Part III: What makes NetSuite’s CRM Unique for Producing Successful Implementations?

This article is part of a four part series and is relevant if you are considering a new customer relationship management system.  See Part I and Part II articles here.

Multiple Information Origin

The challenge with multiple information origin dilemma reveals itself clearly when the marketing department demands a measure for Average Cost for Customer Acquisition.  This measure has always been elusive; but at least with today’s digital marketing mediums, that measurement goal is somewhat within reach.  Yet, it remains fuzzy and most difficult to obtain.  Here is why:

1.  Brand Awareness objectives do not always have direct and specific measurable events.  Advertising on Television, Radio and Print are the most difficult to associate with a single individual.  Further, digital banner advertising may be producing audience influence yet there was no click-thru event to capture that exposure.  The point is that it’s hard to say how many touch points were required, on average, for a customer to be exposed to the product before they enter into a sales conversation.  While some data can sometimes be captured, it will contribute to the information noise within the environment.

2.  Multi-Channel Interaction: you may use different means to interact with a prospective customer before he/she is specifically identified.  For example, you may have a pay-per-click campaign that lands a prospect on your site — yet they do not take action.  Later, the prospect remembered you offered a whitepaper download and they simply perform a Google search for your product name and go directly to the whitepaper offer.  They then finally call you direct to engage in a sales conversation.  Each of these events may appear as separate discrete events: yet they were part of the “seasoning” process in the customer’s mind to be receptive to listen to your sales offer.

These two elements alone, Brand Awareness and Multi-Channel Interaction, mean that the origin of sales related statistics is questionable — that lowers information trustworthiness when attempting to determine the often touted CRM promise: “Average Cost for Customer Acquisition”.

NetSuite helps the situation if you leverage the built-in tools.  This means that you leverage the Sales Campaign features which offer outbound email logic and other digital response capture capacities.  If you are using NetSuite’s eCommerce system, you can measure visitor traffic and traffic conversion to purchases.  Finally, since all the transactional order information is centralized, you can summarize the information to make overall better assessments.

Why Centralized Architecture helps the CRM Implementation?

Understanding that decentralized information thwarts your efforts to reliably measure marketing and sales tactics affords you the opportunity to make informed choices in your business system architecture.  A centralized architecture gives you a greater opportunity to produce a successful implementation because the you can more easily measure trustworthy data.  The alternative requires another major IT project to gather scattered data and “piece it together” in hopes to make meaning out of the various marketing and sales tactics deployed by the company.

We have addressed the multiple information origin concern and previously discussed the two other considerations in previous but related articles:

  1. Duplicate Data
  2. Inconsistent Information Management Practices

We can now finish the article series in a discussion about the Salesperson’s Perceived CRM Benefit.

If you are ready to move up from your current CRM system and want to ensure success, we should talk.

 

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Marty Zigman

Holding all three official certifications, Marty is regarded as the top NetSuite expert and leads a team of senior professionals at Prolecto Resources, Inc. He is a former Deloitte & Touche CPA and has held CTO roles. For over 30 years, Marty has produced leadership in ERP, CRM and eCommerce business systems. Contact Marty to set up a conversation.

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