Audaxium Blog

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

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

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

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

Reason #1: Achieve Customer Service Excellence

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

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

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

Reason #2: Boost Your Sales

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

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

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

Reason #3: Expand into New Markets

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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.

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!