During a meeting, a customer asks whether stock is available for a larger order, what volume discount applies and when delivery is possible. If the sales rep needs to consult other departments, the proposal remains pending. That delay can affect negotiations.
Some of this information may already be in SAP but unavailable to the person negotiating. This article examines that difficulty and how SAP BTP can help make data accessible to the sales team.
The information exists, but it never reaches the rep
Companies have never held so much data about customers, products and operations. Even so, many sales teams work with outdated information or none at all. The cause is rarely a missing system. It is the way systems piled up over the years, each one built to serve a single department.
- Orders and billing: in the ERP, within reach of people in the office who know the transactions.
- Stock and delivery lead times: in logistics routines the rep cannot check alone.
- Available credit and open invoices: with finance, which answers when it can.
- Special terms and volume discounts: in spreadsheets and emails that depend on whoever updated them last.
- Opportunities and visits: in a CRM that often does not talk to the ERP.
To gather this information, sales reps consult logistics, finance and supporting spreadsheets. The time spent on this work and the volume of back-office requests help measure the impact of missing integrations.
The cost you see in the funnel, and the cost you don't
The visible cost shows up in sales metrics: longer sales cycles, lower close rates and deals lost to competitors that answered first. It surfaces at quarter end, when the number is missed and no one can say exactly where the deal slipped away.
Other effects include time spent on administrative tasks, inconsistent answers to customers and incomplete records for sales management. These issues also belong in the process assessment.
What a rep needs to answer during the meeting
To prepare a proposal during a visit, the sales team needs access to five types of information:
- What this customer already buys from you, how often and on what terms.
- How much credit is available and whether there are open invoices.
- What was offered in recent months and has not yet turned into an order.
- Whether there is stock and which delivery date can be safely committed.
- Which price and discount apply at that volume under the current policy.
Sales leadership has a different question: what does the real pipeline look like today, rather than the version consolidated in Monday's meeting?
How SAP BTP puts SAP in the rep's hands
SAP BTP does not replace your ERP or your CRM. It connects them, exposes data under governance and lets you build experiences tailored to the sales team without customizing the SAP core. Reps do not need to know which module holds each piece of information: they see the answer in the app they use. If you are still getting to know the platform, start with what SAP BTP is and what it is for.
In practice, services such as SAP Integration Suite connect the ERP, the CRM and other systems, while SAP Build is used to create the apps the team relies on in the field. Three applications stand out for sales.
A 360-degree customer view on the phone
Before or during a visit, sales reps can review previous orders, open invoices, available credit and products purchased by similar companies. This information helps them prepare the conversation and assess sales opportunities.
Proposals issued during the visit
With prices, commercial terms and stock integrated, the rep builds and sends a formal proposal from the field, within the discount policy the company has set. The time between the customer's question and the proposal is no longer measured in days.
A real pipeline for sales leadership
Opportunity status, close forecasts and activity metrics can be collected directly from the systems. Dashboards in solutions such as SAP Analytics Cloud let leaders monitor the pipeline at the update frequency defined for those sources.
Two cases reported by Grupo Intelsis
In a case reported by Grupo Intelsis, a B2B industrial services company with 45 field reps took 2 to 4 days to issue a quote. Every proposal went through the back office, which had to check stock, prices and technical service availability. A sales app built on SAP BTP cut that time to under 2 hours, and the conversion rate rose 28% in the first six months.
In another case reported by Grupo Intelsis, a distributor with multiple product categories matched each customer's purchase history against the active SAP catalog. The result was automatic cross-sell alerts for reps, along the lines of: this customer buys product X but has never bought Y. Average order value per visit rose 19%.
Alongside the metrics in each case, projects can set the following objectives for the sales team:
- Reduce the time between a customer inquiry and the proposal
- Pipeline visibility without spreadsheets consolidated by hand
- Customers who see the company as responsive and coordinated
- Fewer hours of internal coordination between sales, logistics and finance
- A sales organization that grows without expanding administrative support at the same rate
A conversation about your sales operation
Gather last quarter’s quote data: number issued, preparation time and losses associated with delays. Choose a sales process, such as field quoting, record the current situation and use those indicators to assess the initial release.
The Grupo Intelsis team can help map the flow of information, assess the data available in SAP and define an initial use case, combining customer experience expertise with SAP platform knowledge. To review these requirements, talk to our team.
