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.

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.

What’s the Lead Source? Who knows…

Some CRM systems only allow you to attach one lead source to a closed sale.  Other CRM’s allow multiple lead sources per closed sale, and some even allow you to assign different “weights” to the various marketing touches that contribute. However, as the marketer, do you really know which of these marketing touches is the main reason they bought from you?

The only way to know is to ask the customer directly. Sometimes you can get that information from them or from the sales team, but most of the time they either forget or they chalk it up to something in the sales process that convinced them to buy.

In the end, it’s very difficult to directly associate a 1-to-1 relationship between a specific marketing campaign and a specific closed deal. Also, attempting to accurately track all these specific lead sources from campaign through to closed sale is a daunting task and either difficult or impossible to track in CRM systems. Thus, the challenge in measuring ROMI.

Relative Revenue Contribution

Stop trying to report on how much revenue the Sept. 27th “How to Make a Widget” webinar generated. Instead, flip marketing ROMI reporting on its head and look at it the other way around.  Look at how much revenue each marketing channel “touched”, “helped”, or “contributed to”.  For example… Show me all the revenue that Webinars touched.  Show me all the revenue that Tradeshows touched.  Show me all the revenue that Marketing Automation touched…  etc.  It’s much easier to measure the “Relative Revenue Contribution” of your various marketing channels than it is to measure the discrete ROI from a specific campaign.

Look at each marketing channel in your mix and ask yourself: How much did the channel cost and how much of our total revenue did it “touch” or contribute to, compared to the other channels?

Here’s a very basic example Relative Revenue Contribution ROMI report that illustrates this concept: Sample ROMI report

IMPORTANT NOTE: many (if not all) of the closed deals will have been touched by more than one marketing channel or campaign, so the total revenue touched by all those channels will add up to FAR MORE than your company’s actual annual revenue. Don’t worry about it; that’s not the point. The point is: relatively speaking, which channel contributed the most ROMI?

Relative revenue contribution is much easier to track and report in CRM systems.

Campaign Effectiveness

“But Craig, I still need to know which specific marketing campaigns are more effective than others.”  I agree… absolutely.  You definitely need to know if the “How to Make a Widget” email campaign was more effective at generating leads than than “Top 10 Reasons to Buy New CRM Software” email campaign.  You need to know which messaging, creative, and calls to action are working better than others. Your Marketing Automation or CRM system should give you those reports out of the box, or with minor tweaks. I suggest you stop beating your head against the wall to figure out exactly how much revenue each specific campaign generated.

So what do I do with the Lead Source field?

If you adopt the Relative Contribution ROMI strategy, the dreaded “Lead Source” field becomes less critical. You’re going to be tracking all of the channels/touches that contribute to a deal, rather than trying to decide which is the correct lead source.  You’ll “stamp the passport” of each prospect with the various marketing touches/channels they engage with and that will allow you to easily generate Relative Contribution ROMI reports.

If you need to put something in the Lead Source field, reserve it to track the way you first obtained that Contact or Company information. Did it come from a purchased list, a web form, a tradeshow, or otherwise? Don’t try to use the Lead Source field to measure ROMI.

To make your life easier and learn more about how to setup Relative Revenue Contribution ROMI reporting in your CRM / Marketing Automation system, please contact us.

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.

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.

Step 3 – Find out more…

If you’re actually interested in the next 6 steps, click and download the very comprehensive whitepaper on this topic.  It contains all 8 steps and a lot of detail that will set you on the right track to converting more visitors to leads.

See what I did there?

You’ll find the information you need here

2 Fields and 2 clicks of the button and you’ve got it.

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.

But what about the details?  Just who exactly is visiting your site?

If you’re selling to other businesses wouldn’t it be great to know what potential customers were reading your content?

Pardot is now offering a very small subset of their functionality, for free, that enables you to see what companies are visiting your site, and what they are doing while they are there.  As long as a company can be identified from a reverse lookup, you’ll get their name in a report.

Not only can you see who’s visiting, and potentially spot opportunities before they contact you, but you can also examine specific visitor behavior, to see if your site is working as intended.  Sometimes overall stats are nice, but sometimes you need to look at the anecdotal behavior of one user.

From the Pardot Site:

Real-Time Reports Online

Log in to your VisitorID account at any time to view up-to-date reports on your identified website traffic.

