Like the rest of the world, the business-to-business (B2B) buyer experience is shifting. A Gartner report found that today’s B2B sales reps have decreased customer access, struggling to hold five percent of a customer’s total purchase time.
Additionally, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels, showcasing the degree to which today’s sales conversations are increasingly digitized. With such limited exposure, making engaging digital interactions is even more important for B2B sales reps.
A consistent, pre-customized, and intuitive user experience is a top priority in order to grow and achieve new sales wins in today’s digital landscape. As a result, engaging resource hubs and demo environments have become essential tools in landing a B2B sale. Demos take the sales discussion one step further by highlighting why a specific solution is the best fit for achieving customers’ goals, providing a strong visual that typically closes the deal for many customers.
A shared demo environment has proven to drive affordable adoption and ease sales processes for our valued partners.
Based on conversations with our partners, we introduced the free SAP Partner Demo Environment two years ago to help strengthen their sales processes. Now, users are one click away from the demo environment they need to close a sale.
“The shared demo environment saves us significant time in preparation for customer demos, with available transaction and master data as well as scripted scenarios across integrated solutions,” says Michael Jolton, vice president of Presales, Intelligent Enterprise, NIMBL. “It also gives us the flexibility we need to run our demos in our own style. It is a tremendous tool for partners looking to educate customers on SAP’s paradigm-breaking tools to enable the intelligent enterprise.”
End-to-end integrated, pre-scripted solutions in the free SAP Partner Demo Environment enable partners to showcase the promise and opportunity of becoming an intelligent enterprise to customers with no need for special product authorization or costly integration — ultimately providing the flexibility and ease necessary to grow.
In addition to RISE with SAP, partners can utilize the demo environment to position SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP’s industry cloud, sustainability, and more to their customers. To date, more than 1,300 partner companies with 5,100 system users have gained free access to the SAP Partner Demo Environment.
But our work isn’t done. Our partners are rapidly evolving with today’s digital era. To meet their needs, we are continuously expanding the SAP Partner Demo Environment portfolio. Our most recent release this past June provides partners with free access to 15+ new live demos across key business and technology industries and sustainability solutions. And in combination with SAP Demo Store, SAP Partner Demo Environment provides partners access to more than 550 demos.
“We were able to confidently demonstrate the business case, in an industry that is not our main expertise, and still win the sale due to the shared environment,” says Allen Pizaia, Architecture and Solutions manager for SPRO Consultoria e Informatica Ltda.
As we continue to grow the free SAP Partner Demo environment, we heavily value partner feedback in identifying new areas to optimize and update. We understand that customer needs vary and shift, and for this reason, we have an open feedback loop with our partners, where they can directly influence and submit ideas and requests for demos through the Customer Influence site to be considered in the demo environment portfolio.
Additionally, to support the best possible partner experience with the free SAP Partner Demo Environment, we will continue to introduce new webinars and SAP Learning Journeys to encourage continued education and learning.
SAP partners can visit Shared Demo Services on the SAP Partner Portal to learn more.
Steffen Burger is part of the Partner Ecosystem Success Senior Leadership team at SAP.