Audaxium Blog

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…

General, Marketing, Tips and Tricks Campaign, Email

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…

General, Tips and Tricks Browser, Speed, UI

Every company I talk to wants to maximize the value they get out of NetSuite and once you start putting data in, you begin to realize that there is value in tracking as much as possible within the system.

Over the past while I’ve discovered a number of companies who weren’t using or effectively using NetSuite Jobs, or Projects.  (They used to be called Jobs by default, now they’re called Projects but you can call them whatever you want.)

My advice is, if your company needs to manage jobs for customers, or if you need to track internal projects, consider your options in NetSuite.  Here’s some tips.

What’s a Job?

A job or project is actually very similar to a customer record.  It can appear as a sub-record of a customer and has all the same information attached to it such as contacts, notes, transactions cases etc.  It also has some other extra information such as, resources assigned, estimated work, actual work.  You can view a basic Gantt Chart based on the tasks assigned as well.

Basic or Advanced?

Advanced Projects is an additional module available from NetSuite.  It allows you to do a whole lot more with projects than normally.  Check out the advanced project spec sheet here. I would suggest, that if you bill for projects, or use them regularly to track non-billable customer projects that you take a close look.

Automatically Create Items

One of the nice things you can do once you have advanced projects is “automatically” create projects based on the items that show up in Sales Orders.  And by automatically I mean push a few buttons.

All you have to do is go to the item, then the project tab, and select Create Project.

Then go ahead and put in the standard tasks that need to get completed to get that project done.

Now, if that item appears on an approved Sales Order, you can go to Transactions, Customers, Create Projects from Sales Orders. You’ll be presented with a screen where you can select the projects and assign a project manager to each one.

Track Your Time

No matter if you bill your customer directly for your time, or the projects are fixed price, I highly suggest that you get everyone into the habit of putting their time against the project when appropriate.

Becoming disciplined about this is a great way to figure out if your projects are in fact profitable.

In NetSuite you can define the tasks, and then establish a baseline for the effort required to complete a project.  If you do this consistently, you’ll then be able to compare your baseline to the actual time attached to the project if it’s billable or not. If you’re always underestimating the time you’ll have reports that tell you this.

Tracking Pre-Paid Hours

There’s a useful field on a project.  “Remaining Time” equal to the estimated time – the actual time logged.  If you sell your customer blocks of time it’s clearly a good way to keep track of what you’ve delivered and what you owe.

Assign Cases

Remember that you can track cases and attach them to projects just like you can with customers.  There’s no better way to stay on top of things than to track outstanding issues this way.

What it’s not

NetSuite Projects are a good way to track projects, bill for projects and do some collaboration to a degree.  There are some decent reports that get produced once you start keeping them up to date.  But the functionality in NS isn’t designed to track the minutia of a project like MS Project would.  Not that anyone likes MS Project.  If you need to create super detailed project plans that track 100’s of tasks there are other solutions out there for that.

This functionality is also not designed, out of the box, to facilitate collaboration amongst many many employees.  Perhaps you can get creative and add some files, custom fields, and custom records for a project but for team wide communications and file sharing there are other tools out there.

If you need more

If you need more advanced project management functionality you can find it within the NetSuite family.  Simply check out OpenAir.  The main website is here.

If you’re interested in learning more, send us a message and we’ll hook you up with whatever info you need.

Tips and Tricks Projects

This post is two tips rolled up into one and it has to do with customizing that NetSuite screen you look at every day.  If you don’t use NetSuite yet perhaps you’ll get an idea as to how easy it is to configure NetSuite to present you with just the information you need.

Recently I’ve discovered that a lot of NetSuite users settle for seeing information using the “default” settings in NetSuite, without looking into the various options.  Here’s two tips that answer the following frequently asked questions.

• Can I get a default dashboard that loads only the basics?
• Can I change the menus on tabs to focus only on what I need?
• Can I get more specific search data all on one dashboard?
• How can I control dashboards but give some free reign?
• How can I present better information to managers and employees?

Custom Tabs

Custom Tabs in NetSuite can help answer most of the questions above. You can add another, or several tabs up along the top of your NetSuite dashboard that contain exactly what you want.  

If you want one that is available as a default, lightweight, fast loading, page that only has a quick search portlet on it, that’s how you do it. If you want a tab that contains all your very important reports for your management meetings on Fridays, that’s how you do it.

