San Jose, Calif. – NetSuite users concerned about the accuracy of the information they have on businesses or the reliability of a prospective enterprise or SMB client will love the two add-ons that commercial database firm Dun & Bradstreet released for the platform this week.
D&B Data Management provides users with an easy way to search for customers, prospects, and vendors by combing the 175-year-old company’s verified database of 250 million businesses, eliminating duplicate, inconsistent, and fragmented records along the way, while the DNBi Risk Management app can be used to quickly evaluate a contact’s credit rating.
“We recognized that as NetSuite has built out this incredible platform… their customers are relying on first-party data, which gives them a view of any transactions they’ve had with their suppliers and customers… but without giving them an external view of what might really be going on,” Mike Sabin, Dun & Bradstreet’s executive vice president and general manager of global alliances and partnerships, tells ITBusiness.ca. “And we thought we could really help with that.”
By adding the company’s extensive, rigourously certified data to NetSuite’s cloud-based ERP platform, Sabin says, businesses can have a more concrete idea of exactly how many customers or suppliers they have, identify the relationships between them, or even discover a potential contact among their networks.
“You want to have a 360 view of an entity to understand all of your relationships so that you can take the next best action with them,” he says.
To use the basic data management program, all customers need do is select the “create” option in NetSuite, used by sales representatives to create a new contact, Sabin says. (Click all subsequent images for larger versions.)
Next, rather than fill in each field, users can simply type in the name of the business they’re searching for, followed by the country and state in which it’s located.
In the below example, the user has produced a full profile for San Francisco-based Gorman Manufacturing Company, Inc.
The credit evaluation app works in a similar fashion, except users bring up the menu by clicking the “risk management” tab.
Though Dun & Bradstreet is an American company, headquartered in Short Hills, New Jersey, its extensive – and extensively verified – dataset is global and can be used to research companies across in the world, including in Canada, Sabin says.
“With our app, you can identify and secure that first touchpoint with the customer – anonymously – online,” he says. “You can then nurture and cultivate them until they become an opportunity, and then hopefully a customer that resides in the ERP system.”
Stay tuned to ITBusiness.ca throughout this week for more updates from SuiteWorld 2016.