INTERVIEW: Bob Stutz

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crm7_1_22_qa_sap_stutz.pdf

SAP AG

SAP''s Bob Stutz shares insights on building a flexible CRM ecosystem - centeredaround customers'' rapidly changing needs and business challenges - to ensurecompetitive advantage and profitable future growth.

CRM: Beyond tremendous ROI, what are today’s CRM customers seeking?

Bob Stutz: Companies are looking for better relationships with their customers. Successful businesses today have a better understanding of their customers, and a better understanding of their needs and wants. They strive to find ways to best meet their customer needs and manage the customer experience – while growing their business.

CRM: What do companies who are successful with CRM do differently from those who are not?

BS: The companies that are truly successful with CRM are successful because their strategy comes from the top all the way down. There is executive and line-of-business sponsorship for the strategy, and this strategy is tied to an execution road map. Successful companies prioritize their pain points and customer processes and build a CRM road map with executable, measurable milestones to achieve their overall CRM strategy.

CRM: What is meant by ‘CRM Without Compromise’?

BS: Traditionally, when companies looked at CRM solutions, they wound up making trade-offs. At a high level, the trade-offs could be categorized as tactical versus strategic. Companies needed to make tradeoffs between ease of use versus rich capabilities; point solutions versus full multichannel CRM solutions; departmental solutions versus full enterprise solutions; quick implementations versus strategic CRM initiatives; on-demand versus on-premise.

SAP’s strategy – CRM Without Compromise – means that we have introduced CRM solutions that eliminate these trade-offs for customers. We’ve delivered CRM applications that are simple and easy to use to drive adoption and productivity; flexible, that provide choice with flexible deployment options (on-premise, on-demand and hybrid), adaptable processes and application extensibility; comprehensive and innovative with the breadth of CRM capabilities, as well as integrated, industry-specific end-to-end processes. What this really means is that customers don’t have to compromise ease of use, functionality or deployment models – they don’t have to make any critical trade-offs.

As an example, if an organization acquires a company, they can use an on-demand model to get their customer processes up and running quickly and get control of the sales pipeline, which is absolutely critical when you acquire a new company. And when they are ready, they can migrate the new division to a fully integrated on-premise model without disruption to their users.

More importantly, ‘CRM Without Compromise’ enables companies to have a more holistic strategy for CRM. I’ll give you an example. Five years ago, customers had to do some severe hacking to their business processes if they wanted to use CRM software. Most of the vendors out there had very static processes that were not flexible. And the only options a customer had were to write a tremendous amount of code to break that static process, which resulted in a lot of CRM implementation failures; or, they had to adopt a different process that was less than desirable for their business. Today SAP provides our customers with a solution where they no longer need to make these compromises.

CRM: On-demand solutions seem to be gaining traction in the marketplace. Why the popularity?

BS: On-demand became really popular from a simple sales-enablement-type of perspective. If you’re a salesperson or you’re VP of sales and you want to get simple SFA up and running fast, and you don’t want to hassle with your IT department, on-demand was a perfect solution. That’s really how it started – it was a way to bypass IT to get something up and running quickly; something that was really easy to use.

Also, on-demand has gained traction at some companies as a low-cost-of-entry hedge against the possibility of failure – failure based on not being properly prepared for the changemanagement aspect, or as stated previously, against being forced to adapt to an inflexible offering. But pure ondemand solutions that are limited in scope also create limited upside potential.

CRM: And if my business’ needs become more complex, where do I go from there?

BS: There is definitely a tipping point for customers where on-demand doesn’t make sense for their CRM needs and they need an on-premise solution. Drivers could include complex end-to-end processes, more complex industry scenarios, the need for more sophisticated customizations for differentiated processes, high-volume processing or issues around data security and privacy, especially if you’re talking about significant customization of processes – with a lot of real heavy integration.

For example, say you start out doing SFA, and the next thing you want to do is large-scale marketing, large-scale segmentation and running large campaigns. Or maybe you need to go one step further and start doing trade promotions, and tying that to your campaigns. Now you’re talking about doing a lot of heavy-duty number crunching, dealing with a lot of volume, a lot of complex processes. You probably have to go to an on-premise implementation.

CRM: Can I anticipate greater ROI through on-demand or on-premise offerings?

BS: It really depends on your overall CRM strategy and needs. You may start out with shortterm ROI, but you could run into limitations and additional costs in the long run. Let’s say you’re starting out in CRM and you select an on-demand product to do simple sales and service. It may be a very good ROI right from the beginning because you didn’t start with having a CRM application as a baseline. But it really comes down to what you’re trying to achieve with your overall CRM strategy.

Let me give you an example. You can do basic sales and service and light marketing in ondemand, and you can probably get a fairly decent ROI. Now let’s go to more complex things – let’s take order management. With the complexity of the processes and the integrated nature of data and processes with the back office, it is going to be very complex and expensive to try to achieve results in an on-demand environment. You almost have to go to an on-premise implementation. Or look at managing trade promotions including trade funds management. In every company that does trade promotions management, it’s considered part of CRM. But there’s no way you could ever do that in an on-demand system and do it effectively. So it really depends on what you’re trying to achieve and what your long-term business goals are.

CRM: Where should a business start in selecting a vendor, and what are the key questions we need to ask ourselves?

BS: The most critical thing that you need to do when you start looking at CRM is make sure you have a vision and a strategy. Because if you don’t have those two things before you start looking for a vendor, then you’re not going to find what you need. And you need to select a vendor that supports not only your immediate CRM needs, but that has a solution that fits with your overall CRM strategy and road map and allows for future growth.

CRM: Accenture has gone to this new CRM ecosystem. What might be the benefit for a business working with SAP and Accenture on this new platform?

BS: The new CRM ecosystem should provide Accenture customers with much better insight into SAP’s different offerings, including our platform, the openness of our platform and the ability for Accenture to deliver CRM solutions on top of our platform to really help their customers. We have a very good relationship with Accenture, and it’s growing all the time. They are our largest partner today, and we are working on several joint initiatives with Accenture.