Marketing-To-Opportunity

 

SAP Business ByDesign comes with 35 end-to-end business processes out of the box!  We will be taking a look at each processes in a suite of blogs, the first one being Marketing-To-Opportunity.

The Marketing-to-Opportunity business scenario enables you to manage marketing and pre-sales activities with the goal of generating new business for customers and prospects. You can run campaigns, capture responses, generate leads, manage opportunities, as well as initiate and track related sales activities. Alternatively, you can use this business scenario without campaigns, which means that no marketing department is involved, and leads and opportunities can be created without using a campaign.

You can capture responses using Microsoft Outlook Integration, which allows e-mails to be assigned to specific campaigns directly in Microsoft Outlook and to be synchronized with the SAP Business ByDesign solution. In addition, the pipeline simulation feature provides an interactive combination of graphic and table list of the opportunities. What is more, the What-if analysis simulates how changes would affect your pipeline.

Let’s have a look at the steps involved:

– Creating a Target Group

The Creating Target Group business process enables you to create a target group based on search criteria, reports, or transactional data. The search results can then be added to your new target group. In addition, you can also manually add accounts and contacts that do not match the search parameters, but that also need to be included in the target group. Before assigning your target group to a campaign, you can check whether all members in the target group can be contacted using one particular channel of communication.

– Creating and Executing a Campaign

The Creating and Executing Campaign business process enables your marketing department to create a campaign, assign the newly created target group, and select a campaign type. In addition, you can decide whether to automatically create activities out of the campaign for account and contact history. Following this, the campaign can be executed.

The campaign is executed by exporting to a Microsoft Excel template all target group members who are addressable according to the selected campaign type.

– Creating a Lead

The Creating Lead business process enables you to create a lead as a follow-up document of a campaign response. The lead can also be created without any preceding document. A lead is used to qualify a business partner’s interest in a particular product or service, with the aim of establishing and subsequently influencing this interest. Once a lead has reached a certain status, it can be handed over to sales to decide whether an opportunity should be created.

– Creating and Developing an Opportunity

The Creating and Developing Opportunity business process enables you to create an opportunity as a follow-up document to a lead. Opportunity Management helps to proactively manage the process of closing sales, and allows sales employees to get a comprehensive view of an opportunity from the initial phase of creating an opportunity to managing opportunity related activities, maintaining opportunities, and tracking opportunities. While working on an opportunity, a couple of activities have to be performed to ensure that an opportunity is realised and results in a sales order; the sales assistant in Opportunity Management supports this feature.

In addition, you are provided with a large number of reports that you can run to see, for instance, the number of opportunities and their current status as well as the expected value of the sum of all the opportunities.

 So what’s the business value of the Marketing-to-Opportunity process?

This scenario helps midsize companies – for whom the conversion of leads into opportunities is essential – to control marketing and sales processes to shorten the sales cycle.

SAP Business ByDesign supports you from the market development, campaign management, lead generation, and lead qualification phases, through to the opportunity creation phase.

You can execute targeted campaigns to generate more leads, shorten the lead cycle, improve the conversion rate into opportunities, as well as reduce the cost of sales and marketing.

Key Benefits

• Capturing, monitoring, storing, and tracking information relating to customers, prospects, and partners to optimise contact management, account planning, market segmentation, and relationship management
• Campaign management and response handling to allow follow-up activities
• Streamlined lead and opportunity management to support the end-to-end scenario
• Managing forecasts to ensure the fulfillment of sales quotas
• Microsoft Outlook Integration to synchronize e-mails and capture campaign responses, calendar entries, business partner data, and tasks with Microsoft Outlook
• Built-in analytics and reporting lead funnel, opportunity pipeline, and win-loss analysis

 

To learn more about SAP Business ByDesign, get in touch

 

Next week’s blog will look at Creating a Sales Order