How to add a 'Contract Renewal' alert for an Account?

[Ben_Casey77]

Hi, I'm wondering if anyone can share any best practice with managing the following requirement in Sales Cloud.

When our Sales teams are prospecting their 'Attain' accounts, they would like to capture future contract expiry/renewal date(s), so that they will automatically receive a system notification altering them of the customer's current contract expiry/renewal date, for example 6/12/18 months in advance.

What ways can this requirement be easily met, with minimal customisation? Thanks in advance.

Attain: Our ideal accounts that match our target profile, those that we aspire to win. They fit the description of, “We do not work with them now but we would like to.”

[mjveerhuis1]

Hi Ben,

I think I understand now! So you have set an indicator or attribute on account (role: prospect) level that shows that a prospect is important to you and you would like to win them and convert them in to a customer. With regards to the current contract expiry data you could consider setting up an additional extension field on the customer and include it in data sources for reporting as mentioned above.

But as winning a customer is a process in it self, you could consider to use the rich opportunity functionality in which you can set up a cycle with phases that meets the stages of winning a customer. You can also register the (other) competitors the prospect is interacting with.

Within the opportunity you can use the sales assistant and use activity and task management to set milestones with dates in your cycle phases. One important mile stone is then the end date of the current contract. The functionality allows you to add questionnaires to collect details on a particular opportunity. The system also holds data sources for reporting.

https://help.sap.com/viewer/24765b551a014b779b95c7b07d8e9079/CLOUD/en-US/ce6be44fedd447bbbe013def226...

Does this help you a bit further?

Kr.

MJ

[Ben_Casey77]

Thanks again for your inputs. Challenge for us is that we'd previously agreed with the business not to manage accounts as 'Prospect' role (this would now be a consideration whether or not to reverse this decision, but would be a massive change considering the large number of active accounts we have today).

We've not established a specific 'Winning a Customer' process within our Sales Cloud platform to date, would considering I guess but again would be a relatively large business & system change. I'm aware of the Competitor options available in Sales Cloud, again not massively used by our business today (managed/tracked outside of Sales Cloud).

Sales Assistant is a possibility, I've taken not of this, thanks.

[mjveerhuis1]

Hi,

Of course it is no issue if you do not work with prospects but only with accounts. Opportunities can be created for both. The sales assistant is part of the opportunity functionality. You asked for best practice, so that's why I mentioned opportunity management. If opportunity management is too big of a business / system change, you can of course work with the account data including the extension fields for qualifying the account and current contract end date. And put a process in place supported with activity management - tasks. With workflow rules you can define notifications or create tasks for sales etc. Reporting (on the account data) is of course still key for having appropriate insight.

Kr.

MJ

[Ben_Casey77]

Thanks again, your inputs are much appreciated and gives us a few things to think about 🙂

[mjveerhuis1]

Hi Ben,

Notifications can be set up via the Workflow rule functionality

https://help.sap.com/viewer/5d3ae4aa1f174b2cb6ec625c93ef8884/CLOUD/en-US/9fa751dcda38489c8477196abd9...

As notification might be overlooked, you can also set up a report on contracts that shows the end dates, the contracts that expire within 6 months etc. And when you have multiple reports in this area set up a dashboard. For sales you can then decide to sent a (weekly) broadcast per team / individual based on these reports to inform them personally on the status and end dates of the contracts they are responsible for.

Kr.

MJ

[Ben_Casey77]

Hi Marie-Jose,

Firstly thanks for your prompt response, much appreciated.

Forgive me I forgot to mention in my previous post that we're not currently using Contract Mgt in Sales Cloud. If we were to consider using Contracts, would it make sense to create Contracts (to enable such workflow notifications) even if we're not currently doing business with the 'Attain' account? what are your thoughts on this? I'm also aware that there's a standard 'Contract Expiry' alert query available.

My development team are fully aware of the workflow rule functionality, as we have this in place already for other Sales scenarios.

Any additional inputs would be great.

Thanks