Empower your Product Management with automated crm software for Product Management

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hi everyone thanks for tuning in to this segment of netsuite tv i'm laurelyn ellsworth the principal outbound product manager for netsuite crm and i'm joined by ryan thomas from depaty jeff bernstein from ondeck sports tom barzak from insource solutions and shawna roulette from mann lake we will be discussing how to use netsuite crm to grow your business to start over the past 18 months we've obviously seen more and more businesses move to operating with remote employees as we move forward the new normal is sure to have a mix of in-person and remote employees tom how has this new way of doing business changed your expectations of how your crm system should support your business thanks lara lynn you know it's really changed a lot for us we were before the pandemic we were 67 out of office workers and now we've moved to 97 and because of that the crm is more important for us to keep communicating with each other and for our strategy as a company where we are client focused and team fueled so the only way you can fuel the team is to be able to communicate seamlessly and we do all that through the netsuite crm that's great ryan what do you think yeah we have a similar situation you know being a b2b business crm and i'm assuming a lot of your users have the same challenge which is data management so how do you have thousands of customers with thousands of contacts and maintain the data integrity behind all the information that it takes to run a good crm so really what we've done is try to use this as an opportunity to build out forward-looking things like a application that is available with ios and android where contact users or internal users like employees can come back and exchange data through the app which is live in their pocket manage their own information which we can then leverage because we know that information is good to connect it back to the usefulness of the crm from netsuite so that's been a big piece for us in putting those pieces together allows us to manage things looking forward and we get better adaptation from our users both internal and external and helping us manage the business that's so great and it's so interesting to hear about how our customers are using netsuite to pandemic-proof their businesses now worldwide there are nearly 4 billion social media users half of the world's population and 91 of those people access social media platforms on their mobile devices shawna how are you using mobile interactions and social media to drive your relationships with your prospects and customers and how are you using crm to manage those interactions yeah for us social media has become a bigger aspect of our business over the course of the last few years whether it's the younger generation getting into the market or just different aspects like that and you know with covet everybody's inbox with email was filling up so we really moved to social media to just keep that mobile presence right there in front of users and then try to put codes around it or something that we can track back to netsuite so that we can see you know where did those customers come from or how did we reach out to them and then use that to better market to them going forward to kind of distinguish our our print customers versus our digital customers and and just use our funds appropriately to reach out to our customers great thanks so much for sharing jeff yeah so we we've also seen a large growth in our uh in our social media use or uh in our uh in both our organic and our uh paid advertising through social media uh it's been an incredible increase we've watched our cost of lead decrease a lot uh without doing much other than continuing to use our you know google ads but the growth within social media has been huge wonderful studies have shown that customers are willing to pay a premium when they have a great customer experience ryan how have your business operations um how have you been managing your business operations to make sure that you're improving customer experience and using that to drive incremental profitability yeah again going back to our customer segmentation we have a lot of oem driven customers on the b2b side but then half of our business is also through mro which is maintenance and repair and many of those users are in the field they're out they're working on pieces of equipment and they need a solution and they need it quickly because uptime is what's important to them so again going back to the leveraging of the app we are putting information and transactions available to those users in their pocket so no matter where they are or what they're trying to get done and each each piece of equipment's different they need to source that information they can create a transaction right there get the results that they need what that means to our business at the end of the day is that that value creates both retention with those customers and allows us to leverage the higher profitability behind those products because we're giving them more value with the access sounds like knowledge is power for your customers very much so jeff i'd love to hear your thoughts on that as well yeah we work through two different channels uh first we do a project based business where we do a lot of setting expectations to improve our customer relationships and we also have an outbound sales team that works very hard to call out to reach to outreach all of our customers and improve that relationship with within within our sales to grow revenue that's great tom it's hard to plan and adapt when you don't know how your business is doing know your numbers right so what are the most useful and important kpis for your sales and marketing teams and how have you been using netsuite to track and improve those metrics that's a that's a great question the kpis obviously are a big deal with netsuite and they're all over the product and all different parts of it but when we come to sales and marketing sales you're typically talking about forecast and pipeline and those types of things we know as a leadership team if our pipeline is sitting 4x of quota it's about 95 96 chance that we're going to make our number that particular month so that's really you know just an easy way to know that we're in a good spot another metric that we watch that's that's very exciting as well is we have a marketing automation engine that's external to netsuite but fully integrated with it and as our customers are interacting through webinars downloading white papers web page web page hits we actually create a score that increases as they make all these actions and then at a trip point that's when we actually bring our high value sales person into the engagement at that particular point so we're monitoring that kpi all along the way to know when the customer is ready for a buying decision sounds like having real-time data from netsuite is very important to you oh we couldn't do what we do without netsuite i mean there's just no way that's so awesome shawna what about it man like how have you been thinking about metrics and what have you been doing lately it's kind of like tom we use um some metrics to just look at sales forecasts you know getting our team information are we going to hit our monthly or quarterly sales goal but then also break it down individually each of our sales reps have their individual goals that they're trying to meet so they're able to build their own kpis pretty easily and quickly to see if they're on track and then supervisors can look into that to see you know what's going on with my team we also go and use it a little bit further onto what type of customer is calling in