Tracking which companies are visiting your website can help you both gauge interest for deals that are in progress and identify new target customers.

Detailed Activity View

Dig deeper in to a lead’s activities and see which pages were viewed, how long they spent on each page and what search terms they may have used. The detailed activity view gives the sales team greater insight in to a prospect’s area of interest.

Daily Activity Emails

For a simple way to keep up with your visitor reports, you can choose to activate daily activity emails. Each morning open your inbox to find a report of all visitor activity for the past 24 hours. Easily forward the reports to your sales reps or share with others in your organization.

If you’re interested in signing up, contact us, or sign up at Pardot’s site.

Step #1: Identify the high traffic pages

If you are using some sort of website analytics tool you will be able to easily identify the pages where the majority of your traffic is landing on your site. If the bounce rate for the page is high then you need to work on the page.

Don’t get confused with exit rate and bounce rate, if your page has a high ‘exit rate’ then this could be a good thing, especially if it is a step in an online store checkout process. The bounce rate is the measure of effectiveness, this is the percentage of visitors who left your site after landing on the page.

Step #2: Assess the page from a visitor’s perspective

Try to look at the page from your web visitor’s point of view, your visitor entered a keyword or phrase into their favorite search engine and landed on your page (note that your web analytics tool should also tell you what the most common keywords were entered to reach your page). Answer a couple of questions…Is this what I expected to see? And, I’m interested, what now? If your bounce rate is high then your page design is probably not providing the answer to the first question and a change in the design is required. If you want to provide an answer to the second question move to Step #3.

Step #3: Decide on the business goal for the page

Unfortunately when delivering web pages to visitors you provide a lot of options in the hopes that what they want to achieve is available to them.  Sometimes the best approach is to focus on one business goal and provide a means for the visitor to take the desired action. Here are some typical business goals and the desired visitor action:

Some of those goals may seem obvious, and the trick is to make it obvious for the visitor to complete the goal.

Step #4: Make it easy for your web visitor to complete the goal

Once the goal has been identified deliver the call to action in a prominent location on the page (if possible without having to scroll down, sometimes called above the fold), here are some customer examples:

• If it is a button make it an obvious clickable button with a short, concise, call to action message e.g. Buy Now, Download White Paper etc. Use universal symbols like Play Buttons if you want a user to watch a video as shown in the example below:

Landing Page Example 1 - Prominent Play Button

• If you want your visitor to fill out a form try putting it on the page rather than relying on the visitor to pick a button/link in order to go to another page to fill out the form; that way you are reducing the number of clicks required to achieve the goal. The example below shows a form to request a quote for the special offer:

Landing Page Example 2 - Prominent Form

• If possible try to reduce the amount of secondary calls to action, or at least reduce the prominence on the page. Make sure that the obvious choice is your main call to action. In the example below the ‘Choose a SolidWorks Bundle’ call to action is a red highlighted area to try and draw the visitor to the call to action options and button:

Landing Page Example 3 - Obvious Call to Action

After making these changes to your high traffic internal pages you should find that your leads/sales will increase and the bounce rate for your pages will go down.

Need some help converting your high traffic pages into landing pages? Contact us we would be happy to help.

If you are looking for more information about best practices for landing pages download our white paper: ‘Guide on how to double your Qualified Leads’

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…

Prospect Insight is a great email and general marketing automation tool designed for businesses who market and sell B2B. The suite is an end-to-end solution to manage your lead data, create automation rules, deploy them and then track ROI for online marketing campaigns.

• Automated Prospect Grading / Scoring
• Landing Page Generator with Dynamic Forms
• Automation Rules
• Full Email Capabilities
• Anonymous Visitor Capture
• Drip Marketing
• Automatic Prospect Alerts
• Campaign Tracking and Reporting
• NetSuite Integration
• Two-way Salesforce.com integration

Creating Campaigns, Emails, and Rule sets is much easier than other tools that you may be used to using.  This alone can save many hours per month just in the time spent managing lists, groups, responses, and ROI data.

Pardot allows you to track each prospect across a variety of marketing channels allowing you to track, segment and score each prospect based on their action and interest.  Did they search for pricing?  Did they visit multiple product pages?  Did they click through your email? This will help you to identify the most sales ready leads.

