All businesses want to grow. Growth brings new opportunities and generates increased profit that rewards its investors and ensures its financial sustainability.
But any growth brings additional complexity, whether you are a rapidly growing startup or have reached a stable level of maturity.
An ERP system such as NetSuite can provide a solid foundational basis to support your business through its continual growth.
Here are some of the ways that you can grow your business and how the key features and benefits of NetSuite ERP can help you do that.
Increasing Sales
Perhaps the most obvious strategy for growing your business is to get more customers. More sales means more revenue and therefore more profit.
To increase your customer base, you need your product or service to deliver an attractive solution at the right price. And you need to promote and sell it through the right channels so it can be seen by prospective customers.
With all of that in place, you need a system that maintains control of customer information, pricing details, orders, customer service – the entire sales lifecycle.
NetSuite helps manage new customers by providing a centralised platform that integrates and automates various customer-related processes. It helps you to efficiently track customer interactions, streamline your sales and order management processes, enhance customer service and gain insights that help you provide more effective customer relationship management.
Retaining customers is also key to increasing sales. Retention is typically more costly than customer acquisition. By providing great customer service, you can encourage loyalty and can market to existing customers, encouraging upsells and cross-sells. NetSuite helps you to analyse profitability by customer and then put in place direct marketing and promotional tactics that maximise customer lifetime value.
With ecommerce and CRM functionality, your sales workflows are streamlined and customer details can be accessed by all company functions: sales, marketing, accounts, finance, customer service and operations.
And for businesses that create proposals, the NetSuite CPQ (configure, price, quote) solution helps speed up and simplify your sales process, enabling you to close deals faster and more efficiently.
Employing New Sales Models
By developing how and where you sell your products, you can take advantage of new sales opportunities. One way of doing this is to add a subscription model – either for new or existing products and services.
It may attract customers who thought they were unable to afford your product at its one-off transaction price and it encourages continued loyalty. There is a greater certainty about your future as revenues and cash flow are more predictable. Plus, you have ongoing communication with these customers, allowing you to engender even greater loyalty as you build on this customer base.
NetSuite has powerful functionality for accounting for revenue recognition and can combine multiple payment types – whether recurring monthly fees or one-off payments. The system can also support customers upgrading, downgrading, pausing and cancelling subscriptions.
Product and Market Development
In extending your range of products and services, or by entering new markets, you can also achieve growth.
Many companies start out by selling a small range to local markets and will extend their range and reach as they grow. Opportunities for growth, though, are usually matched by increased complexity and need for resources.
Before offering new products, you will want to test and model sales scenarios. NetSuite has financial modelling capabilities that incorporates your data and lets you check your assumptions and forecasts by building complex forecasting models.
It is also simple to add products and new pricing structures. Creating new entities and adding business locations can easily be accomplished too, with NetSuite’s comprehensive support for multiple currencies and languages.
Attracting Investment and Funding
When you have investment in your business, growing and developing your company is easier. You can employ more people, move to a larger warehouse, buy more stock or upgrade your IT.
To help you when looking for additional sources of funding or seeking investment, you will want to build robust projections and models that demonstrate the returns that a venture capitalist or investor might expect.
NetSuite can manage all this, as well as supply the financial reports and due diligence documentation needed to support any deal.
Increasing Your Competitiveness
To grow successfully and consistently, you need to be competitive. This means minimising your costs, improving processes, becoming more efficient and more productive.
But as you grow, you increase the volume of your transactions, the number of customers you have and suppliers and partners you work with. This increased business complexity also needs to be managed to ensure continued competitiveness.
Through automation and streamlining of processes, NetSuite optimises your working practices. Workflows and approvals are faster, ensuring higher rates of productivity and freeing staff to work on the core business.
By unifying cross-business processes and supplying access to a single database, everyone in the company can collaborate better. With no need to rekey information across systems, manual input is minimised and errors are dramatically reduced.
Getting the money in is key to business growth and with accounts payable automation, NetSuite improves the accuracy and speed of processing invoicing.
Ensuring Strong Financial Oversight
Strategically managing and overseeing your company’s financials improves financial stability, enhances decision-making and reduces the risk of financial mismanagement and fraud. With confidence in your financial health, you establish a good foundation on which you can successfully grow.
To achieve this, NetSuite has robust financial management and reporting functionality. This helps you track and manage your financial transactions, budgets and financial statements in real-time.
For better insights into your financial performance, you can generate customisable financial reports, create dashboards and analyse key financial performance metrics. This enables you to make faster, more informed and data-driven decisions which will drive more growth.
A System That Grows with You
As you grow, your business needs change. You add departments and entities, implement extra workflows and processes, introduce products and services, employ new staff and deal with more partners and customers.
To support this, you need a system that can grow with you. It’s no use having a system that will only serve you a few years before it is redundant. You need something that can work for a startup as easily as for a multinational enterprise.
NetSuite is cloud-based and modular. This means that you can easily add licences so that new staff can use it. And as you scale, you can also implement new functionality, adding modules that extend the inherent capabilities of NetSuite. You might want advanced financials, ecommerce, CRM, human resources, supply chain or professional services features. There are also third-party apps that further extend what NetSuite can do, automating specific processes or providing additional abilities.
See What NetSuite Can do for Your Growing Business
NetSuite empowers you to master the essential elements of running and growing a business successfully. Contact us today to speak to one of our certified consultants and see just how NetSuite can accelerate your business growth.