you know are they a b2b are they a b2c are they a commercial farmer are they hobbyists so that when that customer calls in you can quickly see what type of customer they are what are they ordering and get them to the appropriate sales person so that you you know if you have a big commercial farmer calling in we don't have a new sales rep that maybe isn't quite as informed um so just different tools like that to get our sales team quick information right when that call answers so they can do a better job that's fantastic another thing i'd love to touch on is automation implementing automation in your crm processes can simplify complex tasks especially for sales salespeople they love that when you're not making them do manual data entry and you can use that to reduce overhead to manage and strengthen your customer relationships in return jeff how have you been thinking about this at your company and what are some of the most positive reactions that you've gotten from implementing uh automation from your in your crm yeah so we use a lot of automation in our marketing for our crm we use a field called lead product category to trigger uh product automations based on you know what type of products our customers are interested in it helps our sales team to to not have to um deliver all of the you know the installation instructions and testimonials they can focus much more on the sales process instead of trying to focus on the rest of it i'm sure they appreciate that and shawna what about you one of the projects we're working on right now is putting in item substitutions upsells things like that so as our sales team is on with a customer and somebody orders a product that you don't have to go flipping through a catalog to see you know what else can i sell them or what can i upsell them it's just right there in the system and using those tools um so that's a that's a big one we're working on right now along with trying to uh integrate our phone system so as that customer is calling in that customer information is just popping up right there on the system and everyone can have their their key pieces of information right right at their fingertips awesome tom do you want to jump in on that one as well yeah because we actually just did that with our phone system uh in the last 30 days and we had it fully integrated with our previous phone system and it's amazing is when you're on the phone with the client that you know you have all the information about them their customer 360. but right from there we can actually create tasks or phone call records or any other information or assign things to other people and it just makes the whole thing flow a lot easier and i mean we love our phone integration yes that's awesome so i also want to talk about what you're thinking about for the future so what are you looking forward to in netsuite and in your business and how are you going to use netsuite to get there yeah when we look at it i mean i think the crm for us is just the beginning uh as we move towards more automation and hopefully some type of like artificial intelligence learning um again right now the focus is around accuracy and making sure we're driving good data that we can use because once we begin to build it out in the ai features the hope is that it drives the accuracy drives results around our teams where they can go and how they can do that ai is still such an open topic we're trying to learn as much as we can but our idea is that if we get it right in the crm we'll be able to leverage it sooner than our competition or others that are looking for it like our customers that's so great tom what about you what are you looking forward to well you know our business is actually going through a transformation right now we're moving to more of a subscription-based business where in the past we had sold perpetual software licenses so we pivoted and we now have client success teams working with these subscriptions and in the crm with through custom records we actually have built out a tracking mechanism that we work with our clients throughout their entire subscription to help them get the outcome that they're expecting and with that we're hoping to see higher renewal rates in that subscription and then we also will be doing sweet billing so that we can get a better handle on our revenue recognition so we've got a couple of really neat things going on the last piece we have is an automation piece that we have with the crm is when a client is actually on an active subscription we go ahead and automatically schedule phone calls throughout the 12 months of their subscription for various people in the organization so that we make sure that those client touches actually happen throughout their entire subscription life so just increasing all those touches automatically that's awesome we've got a few minutes left and i would love to hear since we're at sweet world let's just go down the table and say what's been your favorite experience at sweetworld so far shawna um for me since this is my first year at sweetworld and where our company is fairly new we've only been on netsuite for about a year and a half is just the networking and hearing how other companies are using the system and what tips and tricks they've found that we can we can bring back and implement at man like yeah for us we always we we've been at sweet world now i think for seven straight years except for last year and um what she's mentioning is always a big piece for us uh meeting the other customers seeing what they're working on i think some of the enlightening things that we saw over the keynote presentations over the past couple days has really been around the power of oracle behind netsuite showing us what they're bringing that was obviously a big concern when that whole transaction happened wondering if the flexibility and the the things we really enjoyed about netsuite being netsuite we're going to change but this gives a little bit clearer picture about what the future's going to look like and how it's good for our organization so you know i really like taking that back because i think it's an important piece for our people to know that we're on the right platform which is the reason we made the decision in the first place that's fantastic i love that you're thinking about going home with that confidence and taking that to your team jeff what about you uh as much i loved all the the networking and all of that kind of stuff but i really like talking to the vendors seeing what you know what's next what we can do to expand and improve our our netsuite not just in you know the crm side but in the whole erp that's really my favorite part of it tom i'm very excited about all the new developments uh quite frankly when when oracle vault netsuite i was concerned you know there was a lot of localization internet internationalization stuff going on data center work and it didn't feel like value but now all the things that we saw in the main session and what's coming up i i'm really uh now trusting in their decision to go with netsuite i'm very excited for the future of all the things that are coming and i just can't wait to get my hands on them that's awesome well i'll tell you what i'm excited too and for me my favorite thing about being here at sweet world and it's my first time has been meeting fantastic customers like the four of you and getting to talk to everybody and hearing all these amazing stories about how our customers are really using netsuite not just to deal with crises but really to look forward to grow their business and to innovate so that's fantastic i really appreciate the insights that you've shared with us today it's been great having you here thank you so much ryan jeff thomas tom and shauna for joining us