Rajesh Kumar looks after marketing for SAP, India Subcontinent region, which comprises India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. His mandate covers all of SAP solutions, including partner as well as customer marketing. In a career spanning two decades, Kumar has had diverse experience in technology and consumer marketing, with stints in companies such as Seagram, Perfetti, Microsoft and HCL. A Mechanical Engineering graduate of NIT, Kurukshetra (Haryana), Kumar holds an MBA from IIM Calcutta. He has also completed a programme in leadership and change management from Wharton. A regular speaker at industry and marketing events, Kumar was honoured with the Brand Leadership Award by CMO Asia and recognised among the “50 Most Talented CMOs” in India in 2012.

In this exclusive conversation with Sanjay Gupta for India Digital Review, Kumar talks about the happenings in the B2B technology marketing space, the growing role of social, digital and analytics, and what sets SAP apart from others in its realm. Excerpts:


Q. Given that a lot of action has been happening in the digital space over the past one or two years, how does that change the marketing equation for SAP—especially from a B2B perspective?
The way digital is changing or impacting B2B marketing, in my mind, is a bit different from B2C. For long B2C has been driven by creative and communication and distribution and, eventually, customer pick-up. For them the challenge has been measurement. The big excitement for B2C in digital is the ability to measure and take instantaneous action based on that. That is something which, to some extent, has always existed in B2B. This is because we do have a very finite universe [of customers] and we know them very deeply. Also, our solutions are complex and require a lot more engagement.

To me, the value proposition of B2B is very interesting. B2B was restricted in terms of overall communication and the power of a big idea in the previous ear [pre-digital] because the spillage was unviable. To reach out to 25,000 or so companies, it didn’t make sense to go for TV or large-scale print media. So direct marketing became the primary mode—but there’s only so much you can accomplish in traditional direct marketing. I think digital brings the power of data-driven marketing which, at some level, has existed in B2B for long. I think digital is also bringing the power of creativity to B2B.

At a principal level, if you create an excellent piece of communication, people will pull it out and watch it over and over again. So I think the opportunity in B2B is to be creative again. And we all know the power or value of a story from which the customer can benefit.

Q. How important is social media in that context?
If you look at some of our large customers, we engage with them in different parts of the organisation at different levels and at different points of time. I think social media is a great way for us to build engagement with them. It allows us to engage with them on an ongoing basis. Not many in the B2B space are doing it and the models for B2B social engagement are just evolving—which is exciting, as we are already working on the cutting edge of that.

One of the things that social has brought up is that there is the individual voice and there is the voice of the company—now you can hear that individual voice and engage with them on that. In the earlier, traditional direct marketing model, communication was a one-time thing...maybe some telephonic conversations and an event later on as follow-ups. But now it is consistent. And we are a company about expertise—we have islands of expertise in different areas like retail industry, mobile technology, cloud computing, etc. So people can be the nucleus of those communities and engage with them before, during and after a communication or event. These various things are no longer discrete pieces of communication: it’s continuous and it’s two-way...This is how I’m seeing things shape up: very focussed, very personalised and on-goal.

Q. What kind of analytics or social media tools do you use?
We use a range of analytics and social media tools. Being a technology company, it is easy for us to be led by the tool; but the crux is to identify where is the value for the customer and where is the incremental value for us. So we are trying to solve that first and then see which are the right tools to do that.
 
Q. SAP as a company is known for deep domain expertise in different industry segments for which it provides solutions. Does marketing follow a similar, vertical-focussed approach in how you view the universe of customers?
The answer is, Yes. Because a customer in, say, retail industry is very different from one in the IT industry, you have to treat them differently. So we have deep industry expertise and we are going by industry. What happens is that at the top level, we have some large customers in multiple industry segments so we engage with them accordingly. Then, as we go down the chain, there are customers of a specific industry and geography. Like in Ahmedabad, you have apparel and pharmaceuticals; in Hyderabad, you have life sciences, real estate and construction...So we look at those clusters and that’s how we go to them and engage them through industry associations, etc, to bring them together. Then we have the capability to give them a comparative view from other markets that may be ahead of the [tech adoption] curve. So we can paint a picture of how a solution can impact their business outcomes.

Another approach for us—especially for the large mid-market segment that is saturated with the first-level solutions such as ERP—is to think, How can we take them to the next level? For them we have solutions that are mostly horizontal, even though there may be a higher incidence of a solution in a particular industry. For instance, solutions for consumer-facing functions, talent management and recruitment, etc. They are not our traditional customers, so we are building further engagement with them.

Q. How do you think is cloud computing impacting marketing?
As more and more cloud solutions come in, a lot of operations are going to the back-end. In today’s world, the reality of the business is happening where it touches the customer or an important stakeholder like a channel partner. So, different functional and business heads are also realising the need for IT and they are also getting tech savvy. And it is a partnership of the CIO and the head of function that is coming into play. We are working with all these technology and functional heads. We are actually going to where they congregate—associations, professional bodies, etc—and build a dialogue with them. And again, this dialogue is first about how can we make them successful and then technology becomes an ally.

Q. In an expanding universe of customers, how is your messaging changing for the digital era?
If you look at our new messaging, it’s “Run simple.” The pace of change has quickened globally and the businesses have become more complex; [but] technology can help you run simple...

Q. So it builds on your earlier message of “The best run businesses run SAP?”
Yes. Not only that, we are simplifying the way we engage with our customers. So we are simplifying the contracts, simplifying what we can serve them online...we are completely changing our digital presence and we are calling it One Digital. So with a single sign-on, they will be recognised and led to a customised experience. We are going big bang all the way into digital as a company.

Q. From an online or digital perspective, how would your potential customers compare you with a nimbler competitor like a Salesforce.com or a Workday? And how would you measure that perception?
There are two parts to it. One is when customers choose SAP—and we are moving pretty fast there; in fact, we have the largest base of cloud users in the world. We have achieved this through organic growth as well as acquisitions, for the idea is that this change [digital/cloud] is happening right here, right now.

The second part is that when customers choose a solution in the cloud, sometimes they may go for a point solution in a hurry—but it doesn’t talk to their back-end. And we run back end for most organisations. So if you are wanting to do customer analytics, from where will you get the data for that? From ERP, of course. When you want to do analytics on payroll, talent, etc, globally, where will you pull the data for that? Again, from the systems. If you want to innovate in terms of purchasing, you’ll again need to get the data from the company back-end systems. So, at one end, with HANA, we are giving it to them real-time. We are able to provide the customers an integrated solution across functions, and the solutions are all interoperable. So while some of the competitors may have their own advantages, for us, the fact is that we can provide them integrated innovation end-to-end, and the solutions all talk to each other. So some companies may want to do something in a certain way for a short time but eventually, they would want all their solutions to talk to each other.

Sanjay Gupta is an editorial consultant and freelance writer based in Delhi. He can be reached at thinksanjay@gmail.com