Audaxium Blog

In my opinion, excellent customer service is defined by engaging the customer to ensure all their needs are met and their questions and concerns answered.  Especially when you haven’t heard from them in some time. When you need to continuously keep tabs on which customer needs to be contacted or reached out to, providing such customer service may be difficult without automation.  This is particularly true when using the support management module in NetSuite. What happens when you’re waiting for the customer to reply?

For example, when your customer opens a support case with you, you’ll reply and then wait.  You’ll want to remind them that you’re waiting to hear back, and doing this manually can be tedious.  Maybe you want to automatically notify your customer that your customer representative is working on your case.  Or, maybe you’d like to send one final reminder before you close the case.  These are just small number of areas where automation can help take the work off of your support reps.

We recently completed a project for a client who needed this type of automation.

The application offers flexible configuration points to meet the needs of the business.

• Configurable waiting period before triggering message to customer.
• Configurable secondary action after message is sent.
• Customizable message content with ability to personalize to customer.
• Expandable to support additional automation based on different types of case status.
• Case locking by NetSuite after another set period.

Would you like to find out more about this solution? Contact Audaxium for more information.

Credit Opensourceway on Flickr

Throughout 2011 Audaxium has been working with more and more companies and we’ve seen some interesting situations. In working on NetSuite fixups, and implementing Pardot with customers with various CRM systems, both NetSuite and Salesforce, we’ve noticed companies getting into trouble in systematic ways.  Often, problems happen when the data in the system doesn’t match what’s happening in real life.

Life is complicated.  People like simplicity.  And getting people to use CRM properly can be challenging depending on your organization.  So why not just keep things simple? Doesn’t KISS apply?

Here are some examples of somewhat common decisions that cause problems later.

Custom Field for Sales Rep

The client decided, that, in order to not let sales reps think they “Own” accounts, to not put the rep in the default Sales Rep Field.  Instead they used a custom field for Sales Rep and left the main field blank.  Result?  Difficulty in using standard reports.  Difficulty in getting notifications to Reps.  Difficulty in integrating with marketing campaigns.

Duplicate Contacts on Customers

The client decided that, to make it easier on the tech support team, if a person called in to discuss an issue at a certain customer location, (which they were tracking as sub-customers), they would enter a NEW contact on that company record, with the same name, email address and phone number.  Result?  Massive contact duplication in the database, no single source of the truth with regards to communication and emails.

Manual Prices on Items

To make it “easy” on order entry, the client decided to put only a few items in the item master, and overwrite the description and price.  Result?  No ability to report on the delivery and fulfillment of particular types of services.

The above are just a couple of examples of compromises made that lead to problems later. But anecdotes are just that, there are, to my mind, 3 main reasons why you should truly map what’s going on in your business in your CRM or ERP system.

3 Reasons Why Reality is Important

Information Accuracy

There is a balance between segmenting your data for reporting purposes, and capturing every last detail. What level of accuracy do you need to both operate, and make decisions?

Take a company that sells chickens and eggs. You could weigh and measure every egg you sell, sell them by grade, sell eggs separate from chickens, or sell 1 item called “Chicken and by-products”.  In this case, the reality is that the customer buys eggs by grade, either by the flat or by the dozen.

To take an example closer to home, what about our contacts example above?  There is only one person with a particular name, email address and phone number. There should be only one contact, but that contact should be attached to multiple companies as most CRM systems allow.

Easy to Train Multiple Teams

Sometimes by oversimplifying, you’ll need to be constantly explaining how fields are to be used and how to look up certain information.  Because most people in your company will understand how you do business, it’s easier to have them understand the system if it matches real life processes.  The sales team, support team, and services teams need to think of each other when considering how data gets entered.  There’s nothing like hearing things like; “the main contact field is whoever is the decision maker, until they are closing, then it’s the buyer, until they’re a new customer, then it’s the project lead, until they renew, then it’s whoever cares about the renewal”

Your CRM system should enable your business process, not be a workaround for it.  If your processes are too hard for your team to enter into a system, consider changing your processes.

Integration with Other systems

We’re in a world of integrated applications, and when a company writes an integration with another app they make certain assumptions of how you’ll use it.  You’ll need to think long and hard about taking default functionality and using it for another purpose.  Just why are you using a custom field when there’s a similar default field available?  By getting creative with core fields, you’ll risk giving yourself more work down the road when it comes to integration. Sometimes that work can be worth the extra effort, but make sure it’s necessary.

