Does one of your sales team’s most important tasks involve assessing the products in the market and checking their placements?
In that case, SAP’s Sales Cloud as part of the SAP C/4HANA suite can make a significant contribution to supporting sales staff in the field. From planning their visits, to preparing for the appointment, to conducting the surveys, the SAP Sales Cloud provides a number of useful features to help you make your field sales team more efficient.
Tour planning
Employees can plan their tours each week based on visit intervals stored for the market. The system supports them with proposals and several selection criteria such as sales potential, market classifications or geographic features. Even if appointments are outside the defined visiting hours, the employee is warned and can reschedule accordingly. In addition, they can visualize their tour via Google Maps and use Google Streetview to get more information for optimal planning.
Recurring regular visits can be globally defined in templates and used by the field sales employee as a basis for planning their own tour.
As soon as the tour is scheduled, visits are automatically generated and the field sales employee can start processing their tasks.
Preparing visits
To prepare the visit, they can display the market address, the contact person and their telephone number. Furthermore, they can use the integrated reporting tool to display the sales and purchase quantities for the previous months on the basis of individual products or product lines.
Conducting visits
Once at the market, they can start with the dynamically prepared survey and record the data in a structured way. Stock that is available or that needs to be reordered, product and display placements, and competitor information can be recorded. The type of data to be recorded can be specified centrally for each market and product.
It is also possible to store listings of the individual markets for quick and efficient entry. Products to be reordered can be marked directly and then transferred to a consolidated order – with direct ERP integration, of course, so that the order can already be processed on the way to the next market.
Mobile and offline-capable
To support the employee in the market, the SAP app is compatible with iOS, Android and Windows 10. The information is prepared in it in the same way as in the browser, meaning there is no need to train your employees in two different environments. In addition, all functions can also be used offline.
Of course, SAP’s Sales Cloud can do even more. SAP is constantly working to further expand the solution’s focus on the consumer goods industry. We are already looking forward to further innovations and will discuss the latest developments in the area of Perfect Store in a future post.
