We make digital work

In 2015, Forrester discovered that 57% of the buyer's journey happens before the sales rep is involved. At the end of last year, more than 70% of buyers did their research, consideration and evaluation online.  So what is your sales team doing online? And how can you help them feel more comfortable there?

Is it possible to wrap up a decade of content marketing partnership in one blog? The title already shows us that a brief overview may be a bit of a challenge. A challenge for sure, but if there’s one thing we’ve learnt, it’s that we’re always up for one. So here we go!

At delaware, we talk a lot about the need for consistency across digital channels to create effortless customer (and employee) experiences. Evidently, this has far-reaching implications on how digital products – websites, apps, intranet environments, but also SAP interfaces – are designed and developed. A streamlined and scalable solution that facilitates collaboration between stakeholders is urgently needed. That’s where design systems come in.

Recently, SAP presented their new Commerce Cloud 2011 release. They announced some key features that offer an even better customer experience and allow businesses to be more agile. In this blog, I will outline the key capabilities and improvements that were made available following the 2005 release earlier in May.

How pages are rated by search engines is rapidly changing. Companies sometimes fail to consider that the user’s experience on the website also has an impact on the page ranking. With the announced major update of Google’s page ranking algorithm in May 2021, UX seems to be even more important than ever. 

As an organization you need to tell your story. It’s what sets you apart, whether you want to showcase your expertise on a specific topic or you want to share insights with your network. Content marketing is the strategy behind your story. 

Remove friction to boost success, for customers as well as employees: that’s the core of ‘effortless experience’. But what does that mean for your enterprise architecture and software infrastructure? Which tools should you use, and how should they interact? How can data move through the organization in a way that empowers employees and delights customers? Software architect Wim Meerschman sketches out an elegant and powerful solution. 

With the wealth of content out there, it’s not that easy to stand out from the crowd. If you do use LinkedIn to build a strong online brand for yourself or your organization, you need to do it thoroughly. We asked our team of thought leadership content marketers for some advice. What do they recommend, based on their experience? 

What’s the secret of highly successful sales organizations? Is it the charismatic sales professional capable of selling a fridge to a penguin? A genius business strategy that puts customer experience center stage? A cutting-edge CRM tool that facilitates a personalized client approach? “Actually, the secret to sales excellence is all of these, and then some,” says Michiel Debie, senior consultant at delaware. 

Customer experience (CX) is a crucial factor in successfully selling products or services. The last several years have seen a significant shift of focus: processes are now driven by customers. They have the power to make or break your company. The success of your business and positive customer experiences go hand in hand. The more satisfied a customer is, the more likely they will be loyal to your brand. SAP has created a customer experience optimization solution especially for the B2C- or direct-to-customer market: SAP Upscale Commerce.

The quarterly upgrade of the SAP Marketing Cloud system was released just weeks ago – making it the perfect moment to review what version 2005 has to offer. In this blog post, we walk you through the newest features and highlights – and their benefits for your business.

Optimize your end-to-end service flow with SAP Field Service Management and CX FSM Connect and boost customer satisfaction.

SAP has recently redesigned their guided selling add-on, Telco Accelerator, and the process of creating guided selling journeys for customers is now accomplished using Product Offerings (PO). A Product Offering represents how the Product Specification (the functional know-how owned by the business users, i.e. what the marketing operator wants to sell at a functional level) is sold and contains market details covering a specific period of time.

Companies are now making the shift to video marketing to get their vision across. We have come up with a selection of our content marketing team’s favorite software, each of which lends itself to different types of video, depending on your needs. Take a look!

As the ways of doing business have altered during the Covid-19 epidemic, so too has the way in which we now interact with our customers and employees.

So what about marketing in this new age? How can it weather the storm while remaining effective?

What do you look for when partnering with a content marketing team? Most people simply think “good content.” Sure, content lies at the heart. But we believe the strengths of a successful content marketing team are its diversity and its ability to maximize the power of its content creation. The best message is worth little if not read by its target audience or analyzed to see which channels best strike their target.

Due to the corona crisis, B2C webstores are witnessing an unprecedented surge in demand – with some barely able to keep up. A lot of B2B companies were completely taken by surprise, however. Many don’t have any form of webshop yet, relying instead on in-person customer meetings. With the sales team currently stuck at home, a digital storefront has become indispensable. Based on the Shopify platform, delaware has developed a fast e-commerce approach that enables B2B companies to reach customers online.  

Would you trust a baker who doesn’t eat their own bread? Of course not. So, we figured: you probably wouldn’t trust an IT partner that doesn’t heed its own advice. Behind the scenes, our CIO Steven Fleurent and delaware partner Filip Decostere are working hard to make the ‘self-driven back office’ a reality. Read on to hear more about their experiences, expectations and goals in this unique exposé.

With the deadline of 2025 approaching faster than you might think, forward-thinking companies are already prepping for their move to SAP S/4HANA. How transitioning SAP to the cloud will boost business innovation. Those in search of the best results should also seize the opportunity to move their entire SAP estates to the cloud. And if you really want to get an edge on the competition, Microsoft Azure offers the ideal cloud solution: robust, reliable, secure and scalable.

Azure has the broadest global footprint and largest compliance portfolio of any public cloud solution. It also boasts fully embedded security, enterprise-grade SLAs and industry-leading support. In short, it’s the perfect platform on which to reliably run and deploy SAP workloads.

When migrating your SAP environment to Azure, lots of things have to be taken into account. And with many applications being critical to nearly every aspect of your business, ensuring a streamlined deployment is vital. Don’t try to be a hero: get help from the experts.

As S/4HANA is relatively new, only few people have the skills and expertise required to make migration to Azure a true success. On top of that, employing an in-house expert for every area covered by a migration will be difficult and expensive. Finding the right person to handle the management of the system post-migration will be even harder.

By 2025, SAP will end its support for all platforms except S/4HANA. While this may seem like a long time off, savvy businesses are already making preparations. After all, the current business climate is merciless when it comes to falling behind. But while the transition to S/4HANA is a major and necessary undertaking, combining it with a move to the cloud is sure to make your business more efficient and innovative as well.

It’s tempting to put off the transition of your SAP ERP to the cloud until other priorities are handled. But, as SAP impacts pretty much every aspect of your business, that might be a dangerous attitude in the long run.

In times of digital transformation, when disruptive newcomers reshape industries – from banking through tourism to media and car manufacturing – every business (or political) leader will agree that innovation is the key to success. Awareness of the need to transform and innovate is not the issue. The issue is about embedding innovation into your organization so that it generates business outcomes and makes a lasting difference. Current research estimates that up to 80% of innovation projects never see the light of day. They do not deliver anything to learn from, positive or negative.

Dynamics 365 lets you run your entire business from end-to-end with intelligent applications that seamlessly work together in the cloud. Even better: you can combine this with document management, business intelligence and why not: IoT, predictive and cognitive services.

In the 1990s came the ERP systems. Then, the 2000s were the golden age of CRM (customer relationship management) software. Nowadays CRM software has become mainstream in all companies of a certain size.

What are the business benefits? It seems that a CRM solution alone is not enough to bring any kind of competitive advantage. 

During my internship at delaware, my main project was to investigate the integration of beacon technology with SAP Hybris Marketing. Since the 1702 update of SAP Hybris Marketing, it had become possible to import beacon data in SAP Hybris Marketing. But how does it do that and where is the added value?