Audaxium Blog

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) or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) 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 or ERP 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.

One example of the value of a CRM/ERP system in a tough economy is that it can help you sell more to your existing customers.  In a down economy, 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 Netsuite CRM / ERP, you may want to read more about how it can help you achieve your goals.  If you’re just warming up to the idea, maybe you should consider adding this to your budget for next year?

If you DO already use Netsuite, you may want to consider bringing us in to help you sell more to your existing customers.  Yes, you likely have the skills and knowledge to optimize Netsuite and take it to the next level of productivity, but… DO YOU HAVE THE TIME?  Call us for a FREE EVALUATION to determine if we can help you get more out of your existing tools and staff.

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.

Garbage in, Garbage out!  I hear this comment almost every other day.  And it’s not me saying it, it’s the customer.

Then why oh why are most companies in such a state of disrepair when it comes to their customer information?

How can we fix this up when we implement NetSuite?

How can we make sure that it doesn’t happen again?  Or at least not to the same degree.

But first let’s get to the top 3 reasons why this happens. Read More »

Just what is the best browser for use in NetSuite?

The other day a customer asked me this question and I gave my usual response based on the feeling I get while using various NetSuite instances.  Normally I feel Chrome is fastest, and Internet Explorer slowest with others falling in between.  Firefox is my usual choice as Chrome has some known issues (we won’t call them bugs) with NetSuite.  Safari also seems to hold up well in the speed department as a few NetSuite users I follow on twitter keep raving about it and I found it fairly snappy as well.

Just for kicks I decided to do a rather unscientific test of 4 different browsers and use the built in NetSuite performance reporting to figure out which were fastest and which were slowest.  The results were surprising.  In fact, I re-ran my scenario multiple times to see if there had been some mistake.

The Scenario

My test was very simple, mainly because I don’t know how to automate the testing and get page load times for multiple browsers using some kind of super plugin.  I ran the test 3 or 4 times and used the times I got most frequently, as opposed to averaging.  This to ensure that my connection wasn’t the issue.  In all cases I got 3 results that were very close for each page.  All tests were done on my Windows XP SP3 Desktop.

I admit that this is rather unscientific and I haven’t removed certain variables and I encourage others to try the same thing and report on the results here.

Read More »

Right now the News is filled with bad press about the economy. Last weeks Economist painted a particularly gloomy picture.

It’s all well and good to simply unsubscribe from the news feeds but that won’t make you successful in the long run, just maybe less stressed.

Right now a lot of businesses are waiting cautiously, not spending money, but waiting for signs of a turnaround.  Cruising along. Perhaps your business is one of them.

So how will you know when a turn around is beginning for your business?  Your business is unique, it won’t simply happen for everyone at once.  For some it’s already starting, for others, they may have to reinvent themselves to simply stay afloat.

Will you wait until you’ve had two good sales quarters in a row?  How long does it take to roll up a quarter?  1 Month?  That might just be looking 7 months into the rear view mirror.

Will you wait until you’ve had 2 good months over targets?  Can you be sure that it’s not a lucky blip?

Will you watch the forecast, and when it starts to grow, start investing in your business?  How reliable is your forecast?  What’s driving the uptick?

Will you look at inbound leads? When they start increasing, turn up the heat on the reps.  How will you know where the leads are coming from and what their intent is?

Unfortunately there’s no one answer but I can say one thing for certain.  Those companies that only look far in the past for recovery will do less well than a firm with a balanced view of it’s KPI’s

The questions to ask yourself are:

• “Do I have the systems in place to get me the numbers I need, and trust, fast enough to react in a timely fashion?”
• “What are the 3 pieces of data I need to predict the direction my business is headed?”

If you’ve got the systems, great.  If not, give me a call.  Now’s the time to invest to ensure that your business can really be excellent once everything is moving again.  Don’t wait until you’re too busy to become more productive.

Here are some example Key Performance Indicators that NetSuite Provides out of the box. Perhaps some of these could help if you had them on your dashboard every day. Keep in mind that you can create your own KPI’s as well!

• Authorized Commission
• Authorized Partner Commission
• Bank Balance
• Cases Escalated
• Cases Closed
• Cart Abandonment
• Closed Issues
• COGS
• Credit Card Balance
• Equity
• Estimated Commission
• Estimated Partner Commission
• Fixed Assets
• Forecast Override
• Gross New Leads
• Hosted Page Hits
• Inventory
• Long Term Liabilities
• Net Cash Flow
• New Business (Sales Orders)
• New Customers
• New Customers (Sales Orders)
• New Issues
• New Opportunities
• New Visitors
• Open Issues
• Open Opportunities
• Open Prospects
• Open Quotes
• Operating Cash Flow
• Operating Expenses
• Opportunities Lost
• Orders
• Other Assets
• Other Current Assets
• Other Current Liabilities
• Paid Commission
• Paid Partner Commission
• Payables
• Pipeline (Projected)
• Pipeline (Weighted)
• Pipeline Deals
• Profit
• Quota Reps
• Receivables
• Revenue
• Sales (Cash Basis)
• Sales (Orders)
• Total Open Opportunities
• Total Open Quotes
• Total Orders (Count)
• Total Pipeline (Projected)
• Total Pipeline (Weighted)
• Total Pipeline Deals
• Total Sales (Orders)
• Unique Visitors
• Web Orders
• Web Revenue
• Web Site Hits

Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite has gotten some of his thoughts posted over at the venerable Financial Times.

You’ll find his thoughts on Business Intelligence From the Cloud there.

Essentially the article is a nice summary of why one should consider NetSuite.  These benefits are simple, yet can have very positive impact on many organizations.

• Better information at your fingertips and therefore faster and hopefully better decisions
• Less time and money spent messing around with integration
• Faster implementation times

So there you have it! If you’re getting educated about the benefits of software as a service, articles like the one above will provide you a good starting point in developing your elevator pitch to your boss.