When it comes to selling, our focus needs to shift beyond execution, pipeline management, and hitting numbers. For long-term, sustainable growth, the CRO and the revenue team must evolve to create outstanding customer experiences. They must leverage data to strengthen relationships, while also aligning across business functions and diversifying revenue streams. Only then can the revenue team become a strategic driver of growth for the business.

Challenges and opportunities for the CRO

As a key growth driver for the business, the revenue team’s top objectives are to maintain profitable growth, operate at scale, and consolidate and understand complex data to reap the benefits. But several challenges make reaching or exceeding these objectives difficult:

• External forces, such as rising customer expectations, increased global competition, evolving sales models and channels, supply chain disruptions, and challenges in hiring and retaining talent, can all have a significant impact on growth.
• There are also areas internally that can be viewed as opportunities for improvement. Data silos and poor data quality, pipeline predictability, customer retention, adaptation to market trends, and scaling growth are all issues that can compound and delay success.

The ideal state for sales

In a perfect world, there would be an optimal solution that addresses all these challenges and opportunities. The revenue team would benefit from an end-to-end, fully integrated scenario that covers Lead-to-Cash. Knowing your system aligns with the entire customer lifecycle and manages it from start to finish gives your sales team the confidence to execute your business plan and close deals.

The customer experience typically doesn't begin with an order. So, there’s great value for sales teams in having technology solutions that enable them to analyze and manage the pipeline before any initial contact—because it allows for more accurate forecasting and more effective lead choices. The next step in the process is selecting which leads are most likely to convert and then managing this relationship from the very first touchpoint. A fully optimized customer relationship management process is no longer optional—it’s expected.

The strategic role of sales ERP in revenue optimization

A reliable and scalable sales ERP is essential to converting sales into revenue. Having a system that can automate this process and access the necessary data with minimal manual intervention allows for a smoother order-to-cash operation. Customers rely upon this as much as the revenue team, as their expectations for accurate fulfillment and smooth billing have been raised. The entire experience, from initial contact through revenue recognition, must be fully integrated and cannot miss a beat.

Exceed expectations with an AI-infused lead-to-cash solution

SAP's answer is SAP Business Suite, a comprehensive, integrated set of solutions designed to connect and optimize every function across your enterprise seamlessly. With the SAP Business Suite, it’s a new era of enterprise management. Businesses aren't just prepared for today’s challenges—they’re equipped to seize tomorrow’s opportunities.

SAP Business Suite ensures your entire sales operation is covered from end to end, creating a new standard for the customer experience. It starts with having embedded AI throughout a guided selling process to help your business manage leads, opportunities, generate sales quotes, and convert them into sales orders "with the press of a button." It enables sales representatives to generate emails and customer summaries using AI, simplifying their daily tasks.

How cloud ERP in SAP business suite supports scalable growth

SAP Cloud ERP, the foundation of SAP Business Suite, delivers capabilities that range from order and contract management to customer returns, pricing and rebates, automated billing, and more. Within SAP Cloud ERP, embedded AI and analytics ensure that sales representatives have all the tools and data they need to close deals and recognize revenue efficiently. For example, sales order information can be automatically extracted from unstructured PDF files to generate complete sales orders in the system. The machine learning capabilities streamline what was once a very tedious process of accurately recording an order.

With SAP Business Suite, the revenue team is also able to identify and create additional revenue streams with Solution Order Management and SAP Subscription Billing. Solution Order Management allows businesses to design and sell solutions containing physical goods, services, projects, subscriptions, and bundles with one holistic order. The addition of subscription management functionality can also improve monetization and meet customer needs by offering recurring revenue models.

Explore customer stories

SERAX has utilized this SAP Business AI capability to reduce the number of manual B2B orders by 33%.

Today, Pitney Bowes can meet 95% of the company’s operational requirements, bringing together sales, service, and subscription models and enabling a fully automated order management solution.

SAP Cloud ERP, powered by SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP Business AI, can simplify, automate, and enhance your Lead-to-Cash process. SAP Business Suite empowers the CRO and revenue team to create new revenue models, improve forecasting, and leverage embedded AI to boost sales and improve day-to-day productivity.