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In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Did you catch all our latest SAP.iO Venture Studio highlights?

April — June 2021 | Achievements & News from SAP.iO Venture Studio

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch. Find more on sap.io/studio.

It’s been a busy three months recently! SAP employees haven taken charge of their venture, pursued the freedom to shape their own strategy and taken their own decisions, also accelerating their own personal growth. Find the highlights of recent events and developments below:

 

Brilliant Hire by SAP

Brilliant Hire by SAP intelligently matches candidates with a personalized shortlist of jobs on your careers page based on what really matters to them, using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

  • Brilliant Hire has a new General Manager! Jeanine LeFlore already shared some insights on “Busting Product Myths” in this blogpost.
  • Head of Marketing at Brilliant Hire, Katya Pokrovskaya, also shared her tips for successful startup marketing in this blogpost.
  • Did you know that 90% of candidates leave career pages without applying? Their new product video and this article explain more on how they help customers with this challenge and elevate the candidate experience.
  • Brilliant Hire’s offer to their early access program was also announced during SAPPHIRE NOW 2021. Read more in the event’s Innovation News Guide and watch their customer talk in this session on how companies can build their future together with SAP.

More on this venture on https://www.brillianthire.io/

GreenToken by SAP

GreenToken by SAP is a supply chain solution that offers companies new levels of transparency through reliable, blockchain-based information. Gain visibility into where raw materials came from and produce products with knowledge about where and how the materials were produced, even in complex, non-batch supply chains.

  • The venture turned one on April 1! Walk down memory lane with them in this blog post.
  • GreenToken was featured in the global CEO keynote of SAP’s flagship event SAPPHIRE NOW 2021. Watch their segment here. Their early access program was also announced during the event. Read more in the event’s Innovation News Guide.
  • Eastman published a press release on their collaboration with the venture to track recycled content. Together they also joined the SAP Sustainability Summit. Find the replay to their session “Material Return Loops — Accelerating Sustainability Outcomes” here.

More on this venture on http://www.green-token.io/

OwnID by SAP

OwnID by SAP enables your customers to use their phone as a key to instantly access their accounts on your website. This password–less method of login and verification grants a subtle and streamlined user experience, ensuring the highest security standards and complete privacy of every account.

More on this venture on https://www.ownid.com/

Paid Pronto by SAP

Paid Pronto by SAP drives cash into your business faster by automating receivable processes. Deliver a seamless, personalized, customer experience through Paid Pronto’s automated communication solution, beginning when an invoice is first released until payment is received.

  • General Manager Erin Dierker featured on Femventure’s podcast episode on “Founding your own business”. Listen on Apple podcasts or openSAP.
  • Team member Andrew Blum also laid out in this blogpost why receivables teams might need to look across the hall to their procurement and payables counterparts for a transformation roadmap.

More on this venture on https://www.paidpronto.io/

EverLoop by SAP

EverLoop by SAP (formerly ReLoop by SAP) aims to empower every business on the planet to achieve zero waste by being a sustainability solution that connects stakeholders across the waste value chain to enable the circular economy, with transparency and traceability.

  • EverLoop joined the SAP Sustainability Summit. Find the replay to their session ““Growth of Recommerce to Better Manage our Waste” here.
  • The venture is one out of two helping SAP and SAP customers achieve their sustainability goals. Read blog post here.
  • They also have a new website ready for you!

More on this venture on www.ever-loop.io!

SourceAgent by SAP

Great sourcing shouldn’t be a secret. Source Agent by SAP gives you the insights and strategies to address spend intelligently and wow your stakeholders. Identify sourcing opportunities by aligning your spend to current market intelligence. Receive a targeted sourcing strategy and supplier recommendations based on your data and requirements for each spend category. Quickly convert strategies and plans into eSourcing event prep and execution.

  • The venture is actively looking for customers interested in sourcing opportunity assessments (free of charge) right now. Contact them here.
  • And why not check out their new website as well?

