A chemical manufacturer’s sales cycle can vary based on the channel type (direct or indirect, collaborations, international, existing customers, etc.). There is a core set of NetSuite CRM features that are vital to successfully converting prospects into customers and maintaining long-term relationships.
Below are the key features we typically set up for our clients, organized into the following areas:
- Lead and Prospect Management: This includes lead generation and qualification to ensure your organization is capturing information from industry events, online research and networking to identify potential customers. Marketing drives awareness of your organization and products, and it is important to leverage information from your CRM system to expose future opportunities.
- Opportunity Management: NetSuite’s Opportunities allow customers to establish a sales pipeline and forecast for your products. Sales pipelines include prospect and customer opportunities that typically have the need, budget and timeline for your products.
- Proposal/Quote/Estimate Management: Using NetSuite CRM’s Quotes/Estimate tool provides a tailored proposal that captures the customer's specific needs, including product specifications, pricing and delivery terms.
- Customer Collaboration and Sample Request Management are sometimes left outside of the system. NetSuite’s functionality can assist with centralizing sales information and compliance traceability. Chemical manufacturers use customer collaboration and engagement as a sales strategy, experiential marketing and product development. The approach can lead to increased sales, product line extensions or new product introduction and captures key information to ensure your investment in these activities yields the highest return possible. NetSuite CRM software helps streamline the process.
- Customer Communication or Case Management: Communicating with customers in NetSuite CRM is simple - it centralizes key information about your customers and reduces the risk of your customer communications being in a person’s inbox. NetSuite allows your customers to provide feedback and improvement loops to ensure that customer or stakeholder experiences are captured, driving continuous improvement in sales processes, product offerings, and customer service.
- Business System Integration: Integration with your company's key business systems, including enterprise resource planning, inventory management, e-commerce and order entry systems, ensures a single source of truth across your organization, increasing efficiency and optimizing processes. NetSuite’s CRM is fully integrated across its unified platform.
Explore further insights on optimizing sales and efficiency in chemical manufacturing with CRM solutions in this related article.
Pro Tips for NetSuite CRM Setup
When setting up your CRM, Withum leverages the core NetSuite CRM features to align with the unique needs of the chemical manufacturing industry. Many of our customers are either trying to determine or evolve their target market and seek opportunities to extend their products beyond their target market. Others stay firmly on their target market and focus on a lead that fits their target customer profile based on factors like industry, size and specific chemical needs.
We find that the use of a “double funnel” approach allows you to better report on your sales progress and improve your follow-up with potential customers and collaborations. The “double funnel” approach uses NetSuite CRM Opportunities and Projects with a unique configuration to enhance your customers’ experience and engagement, optimize your sales cycle and provide a feedback loop to your product teams for product extensions and development.
To accomplish the “double funnel” approach, you will need to use NetSuite’s Opportunities and Projects as follows:
- Opportunities help track potential sales with your prospects and customers. Sales stages can vary, but typically include Qualification, Needs Analysis, Proposal, Negotiation, Closed Won, Closed Lost and Closed R&D to monitor your sales funnel and act when opportunities get stuck.
- Collaboration can involve activities that boost new product development, introduce your products to a new supplier or customer, or any other tasks requiring your resources, such as investment, time and products. Initially, the aim is to secure customer engagement through collaboration activities and may move to a Proof of Concept (PoC) if successful.
- For successful PoCs, it is good to leverage NetSuite’s project module to enhance collaboration, monitor resources’ time, product usage and investment to facilitate progress tracking and centralized communication. The results of the collaboration may include product sales, new product launches, new distribution channels and more. The subsequent opportunity should capture the intended sales outcome and is linked to the Project record for tracking.
- Some of our customers invest in these PoCs as experiential marketing activities, while others charge for their services within the collaboration. In any case, a Project record can help you track R&D expenditures and SR&ED as necessary.
- Sample management is challenging and mirrors the logistics of commercial products, requiring Labels, Material Safety Data Sheets, Bills of Lading, Packing Lists, Certificates of Analysis, etc. Many chemical manufacturers send samples for free using a "zero-dollar" sales order via their ERP systems. A key factor in the approach is to determine how you want samples to affect your margin analysis (e.g. COGS or Marketing Expense). Based on this decision, we help clients determine the best approach and configure their NetSuite CRM and ERP accordingly.
Takeaways
By leveraging NetSuite CRM, chemical manufacturers can optimize their sales cycles, improve customer engagement and ensure seamless business system integration. With tailored solutions, NetSuite CRM can help you stay ahead in a competitive market while enhancing efficiency and collaboration.
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