Finding the right CRM solution for your business is never easy. After all, there are many factors to take into account: ease-of-use, flexibility, cost, accessibility, and — perhaps most importantly — drawing and visualizing insights. Done right, CRM can supercharge the sales and service areas of your business. If you get it wrong? Well, the road is littered with many failed CRM implementations.
Although there’s no one-size-fits-all CRM solution, Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 app portfolio checks a LOT of the right boxes for SAP customers. Having performed several assessments like this of late, we thought it might be helpful to document some of our findings in a blog series. Since we’re not a Microsoft reseller, our aim is to simply educate customers on options. As always, we welcome your feedback and hope you’ll find useful information.
SAP & CRM: Where are We?
Like most CRM vendors for the past 10 years, SAP has been fighting to keep pace with Salesforce, the undisputed CRM leader. During that time, SAP has cobbled together a cloud CRM portfolio which consists of both home-grown solutions (e.g., C4C) and acquired solutions (e.g., Hybris and Gigya). Collectively, these assorted products have been organized into SAP’s Customer Experience portfolio.
While we won’t dig into the details of SAP Customer Experience within this blog series, it is important to understand that it is a new (and largely non-ABAP-based) product suite. As such, there is no natural upgrade path from legacy SAP CRM systems running on-premises. So, no matter how you slice it, SAP customers are staring at a CRM re-platforming exercise which raises some difficult questions:
What do we do with our legacy SAP CRM on-premises solutions?
Since there’s no standard upgrade path, which SAP cloud package(s) make sense for my business (e.g., Hybris, elements of SAP Sales Cloud, etc.)?
What about best-of-breeds with a 3rd-party CRM package (e.g., Salesforce)?
How will SAP and this new CRM co-exist?
How complex is the ERP <-> CRM integration process?
How does that best-of-breeds approach fit into our overall analytics strategy?
We’ll be addressing these questions and others head on throughout the course of this blog series.
Next Steps
In my next post, we’ll begin our assessment by introducing some of the basics of Dynamics 365. Here, we’ll dig into its underlying cloud platform and explore some of the unique benefits of having a cloud-native foundation built on Microsoft Azure. As a recognized leader in cloud, AI, and analytics technologies, Microsoft has some distinct advantages over its competitors when it comes to building a modern, flexible CRM platform. We’ll unpack these benefits in great detail as we progress through the blog series.
