Sales and Finance teams are two sides of the same coin — a profitability coin, that is. Both are critical to a company’s ability to succeed, and both need accurate data to work effectively. Yet the standard practice, when a company reaches a certain level of growth, is to have both teams working in their own silos — Sales in a CRM, like Salesforce, and Finance in an ERP like NetSuite.
Having two stand-alone systems obviously makes it difficult for teams to align, and increases the risk of bad or inaccurate data in either platform. But, at the same time, a separation between Sales and Finance is useful for a number of reasons — both teams have their own concerns and priorities, and having them work in the same platform presents its own set of challenges.
The solution? Integrate NetSuite and Salesforce. The AppExchange contains many tools that will help you do this — but you need to do it smartly, and selectively. We’ve partnered with Breadwinner, a Salesforce integration expert, to put together a guide to the key objects in NetSuite that should be integrated into your CRM.
The key to making a NetSuite and Salesforce integration work for your team is to be strategic about what you share. NetSuite has a lot of data in it that isn’t useful for Sales teams; likewise, much of what’s in Salesforce isn’t relevant to Finance.
Sometimes, the challenge in identifying relevant data is one of terminology. As Breadwinner’s Senior Engineer, Brian Newbold, puts it, “How many times have you had inquisitive looks in a cross-department meeting when discussing Accounts and Companies? (hint.. they’re the same thing)”
Other times, the issues are more challenging, and can require manual syncing, or translating between different data models — both things that take time and effort that can easily offset the convenience of integration.
But if you are selective in what you integrate — if you focus exclusively on the NetSuite objects that will be most useful for Sales teams — you can reduce both work and risk associated with integration.