Challenges

Often, customers do understand the above, so why do mistakes get made?  Here are some common reasons.

No system is Perfect

Sometimes they can’t represent the reality of your business because they lack the functionality. Until recently, a good example was NetSuite’s multi-currency function.  You couldn’t create transactions in multiple currencies to the same customer.  This caused un-wanted duplication of records and work-arounds needed to be found.  Fortunately this is no longer an issue. When evaluating systems, ask your implementation partner just what the ramifications of a certain functional limitation are.

Clicks and Keystrokes

Often, when selecting systems, the client, and the end user, will focus on how “easy” things look and feel on some standard screens. If they have to fill in two more fields, or wait 5 more seconds for a screen to load, they’ll be frustrated and complain about productivity.  It doesn’t matter than those 2 fields save their co-worker 10 minutes.  It won’t matter that they can see information they’ve never had access to on that new screen.

Saving someone a few seconds at the price of a messy database is a bad trade-off.

Implementation by Department

I’ve seen NetSuite implemented a few times for a particular department and only later does the client discover that they’ve painted other departments in to a corner.  Both Sales and Finance are equally notorious for doing this with NetSuite.  Unless both groups are considered during an implementation, the easy options will be chosen that don’t let the system represent what really happens for the other team. Even if you’re just implementing for one group, work with an implementation partner who understands the bigger picture.

Audaxium is proud to be a sponsor of the Pardot Elevate 2011 User Conference (Nov. 15-16, 2011) http://bit.ly/uqbXQn

Here are the Top 5 Reasons to Visit us at our booth:

1) You’re a new Pardot customer, and you could use some help

Pardot is the easiest to learn Marketing Automation system available today. However, there are often multiple ways to accomplish the same objective in the system. It’s great to have powerful software, but it’s even more important to use it in the most effective manner possible to generate quality sales-ready leads.

Audaxium QuickStart implementations help shorten your learning curve, launch your first campaigns quickly, and get you up to speed on best practices and latest trends in the Marketing Automation community.

2) You’ve been using Pardot for a while, but you’re busy

Most Marketing teams have long lists of ideas for campaigns they would like to run, but they don’t have the resources to get everything done. A typical Marketer’s “to-do” list keeps growing rather than shrinking as tasks get completed.

If you feel that you haven’t gotten enough strategic work done in Pardot or aren’t taking full advantage of the capabilities, why not bring Audaxium in to help? We offer development of drip programs, email campaigns, landing pages, and content marketing strategies.

3) You’re a NetSuite customer and you wish the integration with Pardot worked better

Pardot provides, at no charge, an out-of-the-box connector for NetSuite CRM. It automatically syncs data between the two systems and provides basic reporting capabilities. However, NetSuite has some unique ways that it manages data, so there are steps you need to take to increase the amount and type of data that syncs.

Audaxium can help you configure and optimize this integration in order to segment your lists of customers and prospects in Pardot more effectively, and to deliver to your dashboard better campaign ROI reports.

4) You’re a NetSuite customer and you wish NetSuite were easier to use

NetSuite is in fact a leading system for not only ERP, but also CRM and eCommerce. However, some Marketing and Sales teams are not in love with the capabilities or the ease of use of NetSuite.

This is NOT because NetSuite isn’t a capable CRM tool, but rather because many NetSuite implementations are focused on the requirements of the Finance or Operations team, with little focus on Sales & Marketing.

When NetSuite is configured properly for Sales & Marketing, your team becomes much more productive.

5) You like craft beer or good wine

We really like craft beer and good wine, and we’re always looking for an excuse to buy new friends a drink at the bar at the end of the day. Drop by our booth to say hello, have a chat about Pardot marketing automation, then let’s meet up at the bar to celebrate great software!

READ MORE: http://bit.ly/u0bf2b 

Lead Source: Marketing’s most coveted, and most loathed, data field in a CRM system.

The Importance of Measuring ROMI

It’s stating the obvious to say that B2B marketing teams are being held accountable for a direct relationship between marketing spend and revenue generation. With limited budgets and resources, measuring ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) is critical for determining the best marketing channels to generate quality sales leads that convert to revenue.

