Adding SAP Preferred Success to a deal goes far beyond technical support—it can create a smarter, more resilient path to customer success. For partners, this can mean putting customers at the heart of every interaction while unlocking time to focus on strategic work, sharpening insights to drive action, and driving momentum to expand their services footprint.

SAP partners have always played a critical role in helping businesses unlock the value of cloud solutions. However, technical expertise alone isn’t enough. Projects face increasing scrutiny, high customer expectations, and constantly evolving business goals. To stay ahead, partners need access to the latest tools, insights, and best practices to deliver results at scale and without overextending their teams.

That’s where the SAP Preferred Success plan can come in. More than a support offering, it’s a shared growth strategy that can give partners the expert guidance, enablement, best practices, and bandwidth to be able to deliver meaningful outcomes again and again.

Efficiency gains that drive value

SAP Preferred Success helps deliver significant efficiency gains by taking on critical, behind-the-scenes tasks—such as release planning, usage monitoring, product best practices, and the identification of customer-relevant innovations. Such support can allow partners to stay focused on strategic implementations, drive innovation, and solve complex challenges without being bogged down by operational overhead.

Partners that work closely with SAP experts can receive targeted, data-driven guidance tailored to actual usage patterns, industry needs, and solution capabilities. Doing so helps reduce unexpected effort, accelerate delivery timelines, and enable high-value implementation work that delivers measurable results.

SAP Preferred Success also helps simplify the complexity of frequent cloud updates from SAP. Guidance focused on what matters most to each customer helps partners zero in on relevant innovations while enabling smoother implementations, continuous feature adoption, and faster time to value. As a result, customer relationships can grow stronger and new opportunities can naturally emerge.

According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, SAP Preferred Success reduces internal implementation effort by 10% and release preparation time by 25%. These efficiency gains contribute to a three-year, risk-adjusted value of US$467,000 in savings for the average customer organization.

Enhanced visibility for proactive delivery

SAP Preferred Success can give partners the visibility to better support proactive delivery and identify new service opportunities. With targeted functional insights, partners can spot adoption gaps early, respond to issues before they escalate, and identify areas where customers may benefit from additional capabilities or services.

That approach helps open the door to more meaningful conversations, ranging from solution extensions and new feature adoption to strategic guidance. And the results speak for themselves: Forrester cites that organizations using SAP Preferred Success achieve a 10% faster time to value and reduce implementation timelines by up to one month.

Confidence that sustains long-term growth

By helping to keep projects on track and customers engaged throughout the journey, SAP Preferred Success can build confidence. Consistent and fast access to expert guidance helps ensure fewer disruptions and less risk of costly delays, budget overruns, or unplanned efforts. Moreover, partners can stay focused on making their customers successful.

Forrester reports that customers using SAP Preferred Success experience a 24% boost in user productivity. This empowers partners to move beyond troubleshooting to deepen the adoption of key features and capabilities, even after the customer goes live.

By supporting stronger project continuity and minimizing risk, SAP Preferred Success can enable partners to scale more predictably and build lasting, trust-based customer relationships.

More engagement, more services, more growth

When customers understand how to get the most from their solutions and apply new capabilities to business needs, they see their ROI on SAP solutions increase. Access to prescriptive guidance, tailored enablement, and structured learning paths empower customers to actively participate in their transformation journeys.

This can lead to more frequent interactions with the partner team, more opportunities to demonstrate value, and stronger, lasting relationships. Customers that adopt more features and pursue new goals often require additional services, such as strategy workshops, integration work, or even new solution deployments.

SAP Preferred Success helps create a more predictable and positive customer experience that can support a stronger value journey and can enable stable, recurring revenue streams that partners can rely on. Forrester research shows that customers with SAP Preferred Success have better solution adoption and are more likely to consume a greater share of their licensed capabilities to help achieve business goals.

Furthermore, SAP Preferred Success isn’t one-size-fits-all. It includes tailored elements that partners can integrate into their delivery methods, whether focused on ERP, human capital management, procurement, supply chain, or industry-specific cloud solutions. It’s an adaptable foundation that helps strengthen the customers’ transformation as well as the partners’ client relationships. 

Shared success, scaled impact

At its core, SAP Preferred Success helps unlock the full value of the cloud for customers and partners. It helps partners deliver faster, support smarter, and build stronger relationships that drive long-term customer value.

More important, SAP Preferred Success represents a shift in mindset. It’s a recognition that customer success is a shared effort. With the right tools and collaboration, partners can do more than implement software—they can lead transformation with confidence, continuity, and clarity.

Ready to accelerate your customers’ outcomes with SAP Preferred Success? Contact your SAP partner manager or visit the SAP Partner Portal site for program details and incentives.

Kiron Satyavarapu is global solution owner of SAP Preferred Success at SAP.

Many finance leaders are gearing up for a step change in 2025. New technologies are bringing significant opportunities to improve productivity in finance and beyond. However, CFOs also have a chance to widen their influence this year as they use their unique skills to help organizations strategize around returning growth and business reinvention.

