With a new brand campaign, SAP is coming out swinging. Not only is it seeking to redefine the CRM category, but it also aims to change market perceptions that other players, such as Salesforce, have better front office technology. And with Gartner predicting that by 2017, spend on consumer technology will outpace any other enterprise software category at US$37 billion, the stakes are high.
Speaking at this week’s BluLeader breakfast event in Sydney, Graham Jackson, SVP, SAP hybris APJ and China, said although analyst reports show SAP (including hybris) is a leader in 15 of 17 front office categories (and is not present in two categories), while Salesforce is a leader in only one (and is not present in 14 categories), “the market perception out there is completely different to that”.
“SAP has done a really poor job collectively at pushing ourselves in the customer technology arena,” he said.
To tackle this, in October, SAP launched its ‘Beyond CRM’ campaign, which Jackson said was “more aggressive” than SAP would usually be, both in creating a “bold narrative” that will help to redefine the CRM category by pushing the boundaries to encompass the front office more fully, but directly targeting its biggest competitors in the space “to disrupt perceptions about who is leading and who isn’t”.
“Traditional, legacy, cloud-based CRM technologies create business complexity… [and] were not built for the era of customer engagement,” Jackson said.
“They actually create the organisational silos from which SAP and its customers are breaking free. How can you create relationship management without a seamless integration with the order record and necessary information known to the assets, as well as the supply parts of your organisation?
“Without that, you are exacerbating and driving that problem of having multiple instances of customer data and overlapping business processes, that make customer engagement inconsistent, expensive, dependent on the channel or device the customer is using at that time, and ultimately, it’s that inconsistency for the customer that damages your brand. Customer relationship management needs to extend from tweet to receipt.”
Alongside this branding campaign, Jackson said SAP is launching three new production innovations to market – a next-generation omnichannel content management system; hybris Profile, on the hybris Marketing Platform, which will allow organisations to bring together data from many different sources to build a single profile of the customer; and the hybris Business Platform as a service, a development platform to build micro services and applications to supplement the main platform.
