In what usually is a rather uneventful month for challenging projects the world over, December proved to be pretty challenging for my team. We had to help a firm overcome a number of pain points they experienced with the SAP CRM, particularly those associated with the Service Equipment and Install Base functionalities. While helping the customer out, I thought I could list down these pain points and how we countered them, as I believe they could work as a crystal ball for other firms as we make all the difference in 2020. So, here goes!

For every successful marketing campaign, the right audience needs to be defined to ensure customer-oriented interactions. This can be achieved by defining the right target groups that share similar attributes (for example, address, age, hobbies, purchasing habits, geo-coding, etc.) and adapting your marketing activities. You can achieve half the success by just focusing on the right audience, even before the start of the campaign.

Nowadays, an effective ERP strategy is largely dependent on the timeliness and quality of information that you receive from suppliers, trading partners, and clients. An even bigger challenge is faced by organizations attempting to create a holistic, real-time view of all their enterprise information by combining multiple ERP systems and instances domestically and/or globally. Your ability to effectively integrate your business solutions and systems is critical to implementing business strategies.

SAP Marketing is great for contextual marketing in real time because it lets you engage with customers and get them interested in what you have to offer. Likewise, it lets you build effective brand relationships when you market to one specific audience. SAP Marketing is unlike traditional marketing methods that are not always successful in engaging individual customers. Traditional marketing campaigns typically lack basic knowledge of every customer's needs and wants, resulting in indiscriminate messages addressed to everyone. When you market with SAP Marketing, you can understand your customers better by helping you identify what your customers have done, what they are currently doing, and what they will do.

Sales teams, managers, and specialists are often challenged with ways to engage customers efficiently and gain smarter ways to sell. SAP Sales Cloud is a solution that can empower your business and its sales team with insights that can help you sell better, especially on digital platforms.

SAP Marketing can be handy for contextual marketing in real-time. It lets you engage and delight your customers while cultivating brand relationships as you market your business to each customer. Conventional marketing campaigns may not be able to fully engage individual customers due to the lack of knowledge of what each customer needs and wants. This results in indiscriminate messages to everyone in the target market. SAP Marketing addresses this concern by enabling marketers to have an in-depth understanding of their customers. This way, they know exactly what they have done, what they are currently doing, and what they could do.

Modernizing your SAP system is an important consideration you must make so as to ensure that your business is still able to meet the changing market requirements and demands and provide richer functionality to all users. An SAP CRM cloud update will allow your business to be more dynamic and increase its ability to keep up with the changing demands of the market.

Implementation partners used to start from scratch when building integrations, but that changed with the when SAP made it possible to integrate SAP Commerce with other SAP solutions. The integrated solution provides a ready-to-use and standardized integration framework that links the multi-commerce capabilities of the SAP Commerce Suite with other SAP products, such as SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP CPQ Cloud, and SAP ERP applications. This ensures that custom configurations are minimized, and integrations can be completed faster and at a more reasonable price. Through this kind of SAP integration, businesses can have an all-in-one solution that integrates SAP back-end processes. Here are some of the integration options: