With the SaaS revolution underway, and several niches bursting into reality as practical and quite powerful. This has led to a number of these industries winding up with a bit of a flagship brand. In the case of CRM, it seems to be Salesforce that dominates the charts relentlessly, and almost always wins versus comparisons with little resistance. But, it has resulted in a bit of a bandwagon effect, and causes good alternatives, like Netsuite CRM, to be overlooked, and that’s just a dang shame.
You see, Netsuite CRM is a very powerful and feature-rich solution. While it doesn’t have the kind of exposed API Salesforce does, or the app exchange, unless you’re working with some weird analytics, you’re not actually that likely to miss these with Netsuite.
Honestly, as pure CRM, this one’s a bit more impressive out of the box than Salesforce. Let’s take a look at a few of the features this thing has, and you’ll see what I mean.
Of course, it’s built with primary applications of CRM in mind, so sales force automation, customer support, marketing automation and quote to order automation are obvious inclusions for something like this.
But, along with this, it also has automation for processing, inventory, fulfillment, renewals, upsells and cross sales as well, meaning it can be a POS system and inventory system as well. If you run retail, and have brick and mortar locations, you can use this same software to handle support, inventory, and product lookup, as well as order in things from other locations, and all number of things.
Of course, it’s completely mobile-compatible, optimized for self-service, and has a lot of customization possibility with web forms, email marketing, dashboards and analytics/reporting.
It’s also set up to embrace the digital commerce of the new millennium, with ecommerce, multi-currency and multi-payment-gateway implementation as well.
So, the big thing with this is that it pretty much can handle all of the business core functions necessary. It does not, however, open up room for apps to be adding a bunch of vaguely related features, which Salesforce does do. But, in the case of Netsuite, it’s not the issue you think it is.
You see, Netsuite offers a bunch of other services like BI, finance, advanced POS and much more. These are the sorts of things that people try to tie into CRM when using Salesforce. But, you can get full fledged services for these with Netsuite, thus tying them all together with your CRM without the need for the middle man, or stripped down features.
So, while I have to say Salesforce is great, that’s not the case for everyone. Some people who like to brand deeply and experiment with atomic service architecture will get a lot out of Salesforce. But, for those who don’t need all of that, or the training instability all that custom stuff brings on, then Netsuite is a perfectly (if not more so) valid choice for your CRM and for other solutions as well.
Salesforce CRM deserves more acknowledgment in CRM discussions and SaaS lists. Perhaps once more people try it, and see what a glorious beast this design really is, they’ll give it its due props.