Simply go to Setup, Customization, Center Tabs, New

Then give the tab a name and choose which Center to apply it to.

Now go to the Portlets subtab. Pick all the portlets you want to be available.  NOTE, you can simply click the “Show” Checkbox if you want them not to show by default.  For most tabs I suggest that you add most of the portlets to let users customize the tab later.

Head back over to the Categories Subtab. Give names to all the sections you want to appear with links when you hover your mouse over the tab.  First name all the categories, after you save the centertab record you’ll see an edit link beside the category name.  That’s where you choose what links appear in the drop-down. 

There you have it.  It’s pretty simple.  Now you can create more dashboard options and real estate  for your users with ease.

Report Snapshots

If you’re looking to put information on dashboards you’ll find that Report Snapshots are your friend.  Most NetSuite users really love searches and tend to steer clear of the more difficult to use report interface.  However, you are limited in the number of KPI’s and custom searches you can have on a dashboard.  Report Snapshots are your answer as you can have 10 of them on each page.

Of course there are a number of standard report snapshots but their ability to spice up your dashboard should be enough incentive to figure out reports and create some custom ones.

When you create a report, for many types, you’ll have the option of creating a report snapshot just prior to saving your report.  Just hit the save and create snapshot button. And don’t forget to set the permissions on the report properly so the correct audience can see it.

Conclusion

Just with these two very simple reminders you should be able to customize your NetSuite instance to better suit your desires.  If you’d like help doing this ping me an email and we’ll see what we can do.  If you’re a bit confused let me know and I’ll do a video of it.  I plan on doing a few more videos soon.

One final reminder.  Remember that you can change your “Landing Page” under Home, Set Preferences, Appearance.  Just pick the tab you want to open when you first log into NetSuite.

Tips and Tricks Customization, Dashboard

Just in case you missed it, here are links to 4 brand new NetSuite Blogs that have just sprung up!  Check them out and subscribe.  You never know what goodies might come of them.

In the past there haven’t been that many NetSuite blogs out there. It’s nice to see some people stepping up and helping the community outside of the private usergroup.

blog.netsuitetipsguide.com
The latest Tip here is about NetSuite Online forms. But I really liked the tip on the Net Value of Relationships.  Nice.

blog.suiteknowledge.com

Steven has a good tip on using Item Groups to track free items given away by a sales rep.

suiteasia.blogspot.com

Chelsea’s latest tip is one of my old ones, Emailing Transactions.  There are some other good tips here as well.

blog.netsuitereporting.com

Reporting is one of the more important areas of NetSuite.  Here’s hoping for more tips from NetSuiteReportingGuy.

NetSuite News, Tips and Tricks

Yesterday I gave you a few tips and things to consider when making custom searches.  Here’s a few more things to consider as you’re taking a deep dive into the wonderful world of NetSuite Custom Searches.

So click the “Use Advanced Search” button and let’s go!

Summary Tab

So you’re an expert with criteria and results.  Great.  Now I want you to go on over to the criteria tab, look down, and check out the summary subtab.  It’s a powerful tool that you should know how to operate.

Basically this tab can be used to filter out results that would normally be included when you use the summaries on the results page.  

For example, maybe you are searching for companies and looking for average sales order size and you want to filter out companies where the average is less than $500.  Or, perhaps you want to show the last time (maximum of date) that a prospect was called but you want to filter out maximum dates that occured this week. I’m sure there are even better examples of creative uses of this feature.  

The tip?  Go mess with it and figure it out.  It can take some experimenting

Highlighting

It’s rare that I see a search with highlighting. It’s very useful and can help focus attention on the results.  Make sure you consider using it regularly, it’s pretty simple. Just set your criteria for the highlight and then what you want to do to the row that meets that criteria.

Keep in mind that your highlighting criteria doesn’t need to be in the results so you can basically add visual information without adding columns.

Here’s some examples.  In a list of Prospects, highlight yellow those with open quotes worth more than $10,000, highlight in red those that have no calls in the past 90 days.  In a list of Customers, flag those that have made their first purchase in the last month.  In your list of calls, bold those where the contact has an open support ticket!  Better to know that before you call no?

Criteria vs Filters

Often a NetSuite user will search for lets say opportunities, with a create date of this week, and show a bunch data about them.  They’ll save the search, and then go make another one for opportunities created last year, with the same columns in the results.

