Celigo named a Visionary in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™

On Demand Webinar

Accelerate and Improve Sales and Finance Efficiency: Salesforce & NetSuite Integration

Salesforce is an invaluable tool that powers countless sales organizations. Many companies today leverage this power to manage their sales pipeline, while using NetSuite for their ERP.  Without integrating these two systems, data silos begin to bog down key processes, resulting in delays, costly errors, and even friction between departments.

Celigo has helped hundreds of companies quickly integrate Salesforce and NetSuite. In this on-demand webinar, we walk you through use cases and best practices for integrating these leading solutions. 

Topics discussed include:

  • Best practices for integrating and automating NetSuite and Salesforce
  • Real-world success stories for accelerating sales & increasing profits
  • Integration requirements by roles: Sales, Finance, Ops/IT
  • Demonstration of Salesforce – NetSuite integration
  • Celigo’s out-of-the box Business Process Automation for Salesforce-NetSuite

Watch now!

Full Webinar Transcript
Excellent. Well, let’s go ahead and get started. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our Accelerate Sales and Improved Finance Efficiency Webinar, where we’re going to give you a look at our Salesforce and NetSuite integration application. I am Mark Simon. I’m the VP of Strategy here at Celigo. I’ve been on the Celigo team for a bit over three years and prior to that I was in mid-market ERP consulting with a primary focus on NetSuite and took part in several hundred NetSuite implementations during my period there, as well as managing an integration and digital transformation team. So I try to bring that experience together when I work with our customers. And I’m also joined today by Chris McCarthy. Chris? Yeah. Thanks, Mark. Hi, everyone. Nice to meet you all. My name is Chris McCarthy. I’m a senior solution consultant here at Celigo based out of Denver, Colorado. A little bit about my background. I’m a former NetSuiter, so I used to work over there on the services team as a consultant for their services organization, as well as a solution principal on the presales team. And I’ve been at Celigo now about two years working closely with a lot of our productized integrations, specifically around Salesforce, banking, and e-commerce integrations. Fantastic. Thank you, Chris. So a little bit of background about us at Celigo to get started and just to set the stage. So at Celigo, we are a funded software startup based in Silicon Valley, California. But we are a substantial presence in the integration platform as a service space, rapidly growing company, and that’s brought us to over 5,000 customers at this point. And we really work with a huge spectrum of the mid-market all the way up into the enterprise, as you can see, some familiar logos here. As a platform, we process now over 10 billion, and that’s a B, 10 billion records per month for our customers in aggregate. Within that, there are 360,000 active users on our platform that are managing, modifying, and building their own integration and automation solutions using our Celigo platform, we have six global offices and expanding that rapidly. Within our space, one thing we’re particularly proud about is our G2 crowd rankings. They have put us in the leader quadrant for iPaaS solutions and ranked us as one of the top 50 cloud IT management solutions. So when it comes to sales and finance automation in furthering your journey towards digital transformation and automation, the first place where almost everyone looks either when they start their integration journey or when they come back and maybe done some things that are put together. They’ve got pain points. It might have worked for a while but the first place when there’s a refocus, both of these always come back to quote cash automation. And it’s really where so much of the focus is, because as a growing organization, that is such a critical part of your business operations– is bringing those quotes and bookings from your CRM into your ERP platform. And while this process of getting the data moved and automated between those systems– it may seem like it’s straightforward. It’s anything but straightforward once you get into just a few of the details and you start looking at what’s going on. Because very quickly you realize it’s not just about your CRM and your ERP, but it’s about all of the other applications that you have both in your constellation of sales applications out there, whether you have additional sales specific tools, whether you have opportunity management, quoting tools, signature tools. And then on the ERP in the finance side, also you have cash management, subscriptions payments, contract management. All of these add up for a much more complex environment. And then as soon as you bounce out a little bit to fill out the rest of the process, you’re quickly realizing there’s a need to integrate marketing automation, product data, customer success platforms, and reporting and analytics. And what started out as maybe what seemed to be very simple process connecting two applications, you realize you have to coordinate data flow and movement between often a dozen or more applications to automate your process. But it all really starts from the same single point, which is your CRM and ERP connectivity. But the key thing to keep in mind here is just having a point-to-point solution or thinking about connecting the CRM and the ERP without consideration of the whole is really a big mistake. We see that with a lot of customers coming in and needing to redo their integration solutions because they’ve outgrown them. They couldn’t keep up. They started to inhibit their growth, and they needed an integration platform to provide that beyond just a point-to-point solution. And you can quickly see how we took that sales and finance integrations. They very rapidly expand out and start to touch the other domains in your organization, whether it’s human resources, customer success, IT management, marketing. And it’s important to look and think about what that overall strategy as an organization when you start to integrate– what’s your broad digital transformation and what platform will best suit you up for success across all these domains. And that’s really key to having efficient automation and building that muscle internally in your organization that’s going to allow you to build and manage your own integrations internally. Get