SAP offers the Guided Selling feature. A Kanban board with a list of deals, filtering and sorting tools, and AI-powered deal potential scoring helps specialists easily identify the deals that require their immediate attention.

SEO: Guided Selling opportunities list

Depending on the deal's phase, the system will suggest specific actions to the user, and creating a meeting or task for a related department can be automated.

SEO: Opportunity view

If you need to make changes quickly, you can do so directly from the list of all deals.  
Once you open a deal, you'll have all the necessary information for convenient management and closure. Specifically: 1) Deal and customer details.  2) The current deal phase and suggested activities.  3) The ability to involve colleagues, store files, and communicate in Microsoft Teams within the context of a specific deal.

SEO: Opportunity integration with MS Teams

4) A history of meetings, tasks, calls, and messages related to the deal.  5) The ability to split deal revenue among multiple managers and set individual targets for each (when several managers are working on the same deal).  6) Convenient tools for creating Commercial Proposals and other objects.  7) Display of data for Forecast Tracker (Forecasting). Namely: ● Planned deal closing date. This is necessary for building the forecast, indicating when we expect to receive revenue (calculated automatically).  ● Expected deal amount. Calculated automatically based on the prices of added products or entered manually by the user.  ● Probability of successful closure. Automatically populated based on the sales phase.  ● Deal forecast category for easy segmentation in the forecast (e.g., Committed or Best Case).  
Thus, a single object consolidates all the necessary information for the sales representative and provides logical prompts for the next steps in the sales process.  

Keeping a close eye on deals with Pipeline Manager and Pipeline Flow 

Pipeline Manager displays deals within a selected time period using charts. You can view aggregated deal amounts by month, quarter, or year. 

SEO: Pipeline Manager view in SAP Sales Cloud

The size of the bubble indicates the deal value. The bubble's position on the timeline shows when the deal is expected to close and its likelihood of success. The deal's score is derived from a machine learning algorithm and indicates the risk associated with that probability.

Example Use Case: As a sales manager, you want to check the deals confirmed for the current quarter. Use the filter panel to select Deals in progress. If large red bubbles appear on the chart, you'll likely want to investigate the reason. Why do these deals have such low scores, and what activities have been completed within each deal? After making changes to the deals, the information is immediately updated on the chart.

To analyze changes in deals over time, SAP Sales Cloud offers an additional tool – Pipeline Flow. It helps managers see which deals aren't progressing as expected and take appropriate action.

Example Use Case: As a sales manager, you can monitor the sales representatives involved in specific deals to check if any meetings have taken place recently or if any are scheduled for the near future. For instance, you need to check the progress of selected deals. You select a period in the Start column and see that some deals remain unchanged, while others have moved to the Won/Lost segments in the End column.
The system shows you how deals that initially looked promising were lost.

SEO: Pipeline Flow view in SAP Sales Cloud

"Are we really going to achive our target?" 

How can you be sure that the sales plan is actually achievable? We can assume that 30% of deals in the pipeline almost always end unsuccessfully. A simplified formula for achieving the plan would look like this:

0,7 * PipelineAmount > Target, Where: 0,7 – 70%, the average percentage of successful deals PipelineAmount – the total value of all deals in the pipeline with a closing date in this quarter (Forecast) Target – the quarterly sales plan 
For convenient forecast generation and comparison with the plan, SAP Sales Cloud offers Forecast Tracker. It also allows you to model changes in the sales pipeline to reach the target and send the generated forecast to the manager for review.  
Example Use Case: As a sales manager, you're looking for significant discrepancies between forecasted and actual deal performance and comparing them to the plan. If there's a large discrepancy towards the end of your sales period, you'll want to examine your best-case deal category, look for deals in progress that can be closed by allocating additional resources or changing conditions. You can use modeling – change several attributes in a deal and see how it affects the forecast.  

SEO:Forecast Tracker in SAP Sales Cloud

Conclusion 

Modern CRM systems are no longer just a notepad with a customer database. SAP Sales Cloud functionality offers key benefits for each user role. For sales representatives, the system helps achieve targets, focus on important deals, and guides them throughout the entire sales cycle. Sales managers can effectively control the process and make timely adjustments to their team's activities without needing additional tools. Department heads can not only set planned targets but also have confidence that these targets will be achieved with proper system usage and a healthy sales pipeline.

You can find more articles about the solution's functionality on our page.  

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We are a Ukrainian consulting company specializing in the implementation of SAP and other IT solutions for businesses.

Services

Contact us

36D Yevhena Konovaltsia St, Kyiv, 01133+380 (99) 036 48 04

Privacy Policy