SAP professional
HOW MIGHT WE HELP PROSPECTIVE CUSTOMERS EVALUATE SAP PRODUCTS?
Business Objective: SAP wanted to scale, and was looking for a new market segment. The new target customers were medium-large (1,000-10,000 people) enterprise businesses. SAP didn’t have enough qualified sales and marketing engineers, so they decided to have customers try the product online to help educate them about the possible use cases.
My Role: I worked to develop a consensus across different teams, and created an experimental freemium model which we successfully launched on SAP.com.
Results: Created a freemium model and launched successful experiments on SAP.com. Testing showed that there was very good traffic and customers were interested. Developed consensus across different teams at SAP. Re-classified education into a meaningful system and simplified e-commerce process integrating with product trials and walkthroughs.
STAKEHOLDER COLLABORATION
To reach a new market segment, SAP needs to improve prospective customer education.
SAP’s business objective is to develop a new market segment by targeting medium-large enterprise businesses. In the past they were completely focused on very large enterprises, but they see an opportunity to make SAP available to smaller customers (1,000 to 10,000 employees).
A CUSTOMER EDUCATION CHALLENGE: The challenge is that the potential customers who want to buy SAP don’t have sales engineers to explain to them what is available, how it works, and how it will make a difference for their business.
DESIGN THINKING WORKSHOP: The solution to the customer education problem is to integrate the information available online into a cohesive experience where new and existing customers can evaluate SAP’s products against the competition and their needs. We hosted a design thinking workshop with different stakeholders at SAP to brainstorm a strategy and specific scenarios for the integrated experience.
BUSINESS OBJECTIVE: Medium to Large Enterprise market segment
MARKETING RESEARCH and competitive research
DESIGN THINKING WORKSHOP: If we improve customer education we will reach more medium-to-large sized Enterprises
LEARNING CATEGORIES: The solution to the customer education problem is to integrate the information available online into a cohesive experience where new and existing customers can evaluate SAP’s products against the competition and their needs.
DESIGN THINKING WORKSHOP: We hosted a design thinking workshop with different stakeholders at SAP to brainstorm a strategy and specific scenarios for the integrated experience.
CUSTOMER RESEARCH AND STRATEGY
The fragmented enterprise e-commerce experience is making it difficult to make buying decisions.
NEED-FINDING: The target customer is the decision-maker at the business who is on-boarding the rest of the team (e.g, director of sales and marketing). We talked with customers to identify their needs and pain points and conducted a usability test to evaluate the effectiveness of the current e-commerce system, which consisted of six different websites.
CUSTOMER OBJECTIVE: The customer needs to evaluate SAP versus competition and in alignment with their needs, including:
Scale
Features
Compatibility
Price
Easy onboarding and use
Features
Compatibility
Price
Easy onboarding and use
CUSTOMER FEEDBACK: The SAP website had a lot of good components (Quick glance at features and functionality, Free trial, Onboarding and getting things started, Engagement), but they weren’t working together effectively as a conversion and engagement funnel.
KEY INSIGHT: The customer isn’t going to commit until they know that this service is exactly what they’re looking for.
ADDITIONAL INSIGHTS: Customers also told us that the SAP professional certification was not an important priority for them. They wanted to solve problems and get things done. In order to do that, they needed to be able to quickly and easily figure out exactly what SAP service they needed so they could buy it and get to work.
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EVALUATION of e-commerce and free trial: how it’s not working right now
There are all these different places that you have to go
Screens with evaluation marked up
Competitive analysis
CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Show marketing research about free-trial and enterprise decision making
There are all these different places that you have to go
Screens with evaluation marked up
Competitive analysis
CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Show marketing research about free-trial and enterprise decision making
CONCEPT / VISION
A guided customer education process: well organized categories that correspond to real-life scenarios.
Register with SAP to access all education materials and then get recommendations based on your needs and interest.
Easy access and as-you-go problem solving are the future of professional training and customer education.
Customers want to learn about SAP products before they commit to paying the large subscription fee. But they can’t find the education they need to make up their mind.
SAP IDENTITY UNLOCKS ALL ACCESS: We decided to offer a single starting point from which the prospect could evaluate everything. Giving each customer an “SAP Identity” would allow prospects to build a profile that tracks where they were in the decision making process and to receive customized recommendations / incentives.
