It’s not exactly a secret that every business—no matter its industry—is in the business of making money and attracting new customers, as well as retaining those who have already bought from the brand previously. In smaller companies, one individual might be tasked with the sales aspects of the business, marketing initiatives, and any related service tasks. This might work in the early years of the company, but as it grows, that one-person team needs to evolve into complete teams of people who are dedicated to each group of tasks. Unfortunately, it’s often during these periods of expansion that data silos and communication barriers also tend to appear.
NetSuite’s platform was designed to offer a single, uniform place for all of a company’s data to live. It’s not uncommon for companies to start with an ERP to manage its financials and accounting business, for example, only to find that this streamlined approach also benefits other facets of the company, such as sales, marketing, and customer service.
If you’re looking for way to consolidate these processes and zero in on the management of all your operations, we have exciting news for you! NetSuite’s newly expanded CRM add-on will give you more visibility into sales forecasts, campaign metrics, and escalated issues by providing you with a dashboard that’s tailored to whomever needs to see it in the role they play in the company. For instance, sales managers can see information about their team members while customer service team members will be able to see the metrics that are pertinent to their positions. This CRM add-on works in conjunction with the platform’s prebuilt SuiteAnalytics Workbooks, helping organizations measure sales performance and growth and optimal levels.
Why are these insights so critical to growth? Let’s take a look!
The CRM Balancing Act
As companies expand from those one-person-does-everything experiences to full teams of people fulfilling specified roles on intentionally created teams, each group tends to find its own software solutions that work for its unique needs. Often, this leads to sales coming up with one solution while customer relations finds an entirely different product that fits its needs. Of course, finance and accounting use their own tools, and by the end of the day, every department is operating on its own software, completely independent of everyone else in the company.
This is a recipe for disaster from a transparency and leadership perspective. When tools are part of a siloed organization, frustration tends to ensue. Not to mention, the process to reconcile and integrate these different data platforms is often expensive and incredibly time-consuming, particularly if the processes have been separate for an extended period of time.
These elements, factored with the fact that disparate systems can stunt a company’s growth and lead to costly mistakes, identify why it’s important to lean into a consolidated solution as early as possible.
Of course, that’s not to say that single systems can’t have their own problems. For instance, if you’ve bought into a one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf solution, you might find that it’s a poor fit for everyone in the company for different reasons. These tools often lack flexibility and offer inadequate functionality that can eventually lead to an overall failure of the solution that’s supposed to improve businesses’ processes.
When it comes to a CRM, it’s important to strike an even balance between personalized user experiences and cross-team connectedness. In doing so, you’ll avoid the pitfalls mentioned above and set your organization up for rapid growth and scalability. Understanding your users’ unique needs will help you choose a solution that fits everyone, from sales and marketing to customer support.
The Needs of Your Sales Team
Your CRM platform should be the source of truth for your sales folks, offering a centralized source of information that can be used when they’re prospecting, forecasting, and quota tracking. This will also help them manage renewals and upsells.
Be mindful that everyone will use your CRM differently. Your sales professionals are interested in their immediate tasks, such as who they need to reach out to next, which potential customers they’re meeting with today, and which deals are in their pipelines that need attention. Remember, this team’s focus is meeting or exceeding specified quotas.
Naturally, these goals work their way up to sales leaders’ objectives. This group wants to close deals and make money, but they need an aerial view of what’s happening on the ground so they can support their reps and provide resources where necessary. A great CRM will help sales managers identify when feedback is needed, or when it’s time to offer additional training and assistance to their reps.
Sales managers are also focused on the marketing side of the business, as they need to ensure the marketing team is filling the sales pipeline with qualified leads that keep the sales reps busy. When sales managers need to report back to leadership, they don’t want to spend hours hunting for data and building reports; they need an easy, repeatable method of reporting that provides accurate forecasting data.
The Needs of Your Marketing Team
It’s not uncommon for marketing teams’ lists and campaign reports to be housed in systems that are completely separate from sales data, making it difficult for the two teams to be as integrated as they truly need to be. If sales goals are unable to be traced back to the marketing campaigns that brought the leads to the company, marketing managers struggle to prove ROI. It also becomes difficult to fine-tune those campaigns so they can be optimized for future use.
If you want to align your sales and marketing teams’ efforts, you have to automate the process by having this information housed in a CRM that serves as the place where leads, prospects, and customer data are able to be segmented, tailored, and analyzed.
After a campaign has launched, teams can track marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) through the sales funnel. Armed with this information, you’ll be able to see which campaigns are high-producers, landing both customers and revenue.
The Needs of Your Customer Support Team
When customers call your service center, they typically have very specific questions or experiences they want to share. No matter what the question or issue, customers expect the people answering the phone to be prepared with solutions at the ready.
In order for your organization to provide satisfactory results in a timely manner, your customer service reps must be able to access pertinent information, such as customer details, past orders, payment history, and inventory, on a whim. In other words, you need to give them access to the same information your sales, warehouse, and finance teams are seeing; otherwise, they’ll struggle to find answers and deliver helpful direction to your potentially frustrated customers.
Real-time data can help de-escalate disgruntled customers and give customer service reps the tools they need to turn a negative interaction with your brand into a positive one. The quicker reps can deliver answers and support, the less likely escalations are to happen. Removing barriers that slow down response times and leave customers in a queue waiting can mean the difference between a customer walking away a fan or leaving your company altogether.
Extending NetSuite’s CRM
The new NetSuite CRM add-on is built directly into the NetSuite ERP platform, meaning all of your teams—from marketing to sales to customer service—are natively unified in a single source of information. With this integration, you’ll have access to real-time insights so you can more accurately forecast sales and procure campaigns that lead to satisfied customers.
This new CRM add-on offers a robust library of capabilities. Each user will have access to dashboards that are uniquely set up for his or her role, ensuring all of your company’s CRM users have a centralized place from which to pull information and data. This new add-on also includes the CRM Workbooks SuiteApp, which offers 10 prebuilt SuiteAnalytics Workbooks that focus on sales performance KPIs. You could build your own reports from scratch, but why would you waste a ton of time doing something that could be fraught with errors when the SuiteApp will do all the dirty work for you?
With the CRM-add on, you can seamlessly adopt CRM reporting best practices and access crucial sales performance metrics, including opportunity forecasts, quotes-to-conversions, and won-versus-lost opportunities.
Get Started With the NetSuite CRM Add-On
If you’re looking for a CRM add-on that’s built with your sales, marketing, and customer service teams in mind, you’re ready to reach out to MIBAR and get started! As a leading NetSuite partner, we’ve established a genuine methodology to help maximize every dollar of your ERP budget and ensure NetSuite is meeting your needs. Equip all of your CRM users with the right tools for their jobs today by contacting our team at MIBAR!
