Sales and marketing overview

Marketing Use marketing campaigns and activities to identify and develop relationships with potential customers, so that initial interactions can turn into sales relationships. The process flow below illustrates the business process for marketing.Business process for marketing. Relationships In sales and marketing, initial interactions with prospects can occur in a variety of situations. For example, you may find a potential customer while attending a trade show or you may have a possible lead with a customer after your organization runs a mass mailing campaign. It is very important to understand the flow of a party entity before it becomes a customer. The following image illustrates the entity relationship flow when a prospect becomes a customer.Sales and Marketing01. Campaigns A campaign targets contacts for prospects, leads, opportunities, and customers that you select to participate in the campaign. In Supply Chain Management, you can create different types of campaigns, such as telemarketing, mailing and e-mail campaigns, to maximize your customer potential. As your campaign progresses and positive responses are received, you can begin the sales process with recipients who have responded positively to your campaign. Sales Use the sales functionality to create quotes, upsell and cross-sell to new and existing customers, create sales orders, and create sales invoices for customers. The process flow below illustrates the business process flow for sales.Business process for sales. Sales offers Create sales quotes to present customers with an offer for goods or services. A customer might request a quote, or you can create a quote in response to a request from a potential or existing customer. When the customer approves the sales quote, you can convert it into a sales order. Up-selling/cross-selling Upselling and cross-selling are the techniques for selling products when placing an order for a customer. In upselling, another product is suggested instead of the current product. In cross-selling, a product is suggested in addition to the current product. When setting up product lists, you can create specific rules to indicate when a product should be suggested as an upsell or cross-sell product. Customer orders When creating a new sales order, you must select the type to create. There are five options. Note: After you create a sales order, any order type can be edited except the Item Requests type if the sales order status is Delivered . Sales order type Description Registration journal Use this type as a draft for a sales order. This type has no effect on inventory quantities and does not generate item transactions. Subscription Use this type for recurring orders. When the order is invoiced, its status is automatically set to open order. The delivered quantity is invoiced and the remaining deliveries are updated. You cannot use this sales order type if you use the Inventory Management functionality. Customer order Use this type when a customer has placed or confirmed an order. Return order Use this type when a customer returns an item. A return item number (NAR) is automatically assigned. Article requests This type is created automatically when you sell an item through a project. Sales contracts A sales contract is a contract whereby the customer agrees to purchase a product in a specific quantity or for a specific amount over time in exchange for discounts or special prices. The prices and discounts in the sales contract take precedence over all prices and discounts stated in any existing commercial contracts. A sales contract is valid for a defined period. The required ship date specified for a sale on the Sales Order page must be within the effective period. By default, a sales contract is pending. You can place an order from a sales contract only if that contract is set to Valid . Backorders During order entry and validation, you may need to handle backorders and exceptions before you can complete the sale. Backorders are purchase orders that have not yet been delivered by a vendor or sales orders that have not yet been delivered to a customer. Backorder follow-up is an important activity. For example, if the delivery of products is delayed by a supplier, you may need to change the delivery date for a customer and notify the customer of the delay. You can view your backorders by item, customer, or vendor. View backorders by item Viewing backorders by item allows you to follow up based on the expected future transaction flow for a specific item. For example , you can check the following information . The number of sales orders issued for an item If there are still missing deliveries of the item from the suppliers If multiple items need to be ordered in order to meet the delivery of all sales orders when due. By performing this check, you can respond to requests from customers about the delivery time of the item. You can also prioritize backordered sales orders and divide available items between orders. View backorders by customer Viewing backorders by customer allows you to view the status of the customer’s remaining orders. This control is useful when you need to respond to customers waiting for items that are late. View backorders by vendor When viewing backorders by vendor, you can check missing deliveries and expected delivery dates. This control is also useful for prioritizing backorders when products arrive from suppliers and sales orders need to be selected for delivery. Invoices During the sales process, you can create three types of invoices: Customer invoice Free text invoice Proforma invoice Customer invoice A customer invoice is an account that an organization presents to a customer in connection with a sale. This type of customer invoice is created based on a sales order that includes a header and one or more lines for items or services. The customer invoice completes the sales order, packing slip, and sales invoice cycle. You can post and print a single customer invoice, based on a sales order or packing slip and date. You can also post and print multiple customer invoices together, based on packing slips and dates. When a single customer invoice is posted using the sales order, the Invoice Remaining quantity for each item is updated with the total invoiced quantities, taken from the selected sales order. If both the Invoice remainder and Delivery remainder quantities for all items on the sales order are equal to 0 (zero), the sales order status changes to Invoiced . If the quantity of either field is non-zero, the sales order status is not changed and you can enter further invoices. If you plan to post and print one or more customer invoices based on packing slips, you must have already posted at least one packing slip for each sales order. The customer invoice is based on the packing slips and reflects the quantities listed. You can create a customer invoice based on items on packing slip lines that are shipped up to the current date, even if not all items of a specific sales order have yet been shipped. This feature can be used, for example, if for each customer the legal entity issues one invoice per month to cover all deliveries for that month. Each packing slip corresponds to a complete or partial delivery of the sales order. When the invoice is posted, the Invoice Remaining quantity for each item is updated with the total delivered quantities, taken from the selected packing slips. If the Invoice remainder and Delivery remainder quantities for all items on the sales order equal 0 (zero), the sales order status changes to Invoiced . If the quantity is non-zero, the sales order status is not changed and you can enter further invoices. The inventory transactions are updated with the invoice number and the status on the sales order line changes to Invoiced . Free text invoice A free text invoice is an invoice that is not related to a sales order. Contains order lines that include ledger accounts, free text descriptions, and a sales amount. It is not possible to enter an item number on this type of invoice, and you must enter the appropriate VAT information. There is one main account for the sale on each invoice line. The customer balance is posted to the summary account from the posting profile used for the free text invoice. Proforma invoice A proforma invoice is an invoice prepared as an estimate of the actual amounts before the actual invoice is posted. You can print an invoice of this type for a customer invoice or for a free text invoice.