Learning.com Learns About NetSuite's CRM

On-demand CRM vendor NetSuite, Inc. has announced that “within six months of implementation of NetSuite, Portland, Oregon-based Learning.com has achieved immediate results by accelerating business processes 15 fold and is on track to double its business from the previous year.”

With NetSuite, Learning.com has automated revenue recognition, which eliminated data-entry errors and duplicate spreadsheets, and expedited invoice processing-without adding staff. Previously using Salesforce.com (News - Alert) and QuickBooks, Learning.com standardized its entire front and back office operations on NetSuite for one, integrated software application.

This is in line with NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson’s ideas. As he told this reporter in an interview recently, “We felt that the way SMB companies tried to run their business – attempting to tie together an accounting application from one vendor to a sales application from another vendor to an ecommerce application from another vendor – was broken and would never work.”

Nelson said “it takes large enterprises millions and millions of dollars to achieve integration (with equally poor results I might add) and it’s no easier to tie QuickBooks to Act! than it is to tie SAP (News - Alert) to Siebel. We also felt the way software was traditionally sold by vendors, in effect shipping customers a disc and daring them to install it, was also going to be replaced by a service like Amazon.com where you just log-in and use the application.”

Like many other software companies, Learning.com used multiple applications to run its business -- one for sales, marketing, and customer support; and one for financials. This approach adds additional costs, creates financial errors and results in a poor customer experience, NetSuite officials think, “especially in the complex world of financial compliance, software companies are looking for financial management functionality to manage revenue recognition and usage-based billing, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars when purchased from niche providers.”

As a software company, Learning.com needed a software application to manage its complex revenue recognition process and billing schedules while ensuring compliance. It also required powerful CRM capabilities to ensure proper customer support since quality of service and support are business critical functions for software companies.

"Before NetSuite, when a deal closed, it could take up to a week to process the order, get it into fulfillment, and send it to accounting for invoicing because we were constantly shuffling papers around," said Douglas Stein, VP of Development and Technology at Learning.com. "Also, revenue recognition was a very big issue for us, and we needed to find a better way to do it.”

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

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