Since there’s no “silver bullet” for reaching everyone in a target market, marketers are using multi-channel marketing approaches to build their brands and generate sales leads. SEO, PPC, webinars, whitepapers, eBooks, video, tradeshows, print ads, direct mail, social media… you name it. The question is: How best to divide up your limited marketing budget and overworked resources among all these channels?

The Challenge in Measuring ROMI

The challenge is that rarely will a prospect buy from you because of a single marketing touch, such as a webinar. How did they end up registering for your webinar? Perhaps by clicking on your PPC ad after searching online for something you sell. Then, maybe they read a few pages of a whitepaper you paid a copywriter to write, or watched a short online video you hired a production company to develop. They may even have picked up one of your fancy pens at your tradeshow booth in the past. Read More »

Recently we’ve been working on a project where the customer would like to merge cases together in NetSuite in order to eliminate duplicates that occur from time to time in the system.  Sometimes customers won’t reply to their case, but will send a new email to support, which will then open up a new case.

In these situations, there’s no way in NetSuite to easily identify that the new case is actually copy of the existing one, and there’s no way to move that incoming message over, except by cutting and pasting.  If you’ve accidentally had two support people working each case, it’s impractical to do that.

If you’re interested in this type of function for your support team, please contact us.

This webinar took place on June 22, 2011 => Click here to view the presentation

Questions to ask yourself:

• Have you outgrown NetSuite’s email marketing capabilities?
• Are you tired of low open and clickthrough rates on your email campaigns?
• Still sending generic marketing emails to large lists?
• Need to deliver a higher % of sales-ready leads to your Sales team?
• Don’t have time to deliver the 10+ email touches required to nurture potential leads?

The #1 Challenge in B2B Marketing

Studies have shown that 80% of inbound leads through your website are not ready for a conversation with a salesperson.  Often, when a person fills out a form on your website to learn more about your solutions or your industry, they’re simply doing preliminary research on an issue and it’s not high enough on their priority list to spend time on the phone with you.

The problem is that today’s marketers are charged with doing more with less.  Most marketers just don’t have the time or resources to manually send multiple targeted emails to a lead until they are sales ready.  It often takes months, or even years, to nurture an early-stage lead until they are ready to “shop”.

Marketing Automation Can Help

That’s where Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing come in.  Pardot is a cloud-based Marketing Automation add-on for NetSuite that provides website and email marketing automation.  Leads are scored, graded, and nurtured until they are deemed sales-ready, and shows your sales team exactly where to spend its time.  That way, they can focus on the leads that are the best fit and the most interested in finding a solution to a problem.

Why Attend the Webinar?

Learn automation best practices, including:

• Send more targeted messages with automatic segmentation of your leads by persona
• Increase lead conversion rates with progressive profiling on web forms
• Automate multi-touch lead nurturing and knowledge marketing campaigns

Pardot is a fully integrated add-on for NetSuite

As a certified SuiteApp partner, Pardot integrates tightly with NetSuite at no extra charge.

• View all prospect activity right from within the CRM system (useful for Salespeople)
• Bi-directionally sync Contacts, Companies, and Custom Fields to keep data current
• Track Opportunity statuses and values for closed loop ROI reporting

View the webinar presentation to learn how Marketing Automation with Pardot can help you deliver a higher percentage of sales-ready leads to your Sales team.

Recently I’ve spoken with a number of companies who’ve been getting decent traffic to their websites, but haven’t been getting as many leads as they feel they should.  This seems to be a fairly common complaint, but the good news is that there’s a few simple steps you can take to improve the number of conversions you get.

Put another way, there’s a few simple steps you can take to make it more valuable, and less painful, for your prospects.

Step 1 – Simplify your Forms

Use conditional fields to keep things short and sweet.With landing pages, less is often more. Nothing frustrates a visitor more than arriving at a landing page, seeing a compelling white paper offer, but then realizing she will have to fill out a long and complicated looking form before receiving anything of value. Companies who ask for more than a handful of data points in the first interaction with a visitor are encouraging form abandonment.

Step 2 – Track User Behavior, not just field data

Track implicit data in addition to explicit data held in your CRM system. Your prospects are telling you a lot more than it seems.You can gain valuable data from prospects on forms, but often even more telling is the implicit information that can be gleaned without your visitors even telling you. Read More »

Pardot recently posted on their blog that they now have a plug-in for Firefox that allows send Pardot-tracked emails via Gmail.