More on this venture on https://www.sourceagent.io/

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Venture Voices: Tips for successful start-up marketing

Start-up marketing, Storytelling and Co.: The Director of Product Marketing at Brilliant Hire by SAP shares some key lessons that that she has learned through the years. 

By Katya Pokrovskaya, Director of Product Marketing at Brilliant Hire by SAP 

Having recently made a career move, I joined Brilliant Hire by SAP as Director of Product Marketing just over a month ago. Brilliant Hire is an employee-led venture in the SAP.iO Venture Studio, SAP’s in-house incubator designed to build new growth businesses for the company. Having worked for a few early-stage software start-ups in the past, it feels great to be back in the innovation space. I wanted to share two tips that I believe are key in developing strong messaging and positioning for a SaaS start-up: building your story around your audience and communicating value over functionality. 

So, why does my start-up need marketing?

As a marketer, a question that I often get asked from non-marketer colleagues and friends is “Why do we even need marketing in the first place? We’re building a great product. It should sell itself”. It’s an interesting question as there’s no doubt that a great product is the foundation for the success of a business. Organizations such as Product-Led Institute have built fantastic frameworks and entire training programs on building fast-growing SaaS businesses with a product-led approach. However, as important as product is, so is getting the word out about it in a way that will resonate with your market. Marketers exist to craft a clear, compelling story and bring it to the right people at the right time – to ultimately communicate the value of your product and drive growth. 

Tip: Make your customer the hero of your (marketing) story

Who is your target audience? If you’re trying to appeal to everybody, then you’re probably not appealing to anybody. I would argue that the number one rule of marketing is this: know your audience. It starts with taking a step back from what you’re building or selling to listen and empathize with your target user and customer. Try to learn as much about them as possible to understand their unique needs and think about where you can help. Make time for qualitative research such as interviews and focus groups to build detailed buyer/user/customer persona profiles. If your product addresses a few different audiences, repeat the audience profile exercise for each one to understand all the key personas that you are positioning your product to. Ask yourself: Who are you building your product for? What problems does it solve for them? What value can it bring to their lives?   

The expert knowledge you gain from empathizing with your audience should be the foundation for your marketing storytelling. Think of your marketing message as a story and your customer as the hero of the story. I recently came across an interesting framework for crafting a marketing story in a great book that I’m reading: Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller.  As in any story plotline, the hero (your customer) will need to overcome a challenge or obstacle. Eventually, they meet a guide (your product/service/solution) who will offer them a plan and provide a call to action to help them solve the problem. How does your product help customers overcome a challenge and make them successful?   

Tip: Communicate value, not feature/function

In the fast-paced, information-saturated world that we live in, communicating value helps people quickly understand why they should care about your product. When creating marketing messaging for software, it can be easy to resort to listing the features and functions of the amazing SaaS product that you’re building. However, unless you’re targeting a highly technical customer, this approach most likely wouldn’t resonate with your audience. Instead, think about how you can help your customer: specific use cases for your product, the problems solved for the end-users and ultimately, the value that it brings. Even better, could you quantify the value to show things like time saved or ROI?   

Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Slack, once sent a memo to his team that said: “Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive, our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms”. 

The category of company-wide messaging software wasn’t new when Slack entered the market in 2013. However, Slack was unparalleled in translating their platform’s capabilities into a clear value proposition. By positioning themselves as a replacement for email and the place “where work happens”, Slack clearly communicates how its product makes users’ working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. The strong messaging and positioning, coupled with a fantastic product, powered Slack’s impressive hypergrowth.   

At the end of the day, customer-centric marketing that communicates clear value will make it quick and easy for your audience to understand why they should choose your product over all of the other options out there.

Check out the SAP.iO Venture Studio website to learn more about how we drive organic innovation for SAP.

About Brilliant Hire by SAP

Brilliant Hire intelligently matches candidates with a personalized shortlist of a company’s jobs based on what really matters to them. It allows the candidates to search based on their skills, interests and passions — instead of keywords.

