SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) includes features and functions that support core business processes in the following areas:

• Marketing – Analyze, plan, develop, and execute all marketing activities through all customer interaction points. This central marketing platform empowers marketers with complete business insights – enabling you to make intelligent business decisions and to drive end-to-end marketing processes.
• Sales – Maintain focus on productive activity to acquire, grow, and retain profitable relationships with functionality for sales planning and forecasting, territories, accounts, contacts, activities, opportunities, quotations, orders, product configuration, pricing, billing, and contracts.
• Service – Drive service revenue and profitability with support for service sales and marketing; service contract management; in-house and depot repair; warranty management; installed-base management; and resource planning. Call centers, field service, and e-service provide various flexible delivery options.
• Partner channel management – Attain a more profitable and loyal indirect channel by managing partner relationships and empowering channel partners. Improve processes for partner recruitment, partner management, communications, channel marketing, channel forecasting, collaborative selling, partner order management, channel service, and analytics for partners and channel managers.
• Interaction center – Maximize customer loyalty, reduce costs, and boost revenue by transforming your interaction center into a strategic delivery channel for marketing, sales, and service efforts across all contact channels. Activities such as telemarketing, telesales, customer service, HR and IT help desk, and interaction center management are supported.
• Web channel – Increase sales and reduce transaction costs by turning the Internet into a valuable sales, marketing, and service channel for businesses and consumers. Increase profitability and reach new markets with functionality for e-marketing, e-commerce, e-service, and Web channel analytics. Deploy these capabilities directly against the SAP ERP application or with SAP CRM as a fully integrated customer channel.
• Business communications management – Manage inbound and outbound contacts across multiple locations and communications channels effectively and efficiently. By integrating multichannel communications with your customer-facing business processes, you can provide your customers and partners with a smooth, consistent experience across all avenues of contact, including voice, text messaging, Web contacts, and e-mail.
• Real-time offer management – Advanced analytical real-time decision engine that lets you optimize any decision-making process on all customer interaction channels, enabling you to take the most appropriate next action to enhance customer relationships.

SAP CRM also supports several industry-specific processes with functionality designed to meet the individual needs of diverse industry groups, for example:

• Trade promotion management – Empowers account and trade managers to improve control and visibility of the entire trade promotion process. The end-to-end solution enables managers to accurately plan, maximize profitability and increase brand presence with trade activities.

Learn more about the new features in SAP CRM 2007.