I have posted several times recently on the general topic of revenue in NetSuite. To quickly review, revenue results from sales over the web, e-commerce, sales from direct sales or partner/distributors, or cash sales at a brick and mortar retail/wholesale location (to be covered next week). I also talked about the importance of process in the sales and marketing function. NetSuite enables a serious sales and marketing process, but all the functionality in the world isn't going to help you if you don't have a process. Today I would like to spend a little time making the case for integration. All too often I see small and medium enterprises working at odds with themselves because they do not have an integrated system. They handle CRM in one system and order management/revenue/accounting in another. It's often hard to persuade these prospects that an integrated system has a value proposition exponentially greater that the sum of its parts. Nowhere is integration more important than between CRM and order management. The re-keying of orders from one system to another is an invitation to clerical errors. I challenge prospects to take a serious look at the number of mistakes they are currently making in their non-integrated system and to try to find a value for those mistakes. Keeping metrics on how you are performing at various tasks is extremely important to long term revenue and company growth. And you don't have to have an advanced degree. Simply keep a log of each mistake that you uncover in the order management function at your business. Part of the log also includes the resolution of the issue. Over time you will start to see some patterns develop in the spreadsheet and you'll have the basis for estimating the cost of an error. You may be very surprised to know that each error might cost you several hundred dollars. Then when you consider that you not only lost the sale but the customer, too...compound the cost of the error by 3 or 4 and we're talking real money. A lot of small and medium enterprise owners worry about the staff buying into the new software and really taking advantage of it. Nothing will prove the point of NetSuite's benefits more clearly and effectively than a well documented case for controlling costly errors by integrating the most important functions in your business: Sales and Marketing and Order Management. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. Think about the ability to view within a single system the entire sales history of your customers and how your sales and marketing efforts have paid off, or not. What does the customer respond to initially, to bring them in the door? What campaign is effective on the upsell, cross-sell? Again, we measure the value of a system in how it facilitates, in this case, revenue growth, and prevents costly errors and customer defections. Next week we will start to discuss NetSuite's revenue side in detail. The context created by this weeks posts on process and integration will provide the appropriate backdrop to NetSuite's in-depth functionality. | 