Rather than do this, pop over to the “Available Filters” tab.  Select the create date field, add it as a filter and remember to click the little box that shows the results in the footer of the search.  Add a few filters.  Now you can have a search result that you can dynamically filter to get at just the data you need.  Pure awesome.

“My Team”

If you happen to be creating a search where you just want to see your own stuff, AND, your search is so awesome you think others should use it too, consider filtering by “My Team” rather than your username or “is Me”.  This pops up all over the place, in transaction searches for example where Sales Rep = Mine, or on events where Organizer = Joe

The My Team filter will show everyone who reports to you, or whoever runs the search, using the Supervisor information in the HR tab of your employee record. This is a nice way of making the same search usable by multiple people, and therefore reducing KPI and dashboard clutter.

Allow Subscriptions

NetSuite allows you to email the results of searches based on a few criteria, you already knew this.  Rather than just adding recipients explicitly consider hitting the check box to allow users to subscribe to the email notification, or search results. This is for public searches and ones that send emails when the record being searched is created or updated.

Lead notifications are a great example of this.  It’s pretty intuitive why email out the fact that a lead has been created for you would be a good idea.  If you let users subscribe, it also means they can unsubscribe at will, and resubscribe later.  This self serve option is better than requiring you, the owner of the search, to keep making changes to the recipient list.

Tips and Tricks Best Practise, Searching

If there’s one thing you can spend some serious quality time with in NetSuite, it’s the searches.  It’s rare that I get a search challenge I can’t meet one way or another.  Because they are used to create custom KPI’s in NetSuite it’s a good idea to become familiar with all their in’s and out’s.

Here are some common tips I have for those who have moved beyond the basics of searching in NetSuite.

Selecting the Type

The first thing you do when you create a search in NetSuite is select the type of record you want to search.  It seems obvious and I won’t go through the long list of record types here.  You can search on any record type you want.  But here’s something to consider.  If you are doing a search that includes related records, carefully consider what record you might want as your starting point.  

Example. Are you looking for Opportunities with outstanding estimates attached?  Or are you looking for Opportunities attached to outstanding estimates?  There’s a difference and it will affect your results slightly.  In this case the one to many relationship will give you a different perspective.

The reason for this brings us to the next point…

Related Fields and Records

One thing I see NetSuite users miss regularly is the fact that you can search and filter records based on related records and information.  For example, if you log a call, that call record will typically be attached to the lead or prospect.  You can now search for leads and prospect that have been called by you, on a certain date, with a certain subject.

In the criteria tab, if you scroll to the bottom of the “filter” pulldown you’ll see related records with a “…” beside them.  Click and a box will pop up with fields from that record.  You can do this on both the criteria and results tabs. You can get very creative with this and really dig deep into your data. Experiment with this, make it your friend. 

Go Private

I’ve seen a few instances of NetSuite with hundreds upon hundreds of searches show up for users in both the “Menu” and in the list of public searches.  Most of these searches are wrong, irrelevant, or out of date. Do yourself a favor and don’t click the “public” check box and don’t click the “Show in Menu” check box on your saved search.  You’re just cluttering other users’ interface if you do and making it harder to find what they are looking for.

If you do want to make a search available to someone, just hop over to the audience tab, and select who should see it. Keep the menu reserved for very common and highly used custom searches.  Don’t make your admin clean up your mess for you.

(Remember that making searches public is a role permission, you might not have permission to do so.) 

Transaction Main Line

When searching transactions often people get confused as to what they are looking at, items on a transaction or the Header.  For example the amount on a line, and the amount of the entire transaction are different.  

For this reason you’ll see a “Main Line” field.  In the criteria you can set this to be true or false depending on what you want to see. 

In the results tab this field shows as the  * symbol.  If you are confused, put this field in the results and you’ll see which rows of your results come from transaction headers as opposed to the items they contain.

Result Summaries

One thing you’ll discover fairly quick is that when NetSuite shows search results it will show the same record multiple times for each time it’s found by the search.  For example you search for companies, and show, in the results, company name and call subject.  For each different call the company name will show on a new row.  If you’ve called the company 5 times, there will be 5 results rows.

For this reason you’ll want to use the “Summary Type” column to group things up, count them etc.  Get familiar with them. Once you use a summary you need to summarize each field you want to show in the search.

