As fate will sometimes have it I met in Buenos Aires a very nice Business Development Manager of SAP Brazil. Boris Göbel is from Germany and was delegated to Sao Paolo since the beginning of the year.
Apart from all other interesting information he presented - I lost words as I heard what kind of message he got as he introduced himself in Brazil to many local employees. „Oh Germany... I would love to travel once over there, because you can have such a cheap holiday there“ I mean honestly – is this something you are expecting if someone who considers Germany as one of his next travel destinations? For sure not...
Company / Market definition:
Let's switch over to the business part of this story.
SAP entered the Brazilian market 15 years ago. Since then, SAP’s business in Brazil grew constantly, even making Brazil SAP’s third biggest country in terms of revenue in 2010. SAP sees enormous growth rated in many geographies, but the speed of growth in Brazil is unparalleled.
As such, Brazil is one of the fastest growing markets for SAP. The customers are from the B2B large enterprises segment covering all industries, with very high market share in industries such as utilities, oil & gas, mining, agribusiness, public services and others.
SAPs main strategy directions of the upcoming years include the following issues:
- Next to their well know main product ERP solutions (Enterprise resource planning – 50% market share) SAP included Business Intelligence as a key offering in their portfolio. With this, SAP’s offering is a market-leading combination, enterprises of all sizes in brazil will take advantage of.
- Mobility: As more and more people use mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablet computers, software also has to be consumable anywhere, anytime and on any device. SAP is leading this market with its mobile solutions helps its customers to unwire their enterprise.
- Business ByDesign: A hosted ERP solution that is offered via the internet in a SaaS (Software as a Service) concept. Hence, it is easier to install for SAP’s customers and able to deliver immediate value to them.
Website conception:
SAP's website offers comprehensive information how potential customers can fill their needs with the best fitting ERP solution. E-Commerce via Internet is not on their focus so far- although this might change once the Business-by-Design will be rolled out to a broader market in Brazil.
The online channel is also used as a presentation platform for important events. SAP is setting up these events in Brazil on a regular base in different locations and with different focus topics. In the meantime some of them belong to the biggest IT-events in whole South-America. At one of the last events in Sao Paolo more than 5000 potential customers participated virtually on all activities and presentations from their local office seat. They just had to provide within their registration form in what kind of information they are interested in. Of course these data can be happily used for further acquisition activities by SAP afterwards as well :-)
Internet spread:
So far activities like Facebook, SEM, SEO are mainly managed by the headquarter team in Germany with limited efforts on localized activities. SAP-Global collected more than 60.000 Facebook fans already Is is used as communication channel for SAP events, new products, new partners or information about the company itself or interesting topics in general. But as SAP wants to be perceived as a local company in Brazil they might need to slightly rearrange / establish social networks locally in the future as well.
Search engine marketing is also one of these “local-focused” topics as soon as more and more competitors enter the same keyword market SAP tends for.
Besides to these online activities SAP uses press releases for local and nationwide newspapers as well as local marketing events for special topics to establish the brand itself as a first choice for ERP solutions for Brazilian companies.
Future succeeding parameters:
One of the main parameters to succeed in establishing business in Brazil - with the mentioned strategy directions above - is to get awareness as a local acting company. Therefore SAP puts a lot of thoughts and efforts in setting up a valuable co-operation with local universities, public services, local development centre to create trust and sustainability and will continue to do so. SAP will also keep delivering localised solutions for the Brazilian market that take local regulations such as its complex tax system into consideration. At the end it will be at least one major key success factor in terms of achieving the targeted strategy goals which were mentioned at the beginning.
Online marketing is included within the future strategy and will be set up step by step in the way it was described above. The preconditions are excellent because the mentality of the Brazilian people is made for (online) communication. We are looking forward to follow this successful combination of excellent products and integrated communication through all available channels.
@Thanks Boris for this great inside view. We'll appreciate your openness!
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