Foreword: Grow by SAP is an exclusive program for companies experiencing hyper growth, it is designed to help future market leaders to accelerate their business in the most sustainable way possible. We offer participating companies a cloud solution package as a free subscription for up to six months, supported by a dedicated customer success team: Powering Tomorrow, Today.
I joined SAP as part of an acquisition in 2018 coming from a startup. After 2 years I moved internally to kickstart a new initiative in EMEA North: Grow by SAP. The goal of this new program was to address hyper growing startups in Europe through providing strong back office software to help them grow. Launching this initiative started from a very straightforward observation: as a the leading European tech player SAP needs to do more. At that time SAP already had a few streams helping the startup ecosystem such as SAP.IO, providing programs for early stage companies, as well as SAP.IO Fund to participate in fund raising. Still, no dedicated startup commercial offering was available.
As the biggest European tech player, we feel SAP has a responsibility to provide support and resources to young tech players in order to help them structure for success and growth.
SAP is the only European tech company to be in the top 20 most valuable tech brands.
Building the program revolved around 3 streams:
- Build a great team with a fresh mindset in order to support an innovative program, doing things differently from the way we were doing them before
- Create a specific offering through existing SAP products — ERP focus — that will scale along the way with our clients
- Explore new marketing & communications channels to interact differently with out customers
Starting with building a great team, we looked for people that had the willingness to challenge the status quo internally of SAP, also seeking a “everything is possible” mindset.
They did not know it was impossible so they did it
In a large and matrixed organisation such as SAP, it is a real challenge to be agile and navigate across the different business units as well as board areas. Therefore it is critical to be able to find the right people to push initiatives forward as well as generate genuine interest in new streams through explaining the benefits of shifting focus onto something that has yet to be proven. In our case: SAP addressing startups!
Moving on to creating the offering, our main challenges were to focus on existing products where our value proposition is straightforward — hence our focus on ERP — and build a compelling offer tailored for startups. To make it unique we worked on 3 dimensions:
- Financial incentives — create a compelling commercial offering through free implementation & up to 6 months for free. This shows our commitment and investment in the future of our clients
- Fast delivery — under a month to comply with agility. As the world of startups evolves drastically faster than ours we need to adapt and propose shorter implementation to accelerate time to market and therefore increase expected ROI
- Unique customer experience with dedicated customer success team. Moving from on premises to cloud means you need to make sure your clients always get the most of the software you provide and they understand the value they get from it
Finally, this program was also the opportunity to test new channels of communication and new ways marketing our offering. We used the program as a Petri dish in order to play and use different social media such as Clubhouse and also create our own podcast! We innovated in our tone of voice as well as ways of reaching out to our segment through campaigns designed specifically for them — a unique name for the program, specific website, dedicated assets for communication, etc.
After almost a year we can confidently say that the program is a success.
- We now have a whole dedicated team focused on startups in EMEA North and the program is now scaling globally
- In less than a quarter we managed to work with dozens of startups in Europe and learn from them to adjust the offering and make it more relevant for them
- We innovated by defining new ways of doing business with our clients. From new streams of demand generation, new ways of interacting with our customer base through new social media strategies onto having a dedicated customer success team
Key takeaways from this past year is that in such a large corporate, it obviously takes time and resources but once focus has been set and with the right mindset you can make things move and go into the right direction!
Want to know more about the program? Check out our dedicated website or directly contact us.
Also make sure you subscribe to our podcast 🎧 and join us on clubhouse 👋