rapid time to value, but also handle the future. And as we all know, business processes and business landscape change very, very quickly now and you need agility and the right platform will help you do that. So we laid out a little bit about where integration goes, but we often get questions from customers about when or is it necessary yet to address integration. And so, this very often comes up. We work with a lot of– anywhere from startup companies to companies that are moving into new sales channels, launching maybe their CRM for the first time, launching a new CRM. And that question is very, very common. Is the integration necessary? When should we do that? And almost universally, the answer is, “You’re best off as an organization making that effort and investment, both in time and also money, into that integration as early as possible, basically creating that foundation of automation earlier on in your maturity as a company.” It’s both easier then, but it also sets you up for continued success and your returns on those integrations. And that automation will only grow as you gain more complexity as a business and then you can iterate over your solution as you grow to keep pace with the changing business environment. But by doing so, by moving forward with the integration, what you’ll be doing is you’ll be enabling different areas of the organization to more effectively grow. And especially when we take a look at the sales side, preventing them from being blocked or hindered. We very often see the sales closing process running into issues because of lack of integration. A lot of manual effort, sometimes going back and forth, misalignment between finance coming back and resulting in sales sometimes needing to be debooked, when simply tighter and better connectivity and integration of the data between the two systems would have prevented a lot of errors. A big thing we see is in the finance side. Finance departments often come to us and say, “Wow, our time to close is much too long every month.” And we’ve identified a major factor is in the error management, error resolution of the sales and booking data coming in. And integration is very often either a lack of integration or poor quality integration is the root cause of problems there. And then finally, operations and IT are always looking to make sure you’ve got security, scalability and a good plan for maintenance in place and manual solutions or cobbled together, sometimes internally– sort of internally-built options that maybe were rapidly put together. Those often really miss the mark from scalability. But also, when you look at modern security standards and maintenance. And that’s one of the things we’re really able to bring with our Salesforce NetSuite integration application. So you need to integrate. It looks like it’s a key blocker, internally, in your organization. You realize it is or you’re seeing it. Maybe it’s not a blocker yet, but you’re recognizing that it’s key for growth and you want to be a leader as an organization in automation and digital transformation. You’re committed to integration. Fantastic. Well, how do you go about it? What are your options out there? One of the first options– and when we think about automation, this is the opposite of this. But the first thing we need to often start is manual data transfer. And we see that very, very commonly in organizations of every size whether you’re in the Fortune 50 down through small startups is manual data transfer. And when we think about automation, that is really what we’re doing is we’re automating what would otherwise be done manually as far as transferring data between your systems. But you’ve made a substantial investment in ERP system, a CRM system, and others, and you will never get the value in return on investment that you’re expecting or need as a company if you stay reliant on that manual data transfer. But it’s where everybody starts. And so quickly you look down and said, “Well, what’s next?” The first option that many come to are called these native or point-to-point integrations. So different solutions may have built-in integrations within them. That’s what we refer to as the native solutions to plug in. And those definitely can and should be part of your integration strategy at some point. And depending on the solution, it may work very well, and this is especially when integrating foundational applications. By foundational, I mean ERP and CRM are two of the key foundational systems in an organization. When you start to look at integrating those, those native solutions often fall short. Bigger areas, they don’t have the flexibility you need. And they’re really built for a one-size-fits-all use case. But when you think about if you selected NetSuite as your ERP and Salesforce as your CRM, you selected two class-leading SaaS applications that fundamentally excel at flexibility as far as being able to be customized to meet your business needs. So why would you choose an integration solution that is kind of a one-size-fits-all? That inhibits your growth and will prevent you from actually leveraging the capabilities in maximizing your return on the foundational apps. And we see that the same with what we call point-to-point solutions. And these are ones that are deployed specifically to address those needs between two applications and third-party. We see that same thing. They’re basically a black box. They might work for a while, but they’re not a long-term integration strategy. And you’ll eventually outgrow them if you are hitting your business goals. So the next thing we see organizations doing is moving to direct API integration. And that’s essentially where you might have an internal team. You might hire a contractor and just build things out in essentially what I call an old-school integration approach. Somebody’s writing code, whether it’s someone in your IT, like I said, between your IT department or a contractor write out code, get the data flowing. And it can be effective. It can get things done but it lacks long-term flexibility and scalability unless you make very, very big investments in a program and building a team around it. A single person or a contractor consultant just really can’t keep pace and have the availability or the scalability or the focus on security that other options can. And that’s where we get to looking at leveraging business process automations, specifically business process automation that sit on top of an integration platform as a service like Celigo. And that really gives