There are two important entities in NetSuite's sales process: Customers and Contacts. The third important item is the relationship between Customers and Contacts. Customers actually come in three stages: Leads, Prospects and Customers. Within each Stage there may be one or more Statuses. For example, a Prospect can have Statuses like Qualified, Opportunity Realized - In Discussion, Proposal Made, In Negotiation, etc.. You can manage the stages as well as the statuses in the application to reflect how you want to do business. For example, some users prefer to have Unqualified Leads and Qualified Prospects. Others like a Qualified Lead and then Prospect In Discussion. The Stages in conjunction with the Statuses define the probability, or the weight, of the Lead/Prospect/Customer. Stages and their associated Statuses ought to configured carefully. They will ultimately determine your pipeline reporting. But before I move on, you may be wondering what a Pipeline report is? Good question. If you are not using pipeline reports and you have a direct sales force I will bet a weeks pay that you actually are using pipeline reports, just by another name. Essentially they report by sales rep/sales manager, the current potential business its value, both actual and weighted by the prospect's probability. Pipeline reports are indispensable to sales management because they provide a dependable estimate of the future. Add in the actual sales and you have the sales forecast. Turning back now to the sales process let's consider an unqualified lead that comes to us via the Internet, for example. How do we manage it? First, when you have a team of sales people you will inevitably have rules for territories. These rules can be used to route leads to the correct sales person. But if you are working with leads from the Internet you probably want to get started with some further marketing efforts. They signed up after all for some reason, a webinar, a whitepaper, a mini-course. You can help yourself in these efforts by using Marketing Automation, about which we will post at a later date. But after your marketing efforts are completed and you have separated the wheat from the chaff you start the direct sales process. This is the handoff of a lead from marketing to sales. During this effort it is very important to take good Notes in NetSuite, as well as keep a log of the Activities and Email Messages with the prospect. Also, as you learn more you can continue to add the names and information of other Contacts at the Prospect. You may have several Contacts linked to a single Prospect. Likewise you may have several Customers linked to a single contact. Why is this important, to have the ability to link one Contact to several Customer records? Think about working in one industry, how often do you see the contacts from one company end up at another company? Quite often actually. After you have invested some time and effort with a contact and they move to another firm, you can keep their history in the system while adding the new company to their record. At some point in the direct sales process you will find an opportunity for business with the Prospect. At this point you open up an Opportunity. Managing the Opportunity allows you to setup the potential sale including the items, quantities, rates and amounts. From the Opportunity you have the ability to move to the next steps in the sales process, like quoting. ordering and invoicing. The most important thing to remember about the Opportunity is that it automatically changes the Status of the Prospect, and of course the associated probability. Not all of the changes in the Status are the result of other actions in the system, but opening an Opportunity, creating a Quote (or Proposal) and placing an Order do automatically change the Prospect's Status. Today's post is a quick overview of the direct sales process in NetSuite for business to business sales. In our next post we will go one step further and take a look at some of the forms that are used in the process and how you can set them up for your specific requirements. | 