But here’s the real tip.  When you drill down on the search, the “non-summarized” results will show.  So even if you don’t want a particular field to show up in the actual results, if it’s useful,  let people see it in the drill down by including it in the results, just without being summarized.

More to Come

Tomorrow I’ll post a few more tips that I have in the back of my mind.  And, because a picture says a lot, I’ll probably record a video for this as well sometime soon as well.

If you have other tips and tricks, leave a comment!

Tips and Tricks Best Practise, Searching

There’s few things I like more than to look at data.  Peering into complicated information and pulling out meaningful results is something I really enjoy.

Now if you like complexity, that’s fine, but if you want to make information analysis easy you may want to consider using one or more of, Class, Department, or Location, to segment your business.

Class, Department and Location are 3 ways to divide virtually all the information in NetSuite.  They are built in by default and can do a number of things I’ll outline below. There’s a bunch of automation that can be done with them and just by tweaking them can really make your NetSuite implementation work well.

Overview

Most people find Department and Location the easiest to understand.  Employees, Items, and Transactions can be assigned to a specific department.  It makes department reporting fairly easy.  Location is the same way.  You can track your business by region, office, etc by applying it to transactions.  Class is a bit different.  Think of it as “Class of product” for example, Software, Services, Renewal, Hardware.

Rename Them

Class, Department and Location can all be renamed.  While each really is designed to work as you might imagine they can really be used to segment the data any way you want. How about Product Line, Region and Channel?

Don’t use them!

You don’t absolutely have to use these.  You can turn them on or off as you see fit.  Or use them but don’t make them mandatory, it’s up to you.

By Item or By Transaction

You can use these classifications both on each individual line item on transactions or you can use them on entire transactions.  It just depends on how you operate.  

You’ll be able to decide where each classification method applies.  On lines or on the whole transaction.  The advantage of applying it on the whole transaction is simplicity. Department and location are obvious ones to do this way. (if you call them by that name!)  The advantage of classification by line item is that you get more granularity on the information.  Class is often used here.  

It’s important to note that items, and employees can have their class, department and location pre-set (or not).  This way nobody really has to worry about keying in the information over and over unless you want them to.

Reporting

Obviously all three classifications make it easy to filter, exclude, include and report nine ways to Sunday.  Even if you only have 1 class of item, it may make sense to turn it on so that you have the information in the future if you are planning on doing more later.

Looking at all the segments simultaneously in NetSuite can be a bit of a challenge.  But it’s easy to dump out to a more advanced graphing tool.  I am just waiting for OpenOffice to implement 3 axis bubble charts with a time axis and then I’ll be all set!

Restricting Access

If you’re a slightly larger company it may be nice to restrict access to different classes, departments, or locations.  Not to be a pain, but to give users a simpler experience when using the system.  Because this restriction is done by role you may want to give certain users access to multiple roles so that they can switch over to the less restrictive role the odd time they need to look up something they don’t normally need to see.

Consider Categories

Outside of these classification methods you can also use categories to classify  customers/leads/prospects. This is done by going to Setup, Accounting, Lists, and adding multiple customer categories.  It’s yet another way to slice and dice your data, and in the case of categories, perhaps find out which of your customer segments is most profitable.

Conclusion

Class, Department, and Location as well as categories are a few ways to customize your NetSuite instance and get the most out of the information you collect on a daily basis.  Done right they’ll allow you to monitor and improve your business.  Done wrong, you’ll be frustrated and your users will slash your tires.

If you have questions look me up!

Implementation, Tips and Tricks Data, Implementation, Reporting

Implementing a system like NetSuite means introducing change into your company.  There’s no avoiding it.  So how do you prepare during your CRM Evaluation?  Here are some tips.

Explain Why

Often you’ll have one driving reason why you picked up the mouse and found a NetSuite Partner to chat about a new business system.  But often there are a number of other considerations that pushed you over the edge.  As you launch the investigation into a new tool it’s a good idea to write these reasons down and make sure they are effectively communicated with your extended team.  And by team I mean anyone that has anything remotely to do with the application.

The reason you should do this is first, to get everyone involved, and secondly, because your teammates will immediately begin looking for ways to solve the problem.  They’ll tell you what applications meet their needs and what fixes can be made today to make life better.  At least some will.  Those will mainly be your early adopters.