These changes bring vast challenges but large potential rewards for those who can upskill their teams and tackle the looming talent crunch.

To set up their organizations for growth, CFOs will need to be nimble in executing their strategies, evaluate the technologies they invest in, prioritize cybersecurity, integrate ESG reporting, and tackle talent crunch.  

1. Bringing to life 2024 growth plans 

In 2024, many CFOs focused on devising growth and reinvention plans to scale their businesses in a sustainable manner. In this quest, they had to be nimble and creative: according to PwC’s 27th Annual Global CEO survey, over 80 percent of CEOs thought that their company would no longer be viable if it did not try to reinvent itself. In order to succeed in 2025, CFOs will need to continue building trust with CEOs to partner on executing these plans successfully. 

To sell their vision in 2025, CFOs will also need to build their leadership image with the wider business, internal and external stakeholders. This is why they will need to dedicate resources to mastering their storytelling skills. This will enable finance leaders to ensure that peers and colleagues are aligned with the business’ short- and long-term planning, especially as it undergoes reinvention in challenging market conditions.  

2. Evaluating technologies for long-term benefit and efficiency 

According to the recent CFO Insights research by SAP Concur, 94 percent of finance leaders say that AI has already helped improve decision-making. Also, 73 percent see a positive impact on cost and risk reduction. In 2025, CFOs need to lead the business-wide charge on delving deeper into the technologies they are investing in. As a number of companies are rushing to adopt AI, CFOs are uniquely positioned to ensure this adoption is truly valuable to the company. To do so, they can drive establishing ROI measures to ensure it is used productively and ethically.  

They will need to be involved in critically evaluating the technologies that businesses invest in, ensuring that risks are properly assessed and in accordance with compliance or responsible-use frameworks.

With AI becoming an essential business tool across many industries, CFOs will need to make sure that it adheres to federal and international AI regulatory frameworks. They should also continue investing in new capabilities to strengthen their compliance, auditing, and planning toolkits. Because CFOs have a holistic view of their business’ data and needs, they have a unique insight into the most efficient ways to use AI.  

3. Prioritizing cybersecurity  

The global average cost of a data breach in 2024 is $4.88 million – 10 percent up on 2023, according to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach report. The ubiquity of generative AI provides bad actors with more tools to commit complex fraud schemes. Consequently, in 2025, CFOs will need to dedicate resources to protecting their organizations from cybercrime in the coming year and onwards. According to CFO Insights research, 59 percent of finance leaders plan to increase their cybersecurity budget to respond to growing threats.

Because CFOs understand business risk and reporting, they are well-placed to take an oversight role. This best positions them to work with their business’ Chief Information Security Officers (CISO) to assess investments and the maturity of security arrangements, as well as budgets dedicated to this. 

Another way that CFOs can protect their organizations’ financial assets and data is to appropriately prepare their teams. Since human error remains the biggest risk for a cyber-attack, it is essential that CFOs educate their teams on best practices and develop incident response plans.  

4. Integrating ESG reporting 

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks are becoming increasingly important for businesses as wider regulation schemes are established globally. For CFOs to set up their business for success in 2025, they should embrace ESG as more than just a set of rules, but as a means to build a data base and strengthen their business’ profile. 

Forty-eight percent of finance leaders are focusing on sustainability and ESG to drive growth this year. Not only does collecting ESG data help boost a business’ revenue, but it presents them with a unique opportunity to see how they are performing and inform future related decisions. For example, giving employees sustainable business travel options and recording their decision can help inform future reporting. CFOs ​​​should also set measurable goals for how sustainability data will be used to enhance the business’ performance and value creation. These goals will guide the development of the organization’s staff and its infrastructure. 

A CFO’s focus on integrating ESG reporting is one element of an even bigger shift – a shift from carbon counting to carbon accounting. In the future, organization’s entire carbon impact is going to become an integral part of its balance sheet, measured and managed with the same precision as the financial bottom line. A green ledger will form part of a more integrated view of reporting that goes way beyond financials. Adding this green ledger will help companies to a more holistic approach uniting financial and carbon accounting, making sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable.  

5. Retaining employees despite the “talent crunch“

In 2025, the workforce will continue to evolve, as baby boomers retire and young finance professionals re-evaluate their working priorities. CFOs will need to retain employees and keep them enthusiastic. They can do this by better understanding younger employees’ values and adapting development, training, and recruitment policies accordingly.  

They will also need to collaborate with HR to foster continuous learning, reskilling, and adaptability for staff. This same flexibility should be applied to bringing in new technology. By accepting to adopt these, businesses can drive more competition for the right talent.  

Similarly, CFOs can embrace using technologies such as AI to automate certain tasks, freeing people for more meaningful work. This not only resonates with the values of younger workers but will highlight to employees that their time is valued, boosting retention.  

A CFO’s role continues to evolve in challenging market and macroeconomic conditions, so adaptation and flexibility are key to unlocking rewards for themselves, their teams, and their organizations. Embracing the outlined strategies promises CFOs can continue to secure the business’ future and steer it toward success.

Victor Domingos is chief financial officer for SAP Concur.