Audaxium Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5) You like craft beer or good wine

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

READ MORE: http://bit.ly/u0bf2b 

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

The Importance of Measuring ROMI

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

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

The Challenge in Measuring ROMI

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

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

Questions to ask yourself:

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

The #1 Challenge in B2B Marketing

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

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

Marketing Automation Can Help

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

Why Attend the Webinar?

Learn automation best practices, including:

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

Pardot is a fully integrated add-on for NetSuite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The formula looks like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

User adoption is key to ROI

CRM vendors all promise fantastic ROI by helping your company increase sales productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and enable marketing effectiveness.  However, those benefits only come to life if your employees actually use the system.

WII-FM:  What’s In It – For Me?

To maximize user adoption, you need to figure out the answer to this question: “How can we make them WANT to use, or even depend on, CRM, even though it might require more discipline on their part?”

Generally speaking, people resist change, they already have too much on their plate, and some even struggle to learn new software.  The last thing you want to do is give them a system that gets in their way, rather than making their life easier and more productive.

WII-FM:  Questions to ask yourself

• What dashboards will help my employees make better decisions with their time?
• What reports do they need quick access to?
• What information are they searching for frequently?
• What tools will help them get more work done in the same amount of time?
• What reminders will help them get better organized?
• What real-time performance metrics will help keep themselves on track?
• How do I make it easy and fast for salespeople to keep their forecast up-to-date?

How to answer the Questions

Many people make the mistake of simply asking a few trusted people in each functional area what they want/need, and then turn that into a requirements list.  Observation and measurement are better tools.  Talking to existing CRM reference customers about these questions is another way to find out what works, and what doesn’t.  Watch how your most effective employees get things done.  Replicate some of their methods, and remove obstacles from their path.

What to expect if you don’t consider user needs

There’s no question that a modern CRM system is a wonderful tool for managers and executives.  You get better visibility into the key metrics in your business, you get real-time reports that allow you to make quicker decisions, and you get tools to manage employee performance.

This only works if your whole team uses the system. For example, if only 60% of your salespeople enter their leads, log their phone calls, and manage their sales pipeline, your dashboard is only 60% accurate, at best. Your visibility becomes more than a little foggy.

The Bottom Line

When planning an implementation of a CRM system, put yourself in your employees’ shoes and you’ll make better decisions that will maximize user adoption and accelerate your ROI.

Questions?

Audaxium consultants are former employees of companies who have implemented new CRM systems.  We’ve been through the learning curve and can provide you with some ideas to accelerate user adoption and reduce the impact of change.  Contact us for more ideas.

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.

Customer Relationship Management.  Perhaps the worst descriptor ever used to describe a class of products.

Why?  Because a CRM application does so much more than simply manage lists of companies and contacts, opportunities and orders.  It’s a business management platform that can manage any kind of information you want.  Well, almost any.

It’s also a bad description because CRM should, in the best implementations, be used to manage performance.  And the best way to manage performance is to set goals and targets for yourself and your business.

If you’re looking at CRM for the first time, here are three things to ask yourself as you examine your different options.

What are the 3 most important goals for my business, or my different business areas, this year?

Can a measurement and reporting system help me meet and exceed those targets?

What is the financial impact of exceeding those targets?

If you can answer those questions you’re on your way to figuring out the financial justification of a CRM system.  The important thing to keep in mind is that there are many systems that can measure results.  ERP systems are great at measuring.  But does yours allow you to put in targets and report against them?  Can it measure non-financial data, such as the number of new leads?  The percentage of RFP’s won or lost?  Because a (good) CRM system is so flexible you can measure much much more.

So as you consider either if you need a system, or, which CRM to implement, perhaps take the time to ask how your important goals and targets would be tracked, compared, and presented, and, how doing so would impact your business.

If you’d like to see a demonstration of this, please feel free to contact us.

Here at Audaxium, we have been spending a great deal of time talking to customers about how to get off on the right foot when implementing marketing automation software, in this case, Pardot.

These discussions are as unique as our customers, but there are a few constants in the equation that add up to a successful implementation. It’s important to give these careful consideration.

As point of reference, all of our clients sell to other businesses, and they typically have a lot of customers and contacts at those customers. But they also have a keen desire to both generate new leads, and manage leads sent to them by their partners. Our advice below makes the most sense in that context.

So what’s first? Where do we begin?

What first happens is a discussion of the value of marketing automation tools. Times have changed. It’s no longer appropriate to download lists of email addresses and spam them. It’s not valuable to email your entire customer base each week with every message you want to broadcast.

In a nutshell, you’ll be using an application like Pardot to achieve the following:

• Capture Lead Information
• Track Lead and customer behavior on your website and content
• Measure the “sales readiness” of contacts
• Manage the hand off of sales ready leads to the sales team
• Give customers content and offers they are interested in

But you already knew all that. You’re here to learn about your first steps.

Data Scrubbing

The first step is an analysis of your existing data. Just how good is it? This breaks down into two essential questions. How much data that you need to use to segment your database, is missing? Address, email, company size, industry etc. are typical but there may be others. The second question is, how much duplicate information is there?

While improving data quality should be an ongoing task in your organization, and not a one time program, you’ll need to make sure it’s happening as you move ahead with marketing automation. Clean your data.

Make sure you’re removing or merging duplicate email addresses. Put in place metrics in your CRM system to warn users when they are working with incomplete records.

Your database will never become perfect, but place a high degree of importance on the effort to make it so.

Click the green button to read more…

Read More »

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?