State of the Profession Series
Case studies from the world’s top customer advocacy and engagement programs, showing how to grow the business in today’s buyer-empowered world.
How to Deploy a Customer Reference
Application for Your Sales Team
By Scott Acheson,
Director SAP Customer Central -
SAP and Robert Szych
At SAP we have a very large, and sophisticated, reference program. We have over a hundred people in our department. There are lots of variables too, like regions, personalized settings and so forth. My job is to manage all that and to turn it into a system that can be used globally across all of our regions and across all of our different stakeholders.
To give you an idea of the scope of our system, we average approximately 40,000 reference and about 5,000 collateral searches per month. We have about 20,000
reference profiles on file, representing around 7,300 reference customers worldwide.
From a systems development and deployment perspective, it’s a challenge to satisfy hundreds of administrative users, let alone the 66,000 employees that need to access our reference information.
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How to Deploy a Customer Reference Application
for Your Sales Team
In this report, we’re going to talk about the implementation of our internal SAP customer reference mobile application. This is a project we worked on between the summer of 2012 and May of 2013.
Customer reference mobile application drivers
Our primary goal for the mobile application was to provide our references to SAP account representatives wherever they work. No doubt, you’ve noticed changes in the way that your stakeholders use and access your reference assets. So have we. And what we found is that they’re all moving to a mobile space. Yes, they have laptops, but they don’t use them. Instead, they rely mostly upon their iPads. So we wanted to provide a self-service tool on their iPads where they can get reference information.
The self-service aspect of that is pretty important. That’s one of the drivers of why we’re pushing our assets to the end users.
We want to get away from end-users constantly calling our Reference Managers because it promotes a reactive work environment. So we push the latest, ready-to-use, reference assets to our salespeople.
Another driver in the development of our mobile app was the desire to set a good example by using our own products. So our engineers used all SAP software solutions to build it. Everything running in the background is SAP running SAP. The only exception is the user interface, which is Apple’s iOS. Long story short, I think we did a pretty good job. Since we completed the application, it’s been downloaded over 5,000 times. We have an SAP-only internal app store similar to the iTunes app store and that’s where our employees go to get it.
Case Study:
How SAP maps functionality onto user behavior
When we started getting down to brass tacks, we came up with four ways that our AEs use our reference content along with the application functionality needed to support them.
“Hey, I just need a list of customers that’s in this region by product or by this industry.” Today, the app allows users to get this data themselves. With a few mouse clicks, they can generate charts and graphs for their use.
1. Generating customer lists and reference statistics/charts—Our users constantly ask us for numbers about our program. What drives this need are the emails that our reference managers are bombarded with that say,
We’ve found that in practice, these stats and charts are being used as a sort of collateral all its own. So for example, when an AE is with an automotive customer, they can bring up a chart and say, “I’ve got 100 automotive references, and fifty reference assets.” And it speaks to the volume of experience that SAP has in that particular area.
2. Promoting the newest reference assets—Creating reference assets is a lot of what we do. But if people don’t use them, it’s a waste. So what we do here is to advertise the 20 latest and greatest, which we refer to as the “newest” assets. We push that info to users. However, we allow them to set up preferences so that they only receive, for example, banking industry assets if that’s what’s important to them.
A note on the GUI. I always thought that the iTunes music art carousels were pretty cool. So to give our app more appeal, I had them present our newest reference assets in the same way.
3. Searching for specific assets—Our users consistently search for specific pieces of content to meet their needs. To enable that functionality, we
developed a Google-like search capability. Today, the AEs can find what they want and then save those assets locally to their iPads.
4. Requesting a reference activity—Often, an AE or field rep needs a live
reference. Maybe they need help closing a sale, or maybe they need a customer to speak at a Gartner event. To meet this need, we incorporated a very simple form into the app. All they have to do is fill it out and we process it from there.
Customer reference mobile application creation: lessons learned
Our (Robert's) consulting firm has worked with SAP for years. We helped them complete the mobile application project. As you can imagine, the size and scope of this endeavor added to the complexity of the project. And so I wanted to share some of the lessons learned with you so that when you develop your own
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Lesson Learned #1: Don’t underestimate the complexity of keeping it simple
One of the main goals in creating a mobile app is to make
it very, very simple to use. So simple that there’s little or no training required for your AEs. They need to be able to download, launch and use its core functions without any subsequent information or training.
The goal is to create a useful tool for your stakeholders. Not to create a huge drain on your resources by having to provide a lot of user support.
To meet this standard, it’s important to plan sufficient time to simplify your app design and to gain consensus among multiple constituents. That’s essential when working with complex granular information and multiple source systems. One part of that is to do what SAP did and find out what’s most important to your AEs.
That exercise will allow you to cover the needs of the majority of your users. Yes, you’ll still want to embed some expert user capabilities for your power users. But, you’ll want to keep the core navigation path simple to satisfy the bulk of your user base.
And because you want your stakeholders to use the mobile app, you want to allow
users to configure their own preferences. That way they can “make it their own.”
Lesson Learned #2: Enable both push and pull content delivery methods
Both methods have their own strengths, which we’ll illustrate with a couple of examples.An example of an asset push
capability would be to link your mobile app to your sales cycle. This allows you to push the right assets to AEs at the right time.
A good example of a pull feature would be the inclusion of a really simple Google-like search. When AEs need an asset they need it quickly and this functionality satisfies that desire.
Lesson Learned #3: Plan for change
Another consideration is the need to future-proof your app. The mobile space is changing so rapidly that you need to incorporate the flexibility to adapt to that change. Certainly, you can only make a decision as good as the information that you have at the time. But you have to make sure that you get the best information you can by gathering the right people together, getting a consensus, and then committing to a course of action.
Lesson Learned #4: Look at the TCO
It’s important to avoid budget “gotchas” by taking
everything into account. That means looking beyond the development costs to include the costs to implement and support various devices. There are also tactical considerations. Like deciding to use HTML5 so that your app can be device agnostic, versus choosing to create a device-specific app.
Final thoughts
There has been a dramatic shift toward the use of mobile devices by our reference content consumers. As a result, we needed to create a mobile application to accommodate them.
One key to our success was to understand how our AEs use our content. Then we created features to facilitate each use. Throughout the project, we looked for time-saving opportunities to automate processes as well as to empower users with self-service capabilities. And in so doing, I believe that we delivered a mobile app that increases the use of our reference assets and accelerates the speed with which our salespeople can respond to opportunities.
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