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch. Founding teams join the SAP.iO Venture Studio primarily through the SAP.iO Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) programs.

In Fund, Foundries, Blog

Cracking the code: From startup to scale up in enterprise software

Panel of speakers at Tech Crunch

By Ram Jambunathan

The startup journey is hard. An estimated 75% of venture-backed companies never return cash to investors; only 1% go on to become unicorns. Startup success requires brutally efficient execution and a bit of luck. My own experience as a startup founder attests to this. When we started T-Networks (now a part of Broadcom), we had to build our own semiconductor fab and packaging facility, while at the same time competing with deep-pocketed, well-established multinationals. A “pivot” in those days, should we decide we needed to change in tack (e.g., different product in different segment), was going to be a fairly difficult (if not impossible) road to travel. So, I have to say I’m excited (and perhaps even a little envious) when I see the opportunities entrepreneurs have today — to build, test, refine, and even pivot — now that the need to construct the infrastructure required to develop the actual product is removed.

Of course, there are still challenges. In enterprise software, it also requires industry expertise, access to strong networks, and an ability to reach customers — all of which pose significant barriers to many entrepreneurs who aspire to transform industries. This is where a strategic partner like SAP can help early-stage startups scale the barriers to success.

The SAP.iO Fund and SAP.iO Foundries invest in and accelerate early-stage startups at the leading edge of B2B software innovation, who leverage a combination of emerging technologies like AI or IoT, business process expertise, and new business models. We realize that agile, early-stage startups complementary to SAP can expand and enhance the SAP ecosystem and solutions, giving our customers access to relevant, cutting-edge solutions. While SAP can help startups target customer needs, connect to SAP systems, and access SAPs broad customer base.

A key challenge many startups have after finding product-market fit is scaling. This can require significant investment, especially on the customer acquisition side — from marketing to sales to customer success. But what if the right partner could help to identify and prioritize high-value prospects, make those introductions, and then even help to drive the sales process? This is the type of startup partner SAP and SAP.iO strives to be — even for early-stage startups.

Startups that SAP.iO supports receive strong and unprecedented exposure to our field and customers. We have dedicated resources on the SAP.iO team that ensure SAP.iO startups get visibility and interest from internal account teams, customers, and partners. For example, during the first half of 2019 alone, at least 150 major customers visited SAP.iO Foundries in NA and Europe to meet with the startups SAP.iO is supporting.

In particular, on the go-to-market side, startups ask about the tactical ways that SAP typically partners with startups, where the field is provided incentives to position and / or sell a startup partner’s solution. In my session today at Techcrunch Enterprise 2019, I shared the stage with 3 SAP.iO Fund startups — BigID, Medal, and Plum — who discussed the various ways they work with SAP to scale sales and deliver value to customers:

  1. CO-SELL — in this model, startups get exposure to the SAP customer base via the SAP AppCenter. SAP customers can discover, try, and buy startup solutions. Customers transact through the SAP AppCenter, on the startup partners’ contract paper. Select partners may have special pipeline generation activities supported by an SAP Business Unit.
  2. RE-SELL — in this model, startup partner solutions can be sold via the SAP Solution Extension program, where the solution is sold by the field on SAP contract paper and is also supported by dedicated partner management. This is generally reserved for more mature startups.
  3. OEM (INBOUND) — in this model, the startup solution is embedded into an SAP solution. SAP then sells the combined offering on SAP paper, with the startup receiving a license fee from SAP for using their IP.

By leveraging these types of partnerships, startups can dramatically expand their reach, pipeline, and ability to deliver value to SAP customers. It’s important to note that startups dramatically increase success working with a channel partner if they already have a successful, scalable, repeatable sales formula (or process) that they can teach to the partner. Contrary to popular startup mythology, early-stage startups can have success cracking the code with large enterprise partners — SAP.iO is proof of this.