Once you know even a little about a prospect, your drip marketing rules can kick in.  The better your rules, the better you’ll give the prospect the information and experience they are looking for.

Drip marketing allows you to set a schedule of personalized, automated emails to send to less sales-ready prospects and nurture them. Drip Marketing keeps your organization in front of the client until the prospect is ready to buy.  Sales will be able to see the email that has been sent to each prospect, and what their response was to each message.

Now there is no need to just “set it and forget it.” Pardot also has the ability, to monitor in real time, who is visiting your site.  If you’re very interested in a particular prospect you can get connected with them right away and ensure, personally, that they are getting the attention they deserve.

At the end of the month, Management is always looking for reports and more reports so that they can understand just what is working and what isn’t from the marketing department.  It’s easy to say that the data is just too hard to collect, but with Pardot most of the excuses go away.  The data on what emails, messages, and drip marketing strategies are working is much easier to get at than you are probably used to.

There are a lot more reasons to love Pardot, but the final main one is that it’s hosted, and it’s pay as you go, with no contract.  Try it out for a month or two, improve your delivery rates, improve your response rates, and increase your conversion to sales.  For $500/month you can’t go wrong.

In a future post we’ll talk about how it integrates with NetSuite in more detail.

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.

My Scenario was:

• Open the Browser, go to www.netsuite.com log in then sign out.  Perform a full browser refresh.
• Login (to a default role)
• Switch Roles
• Drill Down on a Dashboard Report
• Click on a Transaction on the Detailed Report
• Load the Customer Record
• Edit and then save the Customer  Record

The Browsers

• Chrome 2.0.172.33
• Firefox 3.5
• Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13
• Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702
• Safari 4.0 (530.17)

The Results

The Results below are the summary of the test, in seconds, for the Client Load Time as reported by NetSuite, and the Total, which includes the server and the network components of the load time.

• Browser          Client         Total
• Chrome           9.0              16.0
• Firefox           7.8              19.1
• Safari                17.7           26.3
• IE 8                   10.1            32.6
• IE7                    11.2            34.4

Chrome

Google’s Chrome had the fastest total load times, and the second fastest client response.  I like Chrome but there are a few bugs to be aware of in NetSuite (as of the post date) that prevent it’s wider use in a company.  Mainly in the filling out of text boxes, which occasionally go wonky, and sending emails out of NetSuite with tags such as <nlsignature>

Firefox 3.5

Firefox is my preferred browser due to it’s support for plugins.  It also plays well with NetSuite as you can see from the results.  I’ve had very few problems with it rendering the NetSuite pages properly. This is the browser I recommend companies to use on a daily basis.  I have had some speed issues with certain versions of Firefox.

Safari

I had expected Safari to fair much better in my little test.  It feels much faster than it reports.  In fact, my first couple of tests with it were even slower than the numbers I have up here and it was dead last.  I then spent a bit more time with Safari looking for some consistent results that I felt comfortable with.   Something wacky is going on here and I don’t know what it is and it would be great if someone could verify or dispute my results. Safari also renders some of the buttons in NetSuite only halfway which makes for a strange look.  (Buttons with pulldowns)

Internet Explorer 8

IE8 is better than IE7 for NetSuite but not by much.  While it seems to be very solid in terms of the look and feel of NetSuite, it does load the pages more slowly.  Unfortunately it’s the default in most offices.  That being said.  If I ever want to ensure that it’s not my browser that’s causing the problem with NetSuite I’ll switch to IE as it’s the most trouble free in my opinion.  I really don’t use it that much however.

(Edit.  I just went through a long call with a customer regarding a problem using NLTags in case messages.  The problem turned out to be the IE8 Browser.)  Buyer Beware.

Internet Explorer 7

IE7 is slow.  Stable but slow.  I’ve only heard one person who says they like it for NetSuite and I suspect it’s because they haven’t used anything else.  If you’re on IE6 or 7 I recommend that you upgrade to something more modern.

Conclusion

For me, I’ll be sticking with Firefox and Chrome when I’m feeling the need to be speedy.  IE8 will be there if I need to troubleshoot problems.

I’ve obviously left out a few controls, and this test could be improved by expanding to different browser versions, operating systems, and even internet connections.  And, it may be useful to simulate a full day for an average user.

If you do some testing yourself please let me know in the comments.  I’ll post updates in the future as NetSuite and browsers get updated.

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.