We Tried Out the New SAP Business One Sales App

Have you heard? SAP just released a spanking new Business One App for your Sales team! Every business owner and sales team knows the importance of managing customers on the go, so we were excited to try out the app and review it for you.

First Thoughts

Let’s get one thing straight. This app is beautiful! The screenshots speak for themselves.

Beauty is nothing without purpose, though, and the app has this in droves too. Everything you need is right at your fingertips on the homescreen.

You can review your activities, opportunities, quotations, orders, customers, items, and KPIs with just a tap on your mobile screen.

The layout is clean and intuitive, meaning you can start using it immediately with little to no training, and can quickly get things done on the move!

 

Activities Management

For extra convenience, your latest sales activities (incoming stock arrivals, sales meetings, campaign preparations and so on) are shown beneath the header menu.

Even better, you don’t even have to open the app every time you want to check these activities, as they can be easily synced with your device’s calendar by clicking the Sync button!

 

With the Activity tab, you can create new activities or review existing ones, with the ability to add details such as:

• Customer/lead involved (under a slightly confusingly named category called Business Partners)
• Contact person and phone number
• Priority (Low/Normal/High)
• Staff assigned

 

Seriously, how much more convenience could you ask for? We no longer have to manually create Google Calendar events with contact information for each activity planned in order to track them on mobile, and can easily add new activities on the go.

 

Sales Opportunities

You can easily track sales opportunities similarly to activities on the Sales app, in three categories: Open, Won, and Lost. The opportunities are listed with their relevant number, name, percentage chance of closure, predicted closing date, and dollar value.

The Pipeline tab allows you to review your opportunities according to the Pipeline stage that they’re in (Lead, 1st Meeting, 2nd Meeting, Quotation, Negotiation, and Order), along with the percentage chance of closure related to the stage, and the value of each (potential) deal.

 

 

You realize what this means, right?

You’re not going to forget about Sam from ABC Computers Pte Ltd just because you started pursuing Adrian from XYZ Engineering.

Your sales team doesn’t really have too much of an excuse to forget anyone anymore. Ever.

(Unless they’re chasing hundreds of leads a day, in which case you should still cut them some slack. We’re still human after all!)

 

Customers and Leads

 

We just told you that the app will make sure you never forget about Sam and Adrian.

Sure, you might remember their existence. But what if you forget their address or phone number, or even your history of interactions with them??

The Customers tab makes sure you never do!

You can check everything from their account balance to their website and even their credit limit. You can even attach documents (e.g. sales agreements, invoices, etc) as needed.

Clicking on Transactions within the Customers tab (we’re not sure why the name becomes Business Partners when you click in either) allows you to see activities, sales opportunities, sales quotations, and sales orders associated with the customer.

 

 

That’s the most beautiful thing about this app – each and every section is thoroughly linked so you never get lost or end up clicking back and forth in confusion while searching for information.

The nifty Dashboard option lets you know how your relationship with them is going. Are sales declining? Why? Have you scheduled any activities with them lately? Is the industry they’re in facing some trouble, and should you deprioritize approaching this customer?

Though the SAP Business One Mobile App has Dashboards which allows you to view your business statistics, it never gives such a micro focus as the Sales App does, digging deep into the historical data and value of a particular lead or customer.

 

 

If you eliminate psychological factors* and emotional judgment, you may realize customers who were once valuable may have practically left you a long time ago. We don’t even have to tell you why this is important.

*(Like the well-known halo effect – sure, Sam from ABC may be a really nice guy. But has he been purchasing from you lately? You may like him so much that you give him huge discounts every time he so much as gives you a call, though it makes no financial sense)

 

 

Breaking up is hard to do – but cold hard facts and figures may help your sales team to move on, and the Sales app is a daily, mobile, and easily accessible reminder to your sales team to make the hard decisions.

 

Actual Sales

So you’ve got a sale, and you’re not at your desk. You don’t want to trouble your colleagues either. What do you do?! You’re not going to let it slip away, are you?

If you’re in the B2C industry, you’ve probably already got an automated webshop. What if you’re in the B2B industry, and quotations are a must due to the sheer volume of products and details involved in each transaction?

Thanks to the Sales app, your phone is all you need to send your customers quotations, fulfil or review their orders, and check on your item details (with pictures!!) and balances.

 

KPIs

Every SAP Business One user knows that analytics are arguably the best and most useful features for business owners and sales teams. The KPIs tab gives a good overview of your business, and whether sales are going up or stagnating (hopefully not declining).

While this can be used as a good summary and will give your sales team a general idea about the health of the business, they should probably still head to the Customers tab to get more in-depth data on what’s working and what isn’t.

 

Final Verdict

 

If you’ve already used the SAP Business One Mobile App, you may wonder:

What’s the difference between the SAP Business One Sales App and the SAP Business One Mobile App?

To which we say:

• The SAP Business One Sales App is focused only on sales-relevant information and functions, so the app is streamlined and easy to understand for your sales team, instead of being cluttered up with functions that are not necessary for their use.
• On top of that, the app “leverages the service layer to read and write data from or to SAP Business One, instead of using the SAP Business One Integration Framework”. We already mentioned that the KPIs goes deeper than the Mobile App’s Dashboards function.
• Sales Activities in the SAP Business One Mobile App are also not so easily navigated through as in the Sales App.

 

The Sales App helps your sales team to help you. Make things easy for them so they can pursue deals easily without having to worry about digging around to find information. We think you and your sales team will love both the look, feel, and functionality of the app, so try it out!