A GUIDED PROCESS BASED ON CUSTOMER NEEDS: Improved navigation, learning categories, and free trial walkthroughs would form the foundation of a new guided process that would allow prospects to evaluate SAP.
CUSTOMER JOURNEY TOUCHPOINTS:
Quick Preview
Free trial with day in the life scenarios
Professional training subscription with all you need to get started
Social learning
Quick Preview
Free trial with day in the life scenarios
Professional training subscription with all you need to get started
Social learning
Authentication process image
Free trial image
Learning categories image
Free trial image
Learning categories image
JOBS TO DO
Customers want to learn about SAP products before they make a large purchase. We make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for.
SAP.COM SITEMAP EVALUATION: In the existing sitemap the customer education was buried and hard to find. It basically said “here’s the product, here’s the features” and left things there. It didn’t have a “learn more” option to engage prospects in the customer education process and help them come to a decision.
LEARN MORE/BUY NOW: It should be very easy for customers to learn more as questions come up for them. We made the product previews, tutorials, and training available on the same page as the product itself.
FREEMIUM MODEL: The key to getting customers to go in and try the product was to offer a free trial. This lets prospects see whether the product fulfills their requirements for features and compatibility, ease-of-use, quality, etc. We paired the free trial with free education, and offered premium options alongside the free trial to clearly communicate what customers would be paying for and how it would compare to the competition.
SOCIAL LEARNING: Our research had shown us that one of the biggest problems with onboarding a team was how slow and inefficient the process was. We created prototypes that would help increase engagement and help share information within a team as it goes through onboarding by assigning tasks and sharing information in a timeline.
PARTNER ACQUISITION CAMPAIGN: One of the biggest benefits of automating the customer education process was that it could be used to generate a large quantity of pre-qualified leads. SAP could then leverage those leads to incentivize partners to promote and sell SAP products to new customers.
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Flows (learn more/buy now, free trial, social learning, SAP partner recruitment) with storyboards and sitemap
Information Architecture for SAP.com
Flows (learn more/buy now, free trial, social learning, SAP partner recruitment) with storyboards and sitemap
Information Architecture for SAP.com
USER INTERFACE / BRAND / DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Improved access and as-you-go problem solving are the future of professional training and customer education.
DESIGN SYSTEM, HIGH FIDELITY, SPECIFICATIONS
DESIGN SYSTEM, HIGH FIDELITY, SPECIFICATIONS
EXPERIMENTS: Essentially our hypothesis was that providing free high-quality customer education would lead to more pre-qualified leads online, allowing SAP to automate sales and marketing. We put our free trial and free education experiment up on SAP.com to test it with prospective customers.
DESIGN SYSTEM: The UI components needed to work as a responsive enterprise e-commerce app. The design system made it a lot easier for the engineers at SAP to collaborate with designers as they built the app. Engineers were able to use modules, and comment and make requests on the prototypes as they evolved. They also had access to components and an asset library in context with the prototypes.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES: The design system was optimized for the learn more/buy now e-commerce flow. Customers have access to all the information they need to make a purchasing decision throughout the process (which could take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a year or more).
Video walkthrough
Before + After images
Experiment with specifications images
Design system images
Design principles images
Video walkthrough
Before + After images
Experiment with specifications images
Design system images
Design principles images
SAP Digital—Enterprise Freemium for Sales Automation
SAP CASE STUDY: How to design professional training and customer education to improve conversion and satisfaction in the context of an enterprise freemium model
1. EVALUATE: Investigate the causes of poor conversion in the existing funnel
2. PLAN: Focus on individual conversion stages in the funnel to identify where we’re losing existing customers and what needs to happen for new customers to be both converted initially and satisfied long-term
3. EXECUTE: Prototype solutions and test alpha with internal stakeholders, then release beta on the SAP website to assess effect on engagement and conversion
1. EVALUATE: Investigate the causes of poor conversion in the existing funnel
2. PLAN: Focus on individual conversion stages in the funnel to identify where we’re losing existing customers and what needs to happen for new customers to be both converted initially and satisfied long-term
3. EXECUTE: Prototype solutions and test alpha with internal stakeholders, then release beta on the SAP website to assess effect on engagement and conversion