Get Input

Once you get the project rolling a bit I always suggest polling everyone about their ideas, concerns, and requirements around a new system.  Make this fairly free form. Don’t pigeon hole people into clicking answer boxes.  Just ask; “How should a new system improve how we work?”

If some people don’t respond initially make a note.  Then, gently demand their input.  ”You won’t be able to complain afterwards if you don’t give us your thoughts.”  You’ll get 100% response rate after explaining this a couple of times.

Be Broad

Often people will get interested in NetSuite for one part of the application.  As you’re investigating a new business system use the project as an opportunity to improve other systems and/or other parts of your business.  You may get some spin off projects when looking for improvements in your business processes.  And, you’ll probably start to define phase II and III if you choose to go with an integrated system like NetSuite.

Set Expectations

Once you have collected all the requirements of a new system from your team, it’s time to explain to them that they won’t be getting everything they want.  It’s about compromise.  Have another session where people rank or pick out their top 10 must haves from the very broad requirements list. And then remind them that they might not get all those either.

In reality, most people will get most requirements, especially with NetSuite, but lower expectations now will make implementation and change management that much easier.

Talk one-on-one

Now that you understand peoples priorities you’ll need to talk to them. Hopefully face to face.  You’ll have a good idea what on their list is reasonable and what’s not.  Talk to them about what they think of the idea of moving to a new business system and what’s in it for them.

Also start asking people how they want to be involved with the project.  You’ll need lots of different help over the course of the project so collect volunteers early.

Users – 1/3 Early Adopters

A certain amount of your team will desire change just because that’s who they are.  It’s very important to harness this energy and use it to your advantage.  You need to make sure that you give enough attention to their needs so that they don’t get frustrated later on.

While most early adopters will desire change a lot of early adopters have short attention spans.  Their desire isn’t an actual indication of how easy it is for them to learn new tools.  Keep that in mind when planning training.

Users – 1/3 Followers

Followers look to the early adopters to assess where things are going.  This is the most important group to get engaged during the product evaluation and selection stage. They are often the ones who highlight the project risks for you so that you can mitigate them.

Followers often need to be reminded about previous changes that took place in your company and the benefits that emerged.  These stories are very helpful.

The followers are also a good group to start gathering metrics with.  You’ll want to measure the impact of a new tool and one way to get this group engaged is to get them to look at the “current situation” from a data perspective.

Users – 1/3 Cranky

Ah, yes, my favorite bunch, the pessimists.  They’ll think you’re crazy for trying to change out a CRM system, or even put one in for that matter.  It’s important that you focus their rage on what’s wrong now, and then commit to fixing it.  Try to get agreement on what the biggest issues currently are. Then get them to promise you, that if you can fix them, they’ll help you roll it out.

The cranky folks are those that you’ll hold up as examples when you roll out the system.  Often managers will use the early adopters as examples, but everyone in your company knows that they love everything new.  If they see a pessimist saying that NetSuite is working for them then they’ll be more apt to keep pushing to get the system into a highly productive state.

How Ready is Your Company?

Change is about people.  And sometimes processes.  But more often its about the people involved.  If you prep each individual for the system evaluation, selection and subsequent change then you’ll have done 80% of the work at being prepared.  The rest of it is the hard work of making sure the system and project actually work the way you want.

Implementation, Tips and Tricks Change, Implementation, Users

Perhaps you use NetSuite and have gotten into a groove. Perhaps you don’t keep on top of every little option.  Here’s one option that, in my opinion, anyone who is doing email campaigns in NetSuite should use regularly.

Here is the high level.  

First, if you have a large distribution list in NetSuite that you send emails to, you should always test different messages and formats on random group members to see what is the most effective combination.

Secondly, there is no reason to just split your group 50/50.  As long as you have 100-200 members in your second or third test group, depending on the total size,  you’ll have enough data to have statistical significance and therefore make some decisions about what works and what doesn’t.

If you have 1000 contacts in your distribution list, it’s perfectly reasonable to send out a slightly different message/call to action/format to 200 of them.  

If you want to calculate the statistical significance of a sample size check this link here

The other day, I was asked how to do A/B Testing of emails in NetSuite.   It’s fairly easy to do so here’s how. Read more…

Tips and Tricks Campaign, Email, Testing