In an effort to boost sales, one of our clients likes to send demo orders to their customers and prospects so that they can test out the product. However, their approach to sending demo orders using NetSuite's native functionality was causing problems that were costing them time and money.
Here's how we created a better demo order solution that eliminated the pain points they were experiencing with their existing process in NetSuite.
Why Their Existing Approach to Demo Orders Wasn't Working
Their process was to create an opportunity in NetSuite for any potential sale. If they wanted to send a demo to the customer, they would create a quote and a sales order to send the inventory to the customer. While this native process did work, there were two main issues that their solution was causing:
- Creating a quote or sales order off of an opportunity will update the Status on that record. This causes the opportunity to be removed from their native forecasting pipeline.
- They are unable to tell the difference between sales orders sent as a demo and actual sales orders.
They added a Demo value in the Status field on the opportunity record. With their existing solution, they needed to manually update this field back to Demo whenever they created a quote or sales order. This was a tedious task that was taking their employees away from other higher-value work and so was costing them time and money. They needed a different solution.
Requirements for the New Demo Order Solution
My solution needed to do two things:
- Automatically update the Status on the opportunity record if the demo is still open.
- Distinguish between sales orders that did not have a demo tied to them and sales orders that were won because a demo was sent.
Sales Situations to Account For
When building the solution, there were four different scenarios that we needed to account for.
- No Demo Sent - Not all opportunities will have a demo sent off.
- Sending an actual quote, but the demo is still open - Occasionally, a customer that currently has a demo wants to receive a quote. In this situation, the company still wants this opportunity to appear in its sales pipeline. In this case, the company wants the status of the opportunity to continue automatically.
- Sending an actual quote, but the demo is closed - The customer had a demo and now wants to order more of the product.
- The demo is sent - A sales rep sends a demo product to a customer.
New Solution for Demo Orders in NetSuite
Step 1: We created a custom list and custom field (Demo State) that will show the state of the order in relation to the demo. The values are either:
- Demo
- Demo Open
- Demo Closed
- No Demo
Step 2: To automatically update the Status field on the opportunity record, we created a scheduled NetSuite workflow that runs every 30 minutes.
Condition: If the Demo State field was equal to Demo or Demo Open, then the Status would be updated to “Demo”.
Step 3: We created another workflow that added buttons to the opportunity record to control the Demo State field.
Step 4: The Demo State field also helps differentiate between sales orders that were won because of a demo and orders that did not have a demo applied.
That's it! It is a relatively simple solution that you can replicate in your own NetSuite account if your company is faced with a similar use case. If this solution doesn't quite meet your needs, contact our team for support!
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