Would you like to expand your company’s marketing process to become better and more accurately by integrating your sales process? In the following article I would like to introduce two Customer Experience solutions from the SAP C/4HANA portfolio to you – SAP Marketing Cloud and SAP Sales Cloud.
There are many companies, that already use the SAP Sales Cloud solution as customer focused sales system to maintain business partners, contacts, marketing attributes, activities, leads and opportunities, etc.
The SAP Marketing Cloud is a cross-industry solution that provides an individualized, contextual marketing experience to the customers. As the standard marketing capabilities of SAP Sales Cloud are limited, customers are asking for integration between the SAP Marketing Cloud and SAP Sales Cloud solution in order to improve their marketing capabilities.
Why customers are asking for integration
The main advantage of the integration between SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Marketing Cloud is, that SAP Marketing offers a classical waterfall type segmentation model, where customers can be grouped and selected via different criteria. Generally, campaign management will be executed within the SAP Marketing Cloud as the functionality is much more comprehensive.
SAP Marketing Cloud content management, multi-step campaigns, golden record logic, marketing management (with planning) and scoring are also big advantages. If a company is using web-based sales channels the commerce capabilities (offers and recommendations) of SAP Marketing Cloud are also very helpful.
By sharing the same business partner objects and business document data, marketing increases the conversion rate effectively, i.e. converting potential buyers and prospects to real buyers.
Integration architecture overview
The following picture describes the integration architecture of the SAP Marketing Cloud system and SAP Sales Cloud (SAP Cloud for Customer). They are loosely coupled by the SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) middleware. The SAP Cloud Platform Integration is an integration broker and doesn’t store any data itself.
Accounts, contacts, and individual customers are replicated from SAP Sales Cloud to SAP Marketing Cloud as corporate accounts and contacts. The leads, activities and opportunities are replicated from SAP Sales Cloud to SAP Marketing Cloud as interactions. In the SAP Marketing Cloud these interactions can be used for segmentations for example.
Key integration process flow
The SAP Marketing Cloud and SAP Sales Cloud integration supports the following integration process from out of the box.
- Create marketing leads, tasks, appointments, or phone calls in SAP Cloud for Customer that are automatically triggered by activating campaigns in SAP Marketing.
- Replicate data for accounts, contacts, individual customers, customer relationships, marketing permissions and marketing attributes from SAP Cloud for Customer to SAP Marketing.
- Replicate data for business documents from SAP Cloud for Customer to SAP Marketing, including leads, opportunities, activities (visits, appointments, phone calls).
- Maintain marketing permission and subscription information in SAP Marketing and display this information in SAP Cloud for Customer.
What are the key business benefits of this integration?
Marketing managers can rely on the user profiles in SAP Marketing to very accurately predict the behavior of their prospects.
- To consolidate all relevant customer data in one view and to orchestrate personalized customer engagements across the entire customer journey.
- Real-time marketing: from SAP Marketing you can create dynamic customer profiles from information in real-time and campaigns can be made more fruitful.
- Better process integration with sales by creating marketing leads, tasks, appointments, or phone calls in SAP Cloud for Customer that are automatically triggered by activating the campaigns in SAP Marketing.
- Improve the overall quality of marketing-generated leads and call center activities.
- Track the interactions (leads, opportunities, and activities) replicated from SAP Cloud for Customer in real time to provide full visibility of marketing data to make strategic decisions.
Please feel free to contact our Camelot Customer Experience Team, if you have any questions. In a virtual meeting, we love to discuss your specific requirements and are able to show you a live demo.
Note: You might also be interested in reading our blog post about iBeacons, where we show how the SAP Marketing Cloud and the SAP Sales Cloud can be used for linking the online and offline world.
