Part 2 in the “Digital Finance Sales Support” series
In my first blog in this series, I explained our Digital Finance Sales Support framework, and how this initiative is helping customers interact with SAP in a better and simpler way. As we strategized our approach, our team thought: How we can help support SAP’s co-innovation activities with its customers and make deal support processes digitally fluent? From a deal support perspective, contracts are one of the ways that customers interact with us. So why shouldn’t we deliver contracts in a digital and hyperconnected way? Below is the how and the what.
The how
In the past, we delivered contracts to customers either via PDF attachments in emails or hard copies. After customer signature, SAP would sign.
Now, after the transaction is approved, the contract is sent via DocuSign workflow for internal signatures, and then to the customer. The customer always has choices: either to DocuSign, or print the attached PDF, ink-sign, and send it back to us via mail or hard copy. Most customers choose to DocuSign.
Benefits are faster delivery of contracts, transparency on where the contract is, and choices for our customers on how to sign.
It is amazing, but to sign via DocuSign you need only a few clicks, and there is no need to download any app on your mobile device: digitalization at its best.
The what
SAP has so-called “extension policies” to give customers flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements. Simply put, these policies help customers to optimize existing solutions and resolve “shelf ware” challenges by evaluating potential innovations from our cloud and on-premise portfolio. To execute these extension policies from a deal-support perspective, we had used two documents: a termination agreement for on-premise licenses and a new contract for the replacement software. What we did instead is to replace the termination agreement with an additional clause in the new contract. Now, instead of two documents, there’s only one to sign. Why not?
My next blog will point out how we succeeded – and how we turned failures into opportunities.
Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube
