Audaxium Blog

So you’re a NetSuite Administrator.  You’ve got NetSuite set up just the way you like.  Or maybe not.

For 2013 you should have a solid list of mini-projects ahead of you so your team can get the most out of NetSuite in the coming year.  If you need some inspiration, here’s a list of several popular projects that our customers have undertaken to make life better.

• Clean up Class, Department and Location.
• Create Custom Transaction PDF Outputs
• Implement the NetSuite Commissions Module
• Train the team on how to properly forecast in NetSuite
• Survey your customers
• Automate the creation of financial transactions
• Clean up old forms and fields that no longer work for your team
• Use conditionally displayed/hidden fields on your forms.
• Spruce up or implement your e-commerce website.
• Integrate with that pesky external application.
• Track Compliance with service level agreements, SLA, on cases
• Display graphs from Google Charts on your dashboard
• Implement new Dashboards
• Start using workflow to track your custom processes.

These are just some examples.  Let us know if you’d like to hear more or want to bounce some ideas off us.

If you’ve come to our site looking for a blog post you can’t find, it’s likely that it’s been lost due to a recent incident with our hosting provider. We’ve since switched.

If you have a specific topic in mind please contact use via one of our many forms and we’ll connect directly with the information until such time as we recover.

This is a great example of how simply hosting something on someone’s servers isn’t a true cloud solution.  Systems like NetSuite and Pardot manage their customer data in a sophisticated way, which is much different than a local company mismanaging a windows server running a few apps.

NetSuite 2011.1 Sneak Peaks is now available online here.

I encourage you to check it out.  It shows where NetSuite is headed with this release and just how deep the application really is with the types of things they are improving.

While I’m sure there’s more on tap, as usual, there’s a few things in the list that are going to make life better. The enhancements to the Suiteflow tool, for one, are my personal favorites.

The team at Audaxium has a long history with manufacturing companies.  We’ve spent more than our fair share of time working with Engineering departments talking about design.  We’ve taken over whiteboards during ERP integration planning sessions.  And we’ve helped companies improve their document control systems.

But some of the most intriguing discussions take place when we sit down with owners and managers who are responsible for sales, and growing the business at smaller companies.  Sales is about Customer Relationship Management no?

“We don’t have sales people.  We don’t need CRM.”
“Our sales reps are fine, they know their customers and they use Outlook for contact management.”
“We really only sell to existing customers.”

Those are some of the reasons given for not wanting to discuss a system for managing those relationships.  We don’t need a solution if there’s no problem right? And a small company doesn’t need more “Systems”. But there is a problem. These same managers will then begin to talk about how times are tricky and how they need to win new projects, expand into more markets, or introduce more product lines. CRM is not just for some sales people.  And it’s not just for a big company with money to spend. It’s for everyone in the company who deals with prospects and customers.  It’s for managing their experience with you and to keep track of your company’s goals. Which brings us to the 3 reasons.  3 out of 16 I’ve got written down.

Reason #1: Achieve Customer Service Excellence

How much time is spent in the office getting answers for a particular customer on fairly basic questions?  Are they getting bounced from person to person?Give your customer the confidence that you’re organized and they can get answers quickly and reliably.

The first area that comes to mind for me is post sale implementation and delivery of a project.  As a manufacturer, your CRM system will include the ability to manage this information and keep your whole team in the loop, thereby getting the job done right and keeping the customer happy.  You’ll incur less penalties and more follow on sales.

A solid CRM system will also help you keep track of any warranty, repair, or service issues.  Perhaps your ERP system keeps track of the material side of these issues, but day to day questions, inquiries, and service calls are an easy thing for a CRM system to manage and ensure that nothing gets overlooked.

Reason #2: Boost Your Sales

When it comes right down to it, everyone wants to sell more.  But how will a CRM system help that?

The first way it will help your team is when you engage a customer or prospect on a new opportunity.  Gathering the customer requirements all in one place will make sure that everyone involved has a very clear idea of what’s needed and what the difficulties might be.  You can then work with the customer to craft a solution. After some time, you’ll have a history of customer requirements that will give you insights into both specific customers, and your entire customer base.

We’ve seen many companies specifically having some challenges when it comes to responding to RFQ’s, the main issue being that the process takes too long as it’s handed off around the office, or, the configuring process, while a set of standard rules, is done manually.  There is often also very little knowledge of why business is being won, or lost.  This is incredibly valuable information that can be captured in your CRM system.

Reason #3: Expand into New Markets

It might be easy to continue to take orders from existing companies, but launching new products, moving into new territories, or targeting different industries, requires that your sales efforts are highly managed.

As you undertake these activities a CRM system will help in targeting prospects and managing those communications.  It will measure the team against the goals set for them.  Being organized and diligent, in combination with some good marketing, will mean the difference between success and failure with your new initiative.

The selling process will be different and it’s important to track that process.

Conclusion

There’s a myriad of different ways a CRM system can help a manufacturing company.  It could mean managing distributors as opposed to customers.  It may be a way to give more people access to data already in ERP.  The list is long.

Go to our landing page for an excellent whitepaper from IDC.  I encourage you to download it and give it a read.  It goes into a great deal of depth on this topic and has several different ideas on how CRM will help.  It’s 18 Pages long and concludes with a list of questions to ask for self evaluation.

With the state of the economy, it’s likely that the LAST THING you want to do right now is spend money and resources on a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.  It would mean a significant investment of not only dollars but also staff resources who are already too busy.

Right now you are likely focusing all your resources on your most important goals.  Some of those may be:

• Hitting your sales and profit targets
• Exceeding your customers expectations and building their loyalty
• Delivering high quality products and services
• Keeping your best employees happy and productive
• Improving your company’s financial position (accounts receivable, cashflow, expenses, etc.)

Although implementing a CRM system can be a big job and big expense, it can help reduce the stress of a tough economy and help you achieve your most important corporate objectives.

The most obvious benefit of a CRM system in a tough economy is that it can help you sell more to your existing customers.  In tough times, many companies go into hibernation mode and tend to conserve cash “for a rainy day”.  They also become hesitant to purchase products or services from a company they have never done business with before.  However, if a company already trusts you to deliver high quality and timely products and services, they are more likely to buy from you, even during a down economy.

It is much easier, faster, and less expensive to sell up-sell or cross-sell additional products and services to an existing customer than it is to win a new customer.  A well implemented CRM system can help you mine your existing customer base more effectively and proactively find sales opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.

If you don’t already use a CRM system, you may want to read more about how it can help you achieve your goals.  If you’re warming up to the idea, maybe you should consider adding this to your budget for next year?

With the recent (re) launch of SAP’s Business ByDesign in direct competition with NetSuite, I thought that it would be useful to present some pertinent questions that should be asked if you’re investigating a new CRM/ERP application, hosted or not.

In recent years, applications have come a long way but it’s not fair to assume that some of the big names, like SAP, always have the perfect solution for your business.  And by solution I mean both the application, and the ecosystem that surrounds the app.

So lets get to some of the questions I feel are important.

What’s been the track record over the past 5 years?

Software, and especially software as a service has developed tremendously over the past few years and it’s important to understand the trajectory of the company and the application.  A series of false starts is sure to be a warning sign.  Progress need not be tremendously rapid, but always forward, and always with the needs of customers at heart.

Perhaps things were a little rough?  What steps have been taken to improve things for the now many customers the vendor has up and running.

What does an implementation look like?  How flexible is it?

Every company is different and yet, the same in many respects.   Do you have choice in how to deploy the system and who is involved in the implementation?  Can the implementation be modified to fit your needs, timing, and budget?  Are there resources readily available who can make sophisticated changes during the initial implementation, while at the same time ensuring that your company is self sufficient at running the app?

How deep is the functionality?

It’s easy these days to develop software that fulfills the check boxes required by the marketing team.  The trouble with any application is the level of sophistication the functional areas have, and how easy it is to actually use them day to day.  Perhaps the system can send email, but can it do so automatically and intelligently?  Perhaps it can track opportunities, but can it track projects, quotes, sales and tasks related to those opportunities?

If the answer to “What’s next on the product road map” contains many very simple requirements, perhaps it’s time to be cautious.

How Scalable is it?

As a customer, getting caught in a bait and switch has got to be one of the worst experiences.  It pays to avoid starting out with apps that are designed to upgrade you, at significant cost soon after you sign up.

Sometimes limits on the use or scalability of an application make sense.  If your company has 10 employees, a cap of 1000 would seem reasonable.  But a cap of 10 or 20 likely indicates that it’s an arbitrary number, defined in the marketing department and not actually a software limitation. And if the new app you’ll need to move to requires a new implementation?  You know you’re in for it.

What is the Vendor’s commitment to Accessibility?

Any SaaS vendor worth their salt can give you reasonably detailed uptime metrics on their systems.  Compare these to your own uptime metrics that, hopefully, you’re keeping in your own IT departments.  While all systems go down from time to time, including big name apps like Gmail and WordPress, having a track record, and a stated commitment to protecting your data is important.

In Closing

Hopefully these questions give you a start on asking some very reasonable questions of a potential vendor.  They’re not questions with a pre-defined acceptable answer, such as, Are you a public company? or with no good answer at all, such as What if you go out of business?

With luck these questions will get you into a dialog with your potential vendor and you can both work together to determine if their application meets your needs.

If you’d like to have that conversation with us, particularly as it pertains to NetSuite, please contact us.

Here’s a funny video from NetSuite spoofing the Apple vs Mac ads, except this time it’s SAP vs NetSuite.

There are a couple other amusing videos on the NetSuite Youtube channel.

Recently I gave a webinar to about 30 companies who are getting into e-commerce.  They have a large, established customer base but more and more are seeing value from offering many of their products online, as opposed from buying from a Sales Rep.

The real goal is to get the reps more efficient by putting lower margin items online, and have reps spend their time on the larger, more consultative, opportunities.

Here’s a few of the tips I gave them during my presentation on how to properly market their webstores.

Read More »

What’s not to love about automation?  Having things done for you is always better than doing them yourself.

Pardot’s email marketing automation solution is a tremendous application for anyone who wants to do a better job sending emails and generating leads. With rules based email, intelligent lead scoring, and integration with NetSuite, Salesforce and SugarCRM it’s sure to improve almost any marketing department that sells B2B.

The first thing to know is that Prospect Insight, Pardot’s application, works just great as a stand alone application.  When you are using it in combination with a CRM tool it’s designed to operate “in front” of your CRM, feeding it with leads when it’s appropriate to contact them.

The image to the right really sums it up.  Pardot will capture web visitors information and activities, score the lead, automate email followups, and then, when you deem it useful, assign the lead to a sales rep.

Do you have problems with large quantities of “junk” leads?

Do you wish you could sort leads by how interested they are in your website?

Do you wish you could nurture cold leads with a call to action that makes sense for that individual contact?

I could ask a hundred more questions.  But if you say yes, then read no more and contact us to see a demo.

Read more if you must…

Read More »

Every year, probably since the dawn of time, people have been using the relatively arbitrary start date of a new year to think about the future.

Now I don’t typically make resolutions, as I think the’re best done through out the year, but now’s as good a time as any to think about things. Here are some questions that I think you should ask yourself, and the answers just might cause you to take action and contact us.

How much do you spend on employee productivity?

This question is a bit tricky, but a white board, or a paper and pen, along with 10 minutes of your valuable time should give you a ballpark.  You might know exactly how much you spend on marketing, or even exactly how much you spent on employee training, but how much did you spend on all productivity related items. This includes IT related purchases that are supposed to make people better at their jobs.  Now, how much of that was on the periphery? How much was spent on the tools they use most often?  I won’t beat you over the head with the logical conclusion.

How predictable is your business?

Can you know in advance if you are going to hit your targets?  What data points can you use for planning?  Do you have an accurate forecast from your reps?  Do you have a system in place to track that data and make it not a complete PITA for those that work for you?

Do you have unused power at your fingertips?

During the past year I’ve heard “We’re not using the system to it’s fullest.  We just don’t have time to improve.”  C’mon.  2010 is the year to make the list of things that you know you should be doing and tick them off the list.  Need help?  Ask.

How clean is your database?

Do you have someone who is officially, not “should be”, in charge of how clean your customer data is? When was the last time you looked at data that calculates how clean?  When are you going to implement a clean up/refresh plan?  Pro Tip – If you can get your customers to clean it up for you it’s a lot easier.  This is very easy to do in NetSuite… Ask me how.

How intelligent is your marketing?

Do you use rules to segment your leads?  What about customers?  Do you employ drip marketing to nurture contacts and valued clients.  Do you add value to your recipients lives while blasting them with email?  We can fix that…

So… with 2010 upon us, lets do all those things we thought we’d been doing in this space age year.