How is the...

Question

How is the Sales Organisation set up?

For example per account, is there a “Core” rep/team and then Solution Specific reps/teams i.e. SucessFactors, Spend Management etc.

Does S/4HANA sit with the Core Rep or is this an additional Solution Specific role.

And is there a “safer” area to work in?

Current Employee · Accepted Answer

There's no such thing as a "safer" area to work in. You have targets. Meet them or get out. Sales isn't for lazy or complacent people. There is no area in SAP that is "safe" - do the work, get paid, or else you shouldn't be there.

You have IAEs (Industry Account Execs) who are generalists or quarterbacks. They own the account, and they own the strategy. They lead a VAT (virtual account team) of specialist AEs from other LOBs along with pre-sales, solution advisors, value engineering consultants, and more, in order to build a compelling vision for change for the client executives.

LOB AEs are usually free to hunt and farm for business within the patch owned by the IAE. Each LOB AE will be working in several different patches at once, so they will be working with multiple IAEs, on each of their relevant accounts.

The LOBs are:

- Ariba. 
- BTP, 
- CX, 
- DSC, 
- HXM, 
- Signavio. 
- (Other solutions at arms-length, like Concur, Taulia, etc. have their own dedicated sales reps)

The IAE's core pursuit is to sell the vision on core ERP (S/4HANA public or private) - whether the client is existing using ECC or R/3 or BYD doesn't matter, or whether they're a net-new prospect using competitors' software. Usually about 10% or less of your portfolio (as an IAE) will be made up of core ERP customers. Maybe another 10-15% will be customers using some point solutions  or old legacy solutions. The overwhelming majority of customers in your portfolio will be net-new hunting targets.

Ideally, the IAEs will want to build large market basket deals that include core ERP surrounded by one or more LOBs; this greatly enhances deal value internally, as well as the perceived value by the client. In practice, because of contract timings, you may have a client that is ready to buy core S/4 only, and then they might buy HXM or DSC or Signavio later on, as a standalone purchase.

All AEs (whether generalists or specialists) report to their own VP (first-line sales manager) and then to SVP; and sometimes turf battles happen at the VP or SVP levels that can slow down or even wreck your market basket deal. Knowing how to control the internal story, how to build executive alignment well in advance, managing the deal-desk, etc. is all critical to success as an IAE otherwise you will flame out and fail - hence my remark that there is no safe area.

Current Employee · Answer

Yes. Core has S/4. Core reps have other line of business reps that sell into their accounts. Core is safest.

Former Employee · Answer

Yes. The commercial team is a matrix with core and solutions AEs - and the ERP salesbag is core AE only.
Core AE have more visibility and responsability which can be good or bad depends on your performance.

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