you the best of really all these worlds here. By taking this approach, we can give you the speed to deployment and that common starting point for quick time to value that you would get with a point to point or native integration. But then, conversely, you get the flexibility of direct API integration. But you don’t have to build it yourself. You’re not starting from scratch. You have someone else worrying about security, compliance, scalability. All those things are handled for you. And the results is much quicker time to value and higher flexibility with dramatically lower costs, both in the short term and the long term. So I’m sure everyone’s excited to actually see the product here. And we’ll get there very quickly. We’ll get Chris going and actually jumping in and showing you the solution so you can see what our solution looks like for Salesforce to NetSuite business process automation. But before that, let’s just kind of set the stage of what really we’re going to take a look at. And our integration application is basically a consolidation of the best practices that we’ve learned as an organization integrating with over 1000 customers in their Salesforce accounts. And we’ve taken the common patterns that we see for their CRM to ERP and then, specifically within that, how these customers are integrating Salesforce and NetSuite. And we pre-map. So we create a no-code option for you, this pre-built integration application that prewires the records, the Salesforce accounts to the NetSuite customers, opportunities to sales orders, and reconfigures these, both at a record level but also at a field level and then, beyond that, embeds business logic within that to solve the common problems with transformation and mapping that we see. And all of this really combined to provide you a solution has very sophisticated integration capabilities, but something that a business team, not a set of developers, but a business analyst, can work to implement themselves and very, very quickly at that. And on top of that, it’s all built on top of our iPaaS. And with that, I’ll hand it over to Chris. All righty. Thank you, Mark. Let me go ahead and get my screen shared here. Hopefully they were able to view my screen. Now, can everyone see Soligo here? Yeah, Chris, we actually see the slide deck for the webinar. Oh, let’s switch view then. How about that.? Perfect. All right, much better. All right, so let’s Zoom out here a little bit. Okay. So when we log into Soligo on our home dashboard, this is where we can really kind of see, maintain and manage all these different integrations into out of different technologies that we have here. So we have our Salesforce, NetSuite Integration tile. We have our banking integration, HubSpot. You can see there’s quite a lot that we can facilitate and manage through this kind of one single pane of glass. Now, the one thing they all have in common as Mark alluded to, they’re all built and facilitated through the integration platform. So when we come in, and we want to drill into a specific integration, we want to see what’s going on. For example, the Salesforce NetSuite tile here, we can see all the different categories of data that we’re going to be syncing left or right, depending on the direction of the data you want moved. So if I take a look at the account integration flows here, we can see our NetSuite customers and Salesforce accounts things and how that’s going in both directions both to and from Salesforce. We can see any errors, and we’d be able to drill into those if they did come up. We can also see the last time we’ve updated or ran these integration flows. I can pull up my field mapping directly from the screen, and I can also see the schedule that it’s running on. So for a lot of these integrations, we are running this in real-time. So as soon as we create or update a certain record and a system, maybe we’re updating the Salesforce account record with a new phone number, or a new build to a new ship to, we’ll go ahead and push that newly updated information to the corresponding field that we’ve mapped it into. But we also do have some integration flow that would run on a schedule. So, for example, syncing over item-level information and details that would make up things like orders or opportunities or quotes. So we have here this calendar icon. So to go in and facilitate setting up a schedule, it’s really very easy where we’re leveraging a lot of these radio buttons, dropdowns, and pick lists to say when we want to sync data and the certain time. So if we want this to actually be something like once an hour, we can go ahead and select that, and then from there just go in and select our start times optionally and end time and specific days of the week we want it to run. So let’s say we actually want that to run at midnight, and we want it to run every day of the week, all we have to do is go in and select that, save it, and then that flow, that integration will run at that predefined schedule. We don’t need to log into Soligo and facilitate anything or mainly push anything. It will run as we defined it there. We can also, though– you do have the option to run it on-demand. So if, for example, you have this set up to say maybe run once a week, but you wanted to run it on say a Wednesday. You have a new SKU a new product that’s being launched. You want to make sure everything’s up to date in both systems. You can go ahead and run those flows on-demand. So you have ultimate flexibility and on timing over the schedules and when you want that data to ultimately sync. Okay, and the same would apply for some of our financial sync. So a big goal of this integration is to help increase the level of visibility to the sales staff or whoever is really working out of Salesforce. And so what’s happening in the ERP side of things? Oftentimes when you’re having solid systems, it’s a lot of kind of redundant back and forth conversations around updates of a balance on a customer’s account or if an invoice has been paid, those types of things. So to reduce a lot of that, we have these integrations pre-built, ready to go, to sync up, for example, customer financials so we can see days overdue and overdue balance. That kind of high-level information that could answer a lot of questions that people might have that don’t have, maybe. the access into NetSuite, so to take out having to chase someone down and get that information. We can answer that question really very quickly with this kind of integration. Can also facilitate moving transaction-level