Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: If you were to start a company today, what would you do in this area?

Sameer Patel: There are several network-first business models waiting to disrupt some highly transactive areas inside organizations that should never have been transaction-first.

I’ll give you one clue there. A sales person spends 70%-90% of their time outside of transactional CRM. If you compare this with what’s mostly offered in typical CRM, you can then see why thinking about the day in the life of a Sales Rep and building solutions around that start to become much more attractive and relevant to a Sales Rep versus a glorified contact management system where they just keep updating data and get nothing out of it themselves. If you apply that same metric to different roles in the organization, I just gave away five business plans.

Sramana Mitra: I know what you’re saying but if you try to get sales people to capture how they structure the big deal, or how they have broken open a big deal, or how they have navigated a big deal, they just don’t have the discipline to write all these stuff.

Sameer Patel: I’m not asking them to do any of that. I’m asking them to work more effectively for themselves, just looking out for themselves. Today, as they do that, 70% to 80% of the work that they’re doing is not being done within a transactional CRM system. They’re writing proposals, they’re looking for experts, they’re not sitting in front of a transactional CRM day in and day out.

There is no systematic way for them to deal with that other 80%. It’s completely ad hoc, scrambled. Everything is unrepeatable. Everything requires different places and different systems. If you had to rethink how to make their lives more effective, and we’re picking on Sales by the way, I could pick on five other areas, there are entirely different ways to start thinking about making their days more productive. It is about helping them wrap the right brains, expertise, and prior art around each deal that they’re working on and I think you would see a very different design to the application that would be built for these folks. This is why there’s so much room right now to be had in re-imagining what new applications will be in SAS. I do believe that most of what we have seen in SAS app until now, in terms of applications, has been largely a copy-paste of what was done on premise. That’s the first generation SAS. We are really in the midst of the second generation now, which is why it’s exciting.

Sramana Mitra: Alright. We’ll be in touch if there’s anything else but I think we have your perspective. Thank you.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP
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