CRM Software

Have you checked out NetSuite (News - Alert) recently? Or let’s put it this way: How long would it take you to pull up your customer satisfaction or lead conversion numbers? Can you remember which spreadsheets or SFA app it’s on?

With NetSuite all that’s in real time dashboards, reporting and analytics. You can let your sales, marketing and service teams monitor whichever Key Performance Indicators you desire, and access the latest reports every day, if you think that would help your business. Employees can diagnose issues on the fly, drill down visibility to the sales opportunity, customer record, or sales quote detail, and otherwise make your life easier.

About a month ago TMC’s Jamie Epstein wrote that NetSuite increased its efforts to recruit channel partners to resell its on-demand ERP applications, raising the margins and resources it began offering providers last year under its "SP 100" program.

The new NetSuite SuiteStart Service, Epstein explained, includes waivers of first-year $5,000 program enrollment fees, a free license for partners to use NetSuite ERP and CRM applications to run their own business, and more marketing resources such as marketing plan templates and sales leads.

Using NetSuite also lets you eliminate one of the most obnoxious byproducts of using homegrown systems, spreadsheets and other Rube Goldberg IT setups -- multiple versions of the truth. NetSuite’s CRM software gives multiple users access to the same single centralized repository, empowers various employees to have access to key sales with the touch of their fingertip, and allow for service and marketing measures to enable clear visibility to reports, down to the actual live transaction.

The dashboards, if you’re not that familiar with how they work, communicate information quickly, effectively and in real time -- the sales team can get instant access to such measures as achieved vs. quota, actual versus sales forecast, commissions, sales pipeline by stage, the percentage of net new customers versus those up-sold and the service team can identify the percentage of calls resolved, monitor First-Call Resolution metrics, analyze customers renewing maintenance and see call volume and trends as well as monitor customer satisfaction.

The marketing team can easily view the number of unique visitors to the website, lead-generation form completion, customer acquisition costs and more, and even the top execs get cross company visibility into financial and CRM measures -- “financial measures such as bookings and billing, sales pipeline measures and customer service performance,” NetSuite officials say.