You can make use of the extensive functionality of the Logistics Information System (LIS) and in particular, the Sales Information System (SIS) to help you plan sales and marketing strategies and, later on, analyze their outcome.

The Sales Support component has an interface to the Sales Information System (SIS). This means that data from your sales support documents is forwarded to SIS and can be used to perform analyses such as how often a particular market segment has been targeted by a direct mailing campaign.

You can also perform analyses on the basis of information forwarded to SIS from other areas of the Sales and Distribution module. For example, you can decide which customers warrant a sales call, depending on recent sales revenue. In addition, you can use SIS as an environment where you can monitor and evaluate sales performance. For example, actual orders can be compared with planned orders by individual sales person, by sales office, by customer, by product, and direct mailings can be analyzed by market segment.

You can use the crossmatching function to determine which business partners have been targeted by more than one sales activity or sales promotion over a given period. This function is designed to prevent customers and sales prospects being contacted too frequently.

The link from a sales activity to Optical Archiving gives you easy access to another valuable source of information - namely, incoming and outgoing documents such as customer letters, responses to a direct mailing, and marketing flyers. Using Optical Archiving, you can scan these documents into the system and, if you wish, assign them to a particular activity. If any archived documents have been assigned to a sales activity, you can branch to them from the activity.