The sales force automation capabilities in NetSuite provide businesses with an invaluable asset. As we looked at in our previous post, one of these advantages is the ability to manage lead routing, whereby new leads are automatically assigned to designated sales teams via sales territories. But how do you get a lead into your system, and how does the system accomplish lead conversion, turning those leads into prospects and customers?
Gathering Customer Information
First, let’s take a look at gathering information on potential customers. This process is the beginning of your company’s relationship with your customers.
Online Customer Form
The online customer form is a simple way for you to gather information on new leads directly through your company’s website. Through NetSuite, you can customize both what this form looks like as well as which fields on the form are required. You can also decide what happens with information the form gathers. Once you have made the customer form, NetSuite will create an external URL that you can embed on your website. To create and customize an online customer form, navigate to Setup > Marketing > Setup Tasks > Online Customer Forms > New.
Customer Type
As you make a new online customer form, you can decide the type of customer you want to create. There are two basic types of customers: individuals and companies. Under the Set Up Workflow subtab, check the Create Customers as Companies checkbox if you want to have both company and individual customer types. In that case, new customers who enter a company name are created as a company in your system, while customers that don’t enter a company name are created as individuals. If you want all new customers to be created as individuals in your system, regardless of whether or not they include a company name, then leave the box unchecked.
Contact Records
Another way to gather information on potential customers is to connect a contact to a lead, prospect, or customer record. Connecting a contact to one of these records enables those who view the records to see the individual or company that is a contact for that lead or prospect, providing a means of further communication. You can associate a contact with a lead, prospect, or customer record by going to the desired record, viewing it, and completing the fields under the Relationships, Contacts subtab.
Customer Statuses
According to the Help Center, “a customer status describes a lead, prospect, or customer’s stage in the sales cycle.” To use customer statuses to their fullest potential, first create the statuses you need for your system and then assign those statuses to your leads, prospects, and customers.
Creating a New Customer Status
First, create the customer statuses you need. To do this, navigate to Setup > Sales > Setup Tasks > Customer Statuses > New. On this page, name your new status and choose which stage this status would apply to: lead, prospect, or customer. Then, choose the probability percentage. The probability percentage describes the likelihood of an individual or company becoming a full customer. For example, a new lead or a lost customer would be at 0%, while a closed/won customer would be 100%. The probability percentage gives you a tangible view of an individual or company’s location on the lead-to-customer spectrum.
You will repeat this process for as many customer statuses as you may find yourself needing to use. You are not limited to creating just one status per stage, and you may find that you in fact need to have multiple statuses per stage. For example, a potential customer could be in the prospect stage for quite a while before becoming an actual customer, but the probability of that individual or business becoming a customer would gradually grow. So you may need to have prospect customer statuses like, “In Discussion,” “Proposal,” “In Negotiation,” etc.
Setting Customer Preferences
How do customer statuses update on a lead record as it goes through the system? While you could always update the customer statuses on records manually, the simpler method is to set the default customer status for the different stages. You can access this page through Setup > Sales > Preferences > Sales Preferences.
There are five fields on this page where you can assign a default customer status. Those fields include (1) Lead Status, (2) Prospect Status – New, (3) Prospect Status – Opportunity, (4) Prospect Status – Estimate, and (5) Customer Status. Under each of these fields, you can select the status that you want records in these different stages to default to.
So, what do you do with statuses you created that you don’t set as a default status? Those statuses will simply be available for you to manually select directly from a lead, prospect, or customer record. For example, while the default status for a customer record would be “Closed/Won,” you may lose customers at some point. In order to maintain a customer’s record (and the information contained in it) without including it in the same category as your actual customers, you could manually change the status to “Lost Customer.”
Lead Conversion
Organizing records into leads, prospects, and customers is a key aspect of the NetSuite sales process. But how does the process help your sales teams actually take an individual or company from being a lead in the system to being a prospect or a customer? That process is known as lead conversion, and with NetSuite there are two key workflows that can accomplish lead conversion.
Status-Driven Lead Conversion
The first lead conversion workflow is status-driven lead conversion. This workflow is the most helpful for B2C (business to consumer) models. In this workflow, when a lead is created the record type for the lead can be either individual or company. Then, that specific record is what moves through the process, either with your sales reps/teams manually changing the record status to convert it from a lead to a prospect or with the record converting automatically in response to opportunities or estimates that are created. When the record makes it all the way to being a customer record, it remains as the record type (individual or company) that it was created as.
Lead Conversion Feature
The second lead conversion workflow uses the lead conversion feature. This workflow is the most helpful for B2B (business to business) models. In this workflow, leads are created with individuals who work for a specific company. Then, when the record converts from a lead to a prospect, the record splits into two records. First, a prospect record is created for the company. And second, a contact record is created for the individual from the company. While the lead record began as an individual type, when it converts to prospect it becomes a company type with an associated contact record.
Conclusion
The NetSuite sales force automation process streamlines the collection customer information, organizes customer statuses, and enables lead conversion, simplifying the work of your sales reps and sales teams. If this post has been helpful, view the related posts linked below. And don’t forget to subscribe to our mailing list so you never miss a post!