SAP reports its Q2 2022 – A snap Analysis

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 25, 2022 | Analysis, Blog |

The News On July 21, 2022, SAP reported its numbers for the second quarter 2022 and the first half of the business year 2022. In contrast to the last times, I’d like to cover this in written form, as this one is quite interesting and probably takes a bit longer than 5 to 10 minutes. SAP changed the report structure to reflect the common cloud service terminology. It is reporting IaaS, PaaS and SaaS now. The overall cloud revenues increased by 34 percent, with some tailwind by the current weakness of the Euro. The cloud backlog surpassed € 10 bn for the first time, growing at the same pace. S/4HANA Cloud revenue is up by 84 percent, with the backlog even growing at 100 percent. This revenue growth is consistent across the reporting regions. For the first time, SAP broke out PaaS revenues, which came in at € 389 million, up 49 percent yea over year.  Not surprisingly, the profitability went down, which is attributable to loss of business due to the war in Ukraine and unfavorable conditions for SAP Ventures. The bigger Picture The enterprise cloud market is extremely contested. It is a saturated market that is dominated by few vendors that are able to support important parts of or even the complete business value chain. The challenge facing all these vendors is the necessity to scale down into the mid and lower mid-market. This, however, is a region that is covered by smaller vendors with similar aspirations, e.g., Creatio, Freshworks, Hubspot, Odoo, Pega, ServiceNow, SugarCRM, Zendesk or Zoho, to name but a few.  The big vendors in this Clash...

The secrets to improving Sales Operations and thereby making your salespeople love their system

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jan 12, 2022 | Blog, CRMKonvos |

Three times is the charm. Our first attempt was disrupted by Texas getting off the (power) grid due to a winter storm, the second one due to Streamyard going offline (courtesy of a Google problem), now we finally made it happen and talked with an enterprise software user about sales operations. Based upon real life experience, how can sales ops be improved, how can it contribute to sales success? Does it need process, tools, or what? Well, the answer to that one is, of course, both. But what comes first and how to make sure that people love to use the resulting system? Our guest Thomas Verly, VP of Sales and Marketing at EagleBurgmann has quite some interesting answers. Also to the question whether Revenue Operations is really a thing. Is it new wine in an old bottle or rather old wine in a new bottle.  Thomas has some truely interesting stories to tell that help us identifying what is really important for a sales organization, even if it is in a quite specific industry.  At EagleBurgmann they identified the secret of what makes their sales reps use the system – and they have a truly astonishing adoption. Hint: It is not force but they managed to make the people want to use the system because it delivers value to them. How? No spoiler here besides: Don’t digitalise chaosSimple is beautifulHarmonisation is a good thingDon’t forget about change management Watch the episode. It is worthwhile. More than...

CRMKonvos – The all time hot 5 including some surprises

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jan 3, 2022 | Analysis, Blog, CRMKonvos |

The new year just started, so it is the perfect time to look at some data. To keep you curious: There are some interesting data points. I looked at and reviewed the success of our CRMKonvos. We are streaming live on various channels, including my LinkedIn profile, several Facebook channels including mine, the one of Ralf Korb, Korb & Kollegen as well as Tante Emma 4.0 and occasionally Kompetenztraining Ralf Korb. Of course, we are on Twitter using @twieberneit and @loneRangerCRM. Last, but not least we stream to our YouTube channel CRMKonvos. We are live every Tuesday at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 7 pm CET. Why do I say that? Because we are serving an international audience and timing matters for live shows. On all of these channels the videos remain available for viewers who could not make it to the live episodes. Shameless plug: Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel! Streaming to Twitch doesn’t seem to be that successful for us. I think, this is due to being live once a week is not often enough to build an audience. And then Twitch is full of gamers, who might be less interested in the latest and greatest of CRM and CX, delivered via good discussions with our expert guests. A hard part is that we haven’t found a solution that gives us detailed statistics, like views over time, duration of the view, engagement, etc. across platforms. Means, getting this data it is all manual work. If there is anyone who has a solution for this: I am all game, let me know via the comments or ping me via my LinkedIn or Twitter profiles. So, I did the data collection and am now able to tell you the 5...

Your ultimate 2021 hit list of most read articles

by Thomas Wieberneit | Dec 27, 2021 | Blog |

It is this time of the year and I want to extend a heart-felt Thank You! to all my readers who honour me by investing your time into reading my posts, sharing and commenting on them. Thank You! Below is the list of the top 10 posts read by you in 2021 #10: How to avoid the looming CRM crisis #9: The Dirty Dozen of 2021 Trends (maybe I should revise this one for 2022?) #8: CRMKonvo – Freshworks on Platform, CRM and useful AI #7: Outlaw Spirit – Lessons from The Zoho Analyst Day 2021 #6: How to orchestrate customer journeys in real time at scale #5: Digitization, Digitalization, Digital Transformation – A Stake in the Ground #4: With Oracle Fusion Marketing into the Future of CRM? #3: Together, Zoom and Five9 shape a new market (well, in the light of this merger having failed … they could have shaped a market. Still, a very readable one) #2: Nimble strengthens its ability to be where the user is #1: Ecosystem Play, One Game at a Time Obviously, I do not know yet in detail what I am going to write about in 2022. however, I strive to make it as valuable for you as this year – at least Bonne...

How to walk a Fresh way towards CX and EX

by Thomas Wieberneit | Nov 24, 2021 | Analysis, Blog |

The News On November 11, 2021 Freshworks held its annual Freshworks Refresh event. This year, the event had a hybrid format with around 250 customers, partners and analysts participating on site while around 17k people have registered for online participation. There was a social pre-event and an after-event for entertainment and networking purposes.  The event itself was themed around “delight made easy”. Naturally, it had different agendas for customers and partners on one side and analysts on the other side. The morning was dedicated to a 4-hour sequence of keynote sessions for everyone. The event was kicked off with a keynote by Neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author David Eagleman, who spoke about the “Science of Delight”. The closing keynote was delivered by Amy Purdy, who shared her inspiring story of how she used creativity, a positive outlook and a never-give-up attitude to turn her life from nearly dying, finding herself with a double lower leg amputation and failing organs into becoming a 3 times Paralympic medalist. Between these two speakers, who set the scene, Freshworks offered product and customer information. Freshworks CEO Girish Mathrubootham gave a product update that linked into Eagleman’s message and a distributed customer panel spoke about their experiences with Freshworks, how they implemented Freshworks solutions and how these help the respective businesses. Rounding this off, Freshworks awarded several prizes to customers who offer exceptional EX or CX and showcased the winners of an internal hackathon. The latter is relevant because these winning solutions made it into or will make it into Freshworks products. The afternoon was filled with customer related information in the customer and partner track and product and strategy sessions for the analysts. The...