This is great news for Google Apps users who’d like to get off of other paid for email clients and servers and keep everything online.

Rather than repost their content, I’ll link you directly to the page on the Pardot site.

http://help.pardot.com/faqs/add-ons/gmail-extension-firefox

Many companies still conduct calling programs, using either internal resources or a third party company.   NetSuite has the ability to log phone calls of course, but what’s the best way to automatically populate the call records quickly, rather than filling out each field.

Here’s how one of our customers does it.  This might not be the most slickest way to do it but it’s effective and makes it easy for users to click and log a call.

First, create your custom phone call form.  It can be a copy of your regular one, or it can have more or less fields than usual.  Get the ID number of the form.

Second, create a custom field on the customer record, of type html link, and don’t store the value.  Have the value driven by a formula.

The formula looks like

‘https://system.netsuite.com/app/crm/calendar/call.nl?l=T&refresh=activities&invitee=’ || {internalid} || ‘&company=’ || {internalid} || ‘&cf=47′

The &cf=47 text is telling NetSuite to use Entry Form ID number 47.

Third, create a basic script, or workflow if you prefer, to fill in the form with program specific default information when it is opened.  Below is an example:

var BLITZ_CALL = 7;
var NO_CONNECT_NO_MESSAGE = 6;
var CALL_TITLE = 'Blitz Calling 2011';
var CALL_COMPLETED = 'COMPLETE';

function pageInit(type) {
	setOriginPhoneOnCreation(type);
}

/**** CORE FUNCTIONS ****/

function setOriginPhoneOnCreation(type){
	if(type=='create'){
		nlapiSetFieldValue('custeventcalltype',BLITZ_CALL);
		nlapiSetFieldValue('custeventcalloutcome',NO_CONNECT_NO_MESSAGE);
		nlapiSetFieldValue('title',CALL_TITLE);
		nlapiSetFieldValue('status',CALL_COMPLETED);
		/* nlapiSetFieldValue('message','Does the company do design? Y/N \nWhat design software do they currently use?'); */
	}
}

Now make sure this script is attached appropriately to your call form in NetSuite,  such that anytime someone creates a call using the form it runs.  This is obviously best done when it’s not the default form for people.

Finally, create a saved search of companies that need to be called.  Use any criteria you can think of, there are a million ways to do it.  And, include your custom field above in the results.

Clicking on the link will pop open a call record where your outbound calling person can simply hit submit at the end of the call without have to repeatedly fill out the same information over and over.

For this and other cool NetSuite ideas, connect with us.  If you like this give us a shout-out in the comments.

Our Pardot implementation and marketing automation services are in high demand.

With several new customers coming on board recently and more to follow, we’re looking for some additional help to deliver top-notch Pardot marketing automation services.

Ideally, we’d like to find a freelance Marketing Automation Consultant to join our team on a part-time basis.  If you know of anyone, please forward their name to jobs@audaxium.com.

Here’s a description of the role:

Role:  Marketing Automation Consultant (Part-time, Contract)

Overview:
Audaxium is seeking a Marketing Automation Consultant to join our team on a part-time contract basis.  As a Pardot Solution Provider, Audaxium provides not only Pardot implementation services, but also full-service marketing automation campaign outsourcing services to B2B technology companies who are looking to increase their quality and quantity of sales leads and increase their brand awareness.

The Marketing Automation Consultant role involves both project management and consulting/best practices services in the areas of: email and website marketing, lead nurturing, lead conversion, marketing automation, and content marketing strategies.

Skills Required:

• Work effectively and independently from a home office
• Experience in B2B digital marketing (email and web)
• Working knowledge of Pardot or other Marketing Automation platform is required
• Project Management and Client Services experience

Responsibilities:

• Help new customers implement Pardot marketing automation
• Help existing Pardot customers with best practices advice
• Plan and create email nurturing campaigns to drive conversion and sales readiness
• Create lead segmentation strategies and lists based on visitor behaviours and interests
• Implement content, email, landing page campaigns to deliver value to prospects
• Evaluate and create effective lead scoring scenarios
• Plan and create data capture and management strategies using custom fields in Pardot
• Coordinate other project resources such as: HTML web designers, copywriters, etc.

Estimated Amount of Work:

• 2-3 days per week (to start)