Trade Promotion Management Made Easy: Creation of multiple orders in SAP Sales Cloud

Tips & tricks for customer experience with SAP – #2 Trade Promotion Management  

In the “Tips & tricks for customer experience with SAP” rubric, we provide some helpful practical tips. In the second installment, we will take a look at trade promotion management and easy implementation in SAP Sales Cloud – a frequently-used means in retail to increase customer loyalty and market share as well.

In the industry of so-called Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), a frequent strategy for customer acquisition and loyalty is trade promotion management. Here, free products are given to customers. There are many possible occasions for this: Christmas, a special event, social media or a big advertising campaign. The organization and order processing behind this are important to ensure on the one hand that the products arrive, but also to be able to measure the success of such an action.  

Hello Nike, hello Fabian. Thank you very much for sharing your experience with us.

To start with: what’s your tip, summarized in one sentence?

Nike: Multiple sales orders for so-called free goods can be created very easily and with just a few clicks with our SAP Sales Cloud development. 

What are the challenges when creating sales orders?

Nike: You can imagine the following scenario: A company invites an exclusive group of people to an event and promises a free trial of new products with registration. 

Frequently an Excel table is not enough to keep track of the organization and processes involved. There are usually too many orders for this and creating them is tiresome and time-consuming. Both the registration itself and the order with the price 0.00 € have to be created – in our case in SAP Sales Cloud in interplay with SAP Marketing Cloud.   

How did you overcome these challenges?

Fabian: The customer registers for an event and this is recorded directly in SAP Marketing Cloud. In the course of a campaign, all registrations can be selected and exported. The selection of the registrations and the associated orders for free products are then replicated in the direction SAP Sales Cloud. As soon as the list of people is in SAP Sales Cloud, we can detect the marketing campaign and form a kind of “container” with the selected customers. Then the free products can be selected. 

Now we get to the actual clue: At the touch of a button, an order – a so-called request – is generated for each selected customer. These include typical header data such as name, address, and contact data, the responsible salesperson, and the assigned sales organization. Then the orders are exported all together and made available via an SAP Cloud Platform (CPI) replication with a document creation for dispatch, so that the products can be sent to the customers. 

In the end, you can divide the overall process roughly into three (independent) subprocesses: 

1. Registration in Marketing Cloud and transfer of the data to Sales Cloud. 
2. Mass creation of the orders in Sales Cloud. Data from customers and products in the system is required for this. 
3. The exporting of the orders in a file format to send the products. 

What are the advantages of this approach?

Nike: What Fabian has just described is not a standard integration, but rather a solution we have developed to make the creation of such orders as easy and efficient as possible. Here, we’re not talking about 10 or 100 orders, but several thousand. For this, we use an extra workcenter for SAP Sales Cloud, which we call “Free Goods Request.” It can not only be used for trade promotion management, but also for creating simple, uniform offers for a particular group of selected customers.  

Fabian: The order process is reduced to the essential with our development. In our case, there is no pricing behind the orders since they are free products. However, pricing is also conceivable if, for example, an ERP system is incorporated that assists with the pricing and isn’t too complex (e.g. through additional, individual discounts).  

What should you do if you’re confronted with this challenge?

Fabian: In principle, the solution can be used anywhere where several orders should be created at the same time. The more complex the orders, the more information is required in advance. In our example, the whole process extends through SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP CPI, and SAP Sales Cloud. Furthermore, another system for document creation is incorporated.  

The development requires SAP Sales Cloud to be the system in which orders are created. However, the logic is also conceivable without SAP Marketing Cloud. SAP CPI as middleware is required for exporting the documents. Here, the orders are read out according to particular criteria and transformed into a CSV file, for example. 

Nike: We are happy to advise if someone is contemplating this or a similar task. Just contact us.