The Sales Support function is a powerful tool that helps employees do their job effectively and frees them from routine administration tasks.

Sales Support provides office-based personnel and field staff with up-to-the minute information in varying degrees of detail. It involves primarily the promotion of sales, internal and external communication and the assessment of competitors and their products.

Sales Support works in two ways:

• The plethora of information gathered by your sales staff is stored in the system in structured form, making it accessible to everyone and easy to analyze. Current market data can be used for strategic product planning and enables you to take the necessary action to promote sales.

• The wealth of data gleaned from different sources of information on customers and competitor products is made directly available to your sales staff.

The common database for both office-based personnel and field staff combined with the many and varied options open to them for communicating make for smooth and efficient sales and marketing. Quality consultancy services improve customer satisfaction and help keep you one step ahead of the competition.

Sales Support obtains its information from the data maintained in Sales, Shipping, and Billing transactions and from the master data relevant to these areas. A number of reports are also available from the Sales Information System (SIS). Sales summaries and incoming order statistics are just some of the information that sales support staff can have at their fingertips when required.

Sales partners and sales staff represent a company on the market. Sales partners would include consultancy partners or sales representatives; sales staff are employees in your company known in SAP Retail thanks to its integration with Human Resources. Both sales partners and sales staff can be managed in SAP Retail.