A Trip to SAP’s Global Headquarters in Walldorf
Since September, Greendeck has been part of the SAP.IO Foundry powered by Techstars. The first of it’s kind in Europe, the program provides Greendeck and nine other machine learning and AI companies with direct mentorship and access to SAP’s application programming interfaces, technologies, ecosystem, and of course the amazing global Techstars network!
SAP needs no introduction. Over 365,000 customers across 180 countries, 80,000+ employees, a presence in 130+ countries, and over €22 Billion in revenue.
It’s not ‘a’ enterprise software company, it’s ‘the’ enterprise software company. In fact, it’s the company that started the whole new genre of ‘Enterprise Software’!
As part of this program, Greendeck was invited to the SAP Innovation Day held last week at Walldorf, their global headquarters, to “inspire and connect”. True to the tagline, the day was packed with a multitude of talks, keynotes, and a panel discussion that ‘inspired’ disruption in technology and provided a great platform for startups to ‘connect’ with a folks from a technology giant like SAP.
It was wonderful talking to people about pricing strategies, adoption of dynamic pricing across different industries, personalisation in modern commerce, and the role of pricing as a lever to maximise profitability.
There were tons of interesting events happening all over the place. For instance, the sales workshop by Ulrike Dobhan, who is a Senior project manager at SAP with immense experience in enterprise sales, helped explain the subtleties in B2B sales processes, and how best to tackle the multiple nuances that may arise.
We sure can confirm that long sales cycles can be tough to deal with! But we’ve learnt the importance of understanding the compelling event that makes a customer buy. Also, it’s important to realise that qualification of a prospect is not an event, but a process.
We also learnt one more thing…SAP takes branding to the next level!
All in all, it was a great learning experience, and of course, a lot of fun!