When trying to find an ERP or CRM solution that works best for you, it’s understandable that you’d want to compare the various software products that are available on the market. For most businesses, this software search eventually boils down to “NetSuite vs. Salesforce.”
This should hardly be surprising, as these are two of the most popular software products available today. But how can you determine which software is the right choice for your business? Here’s a quick look at the strengths of each program.
Criterias we’ve looked at for this comparison:
- Implementation With Your Business Processes
- Customer Relationship Management
- Contact Management
- Financial Management
- Opportunity Management
- Inventory Management
- Real-Time Dashboards
- Supply Chain Management
- Accounting Software
Oracle NetSuite
Oracle NetSuite is often considered to be the “Swiss Army Knife” of ERP software. NetSuite allows you to connect all corporate data by storing various pieces of financial information in the same database. Pretty much every financial data point that your company would need to track is stored in NetSuite, ranging from general ledgers and inventory management to billing and shipping. NetSuite can even integrate with ecommerce platforms, making it perfect for businesses that utilize PayPal, eBay, and other online transaction methods.
Enhanced Collaboration
The greatest advantage of NetSuite is its ability to enhance collaboration between departments for better decision-making. Employees in different departments don’t have to wait for system updates or manually re-enter data for their own needs. Rather, data from different areas–including accounting, sales, and other key areas–is shared in real-time.
With this cross-department integration, your team becomes better equipped to quickly and effectively make smart business decisions, while also reducing productivity loss from data input and correction. As you use NetSuite software to effortlessly share data, you can more effectively place orders with suppliers, respond to customer needs, and fulfill other important work responsibilities.
This integrated approach makes NetSuite especially valuable for mid-size and larger ecommerce businesses and manufacturing facilities where intelligent inventory management plays a key role in customer satisfaction.
Tracking Abilities
With the help of NetSuite software, you can track customer shipments, manage payments, and keep everything running smoothly. Using NetSuite can even help you plan for the future by allowing you to scale your operations for growth and accurately manage your financial situation.
Implementation With Your Business Processes
With the help of NetSuite, you can automate business processes and support or take over manual repetitive tasks or processes. By automating business processes, you can achieve significant efficiency, save your organization time and money, reduce errors, and increase transparency. The NetSuite platform has over 30 different modules and different add-ons. These customizations are designed to meet the unique needs of each business. There is no doubt that the advantage of ERP lies in its module. The modules are extensive and help multinationals integrate data and give organizations greater visibility into reporting and analysis.
Third-Party Integrations:
NetSuite can be Integrated with 3rd party applications to automate processes. NetSuite is flexible and can be applied to a range of business applications. Integrating different systems contributes to increased business advantages. Examples of some third-party integrations are Boomi, Celigo, Salesforce CRM, Mavenlink, Avalara, a tax compliance solution, Expensify to manage expenses, as well as Stripe and Shopify for e-commerce.
Customer Relationship Management
Oracle NetSuite CRM manages interaction between your company, existing customers, new customers, partners, and suppliers in a single place. NetSuite CRM also provides the ability to manage quotes, commissions, sales forecasts, and partner relationships. NetSuite CRM provides a seamless flow of information throughout your customer’s lifecycle, from leads to opportunities, orders, fulfillments, updates, upsells, cross-sells, and support. NetSuite CRM is a one-stop solution for single data source, improved sales performance, effective campaign management, and increased customer satisfaction.
Contact Management
NetSuite can be used as contact management to store or retrieve customer, partner, and supplier information. NetSuite is a cloud-based CRM in which you wouldn’t lose any data regardless of your location or timing. NetSuite is a cloud-based database that is useful for tracking all information and communication activities linked to contacts.
Email Marketing
NetSuite CRM manages, tracks, and analyzes all marketing campaigns, including email marketing, direct mail, and multichannel marketing. NetSuite contains all the information regarding marketing campaigns, leads, and opportunities.
Customer Service
NetSuite is a reliable tool that helps companies provide superb customer service. The sales team and support team can retrieve customer information at any time, from anywhere in order to provide the best customer satisfaction and retention.
Financial Management
NetSuite’s Financial Management solution will help you monitor your daily financial transactions, reduce budgeting and accelerate the financial close. This cloud-based platform provides real-time visibility into the financial performance of businesses, from a consolidated level down to individual transactions. NetSuite financial management can be integrated with other business applications including inventory management, CRM, and e-commerce solutions, and will therefore allow you to run your business with a single solution. NetSuite financial management helps you automate complex financial transactions from bank reconciliations and assets management to receivables, payables, revenue management, and more. NetSuite financial will help you easily generate reports, as well as, produce budgets and forecasts.
Opportunity Management
NetSuite will help you manage your opportunity pipeline. As leads become opportunities, your sales representatives must manage the details of each potential sale while it’s still in the pipeline. NetSuite contains the information you need such as key contacts, a record of previous meetings, and which products/services are most suitable for a given customer. Using this information, sales representatives can determine how likely the deal is to close. Sales representatives can work with opportunities in a list view, or with a detailed opportunity record. The list view allows for flexible filtering, so individual representatives can analyze the opportunities based on their status, and sales managers can view all the deals their team is assembling. The detailed opportunity record contains all the crucial information sales representatives and managers need: status, potential revenue, key contacts, notes, and related documents. When a prospect is ready to purchase, the sales team can convert opportunities into quotes, and later, quotes into sales orders—all with the click of a button.
Inventory Management
NetSuite inventory management capabilities allow companies to manage inventory from one central location. It helps avoid stock-outs by ensuring they always have enough products available for sale. With NetSuite Inventory Management, companies can optimize their inventory by keeping an eye on everything from sales forecasts to order fulfillment times.
Real-Time Dashboards
NetSuite Suite Projects’ Project Reporting and Analytics provide powerful dashboards as well as reporting and analysis tools for managing projects. You’ll be able to monitor, report on and analyze project performance in real-time; zeroing in on key metrics such as resource utilization, profits margins, budget vs. actual, and more.
Supply Chain Management
When it comes to Supply Chain Management, NetSuite holds its place. NetSuite supply chain management solutions enable companies to oversee the flow of goods and services from suppliers through manufacturing and into customers’ hands. NetSuite allows the production to run smoothly by ensuring all materials are available and in the correct location. The software NetSuite proactively communicates with suppliers and ensures accuracy throughout the purchasing process. NetSuite supply chain management is good to record and update production, inventory, and outstanding orders in real-time. NetSuite supply chain management will help you increase profitability by decreasing the cost associated with planning and executing supply chain processes. NetSuite is useful to improve cash flow by understanding when goods and materials are needed to meet customers’ demand, plan production and minimize inventory on hand.
Accounting Software
NetSuite cloud accounting software simplifies the process of entering transactions, managing accounts payable & accounts receivable, collecting taxes & closing books, enabling timely & accurate reporting and better management of financial assets. Real-time access to financial data allows you to quickly drill down to resolve issues and create statements to meet multiple financial compliance regulatory requirements. You can simply call it “Accounting all in one place”.
Salesforce
Salesforce offers a slightly different range of features than NetSuite. These differences make it so that sales-oriented businesses of all sizes can benefit from the software.
Customizable Dashboards
Salesforce’s dashboards are highly customizable, enabling users from many different industries to utilize this software product in a way that will best help their customer support staff.
Data Automation
This CRM software is all about helping you manage customer relationships and eliminating manual processes, so you can grow your business. By automating data entry and analysis in a way that helps better track sales leads and keep customers happy, this customer-oriented approach ensures that companies can build a solid client base.
Integration
Salesforce integrates with many other programs in order to facilitate customer relationship management. Examples of some integrations include Google Cloud, Slack, Mailchimp, Zendesk, Linkedin, and ActiveCampaign. By integrating internal data with these programs, Salesforce allows companies to learn more about their customers and store valuable information in an easily accessible database. Preferences, past communications, purchase history, and complaints can all be stored in the same cloud system.
This can reap tremendous benefits for sales-oriented companies regardless of who is reaching out to your customer–a salesperson, a service representative, or someone else. With Salesforce integration, everyone on a team can access the information they need to understand a customer’s situation and help provide a dependable solution.
This allows companies to quickly resolve complaints, fulfill orders, and manage customer-facing tasks that significantly impact how your target market views your brand. As a result, your entire team will be able to work together to convert leads and keep customers happy.
Better yet, software automation gives employees more energy to focus on important tasks by automating many of their more manual and repetitive responsibilities.
Implementation With Your Business Process
Salesforce is the world’s #1 CRM platform, with several products giving you the power to put your business thoughts into action. The biggest advantage of Salesforce is that it is cloud-based, which means you don’t risk losing data if your system were to crash Salesforce has various platforms like sales cloud, service cloud, marketing cloud, and many more.
Sales cloud will help you improve sales productivity. Service cloud will help representatives provide the best customer service. Community cloud will help you communicate with your customers and partners. Marketing cloud will help you run campaigns.
Also, Salesforce has introduced a new functionality – Einstein cloud, which will help you run your business via artificial intelligence. Using Salesforce will improve your business automatically just with the simple clicks via using process builder, approval processes, flows, validation rules, sharing rules, etc. By using these automated tools you can automate your business and can save a lot of time, money, and energy.
Customer Relationship Management
For any business to grow there is a need to maintain good relationships with existing and potential customers. Long ago businesses were using handwritten notes, spreadsheets, or non-cloud-based systems to track important information about customers, but do you think that was feasible?
Salesforce CRM is a good replacement for the outdated method. It will help you track all the information about your existing and new customers. Salesforce CRM not only helps large companies, but it is very helpful for mid-sized and small businesses to grow. Salesforce is a fully cloud-based CRM where you can easily see all your customers’ information with a few clicks and drill down to their histories or interactions.
Contact Management
Salesforce helps manage contacts, schedule tasks and manage deals more efficiently via contact management software. Salesforce allows businesses to drill down into contacts from customer accounts to see their previous interactions and histories. It will allow to get a complete picture of every contact, how to interact with them, and deals they are involved in. Salesforce contact management software helps you to see their related opportunities, cases, open activities, surveys, and many more.
Financial Management
Salesforce also provides a Salesforce Financial Cloud which could be very beneficial to the industries related to financial transactions for example:- banks, private lenders, insurance companies, wealth management. The Salesforce financial cloud gives you 360-degree visibility into the financial profile of every client. It tracks all the transactions related to the client.
Opportunity Management
Salesforce’s opportunity management allows you to manage your sales deals while staying connected to the customers and information related to the customers. Salesforce’s opportunity management helps track the stage of opportunity from prospect to closed-won or closed-lost. Using the opportunity management, you can keep track of related contacts and accounts. You can also see products related to opportunities and generate quotes from the opportunity with a simple click and send it to your customer in PDF format.
Dashboards and Reports
Nowadays, every size of company needs reporting seeing how well are they performing and where they need to direct their energy. Salesforce is not just a CRM, it can also be used to generate reports and dashboards. This feature of Salesforce provides you with the ability to generate real-time reports and create dashboards for better visibility.
Inventory Management
While Salesforce is primarily a CRM, it also has inventory management capabilities. Salesforce has its own app exchange similar to the Google Play Store from which you can download multiple apps. App exchange allows you to install the FinancialForce package, integrate it with Salesforce and use it for inventory management and track all of your items. FinancialForce keeps track of all the items that are going in and out.
Supply Chain Management
By leveraging the benefits of Salesforce and FinancialForce you can use it as a supply chain management tool that will help you to manage quotes, suppliers, cash, inventory, and other key areas. This helps businesses make smarter inventory decisions and allows managers to develop optimized metrics from historical orders and financial data that improve productivity throughout the supply chain. It also supports customer service by providing real-time access to track customer orders and answer questions on the fly. SCM software is also a communication tool for the entire enterprise. This allows many different departments within your organization to act as one consistent, centralized entity. When departments work together to use the same data on the same platform, efficiency is greatly improved. In addition, this data is automatically consolidated in real-time, allowing companies to make better decisions about their products.
Accounting Software
By using the FinancialForce accounting software on Salesforce you will get all your customer records, sales records, and accounting records on the same platform. You don’t have to integrate Salesforce with 3rd parties, and it will save a lot of time and money. FinancialForce allows you to create invoices from sales orders with just one click. It automatically calculates payments to invoices based on document references and amounts.
Final Verdict
Whether you like the integration and customization capabilities of Salesforce or the versatility of NetSuite, there is a solution out there to fit your needs.
If you’re looking for premier best-of-class software – both are great options. When marketers are searching for new ERP or CRM solutions, Oracle NetSuite and Salesforce come out on top.
NetSuite is one of the top 10 ERP systems in the world. NetSuite mainly offers online ERP solutions to larger clients. They also provide CRM and e-commerce solutions for small and mid-sized businesses. NetSuite is strongly suggested for companies looking for a strong financial core. NetSuite It is a complete ERP solution, which automates front and back-office processes.
Salesforce is the world’s most popular CRM platform. With Salesforce, many extenders and additional functionalities can be added. Salesforce is also an excellent analytics and reporting tool. Companies can also choose to integrate FinancialForce from the app exchange to make Salesforce function as an ERP.
NetSuite and Salesforce have similar financial management features like accounts payable, accounts receivable, General Ledger, multi-currency, and many more.
Overall, both systems are cloud-based and easily accessible from mobile and desktop devices. NetSuite and Salesforce both provide knowledge-based, support and video tutorials, and are ideal both small, mid, and large companies.
At the end of the day – if you can’t decide between the two, both offer superior functionalities that will help take your company to the next level. Our Big Bang Experts can help you choose the best solution for your organization’s needs – do not hesitate to reach out with your questions.
