A+ in Empathy: Developing customer understanding on a global scale at SAP

At SAP, one of the world’s largest software organizations, our nearly 100,000 employees do business with more than 400,000 customers in 130 countries around the globe. In an organization this large and diverse, it’s an ongoing challenge to keep the salesforce unified in their focus on the customers’ business. In order to meet that challenge, we created the SAP Global Academy for Sales Leaders.

As we began to develop the Academy, we were looking for a way to generate more customer empathy in our global audience of sales leaders. We looked at many business and customer acumen programs, but when we saw Interplay we knew it was genius and just right for our audience. Over the past two and a half years, Interplay has proven to be a highly engaging and interactive experience that helps our sales managers rethink their role as leaders.

The ability to focus on the customer perspective is a critical skill for our salesforce. At SAP, our software runs in the background so typically our customers don’t think about it from day to day – and we don’t want them to! It’s not helpful or relevant for our salespeople to approach their customers with a lot of facts and figures about what our software does.

By going through the Interplay experience, our sales managers have greater empathy and awareness of the challenges our customers are facing – and what their pain-points are. Interplay helps our managers teach their teams how to approach customers and conduct value conversations. They learn how to talk to customers about their challenges so they can unlock the intangible and tangible value they want to create and link our solution to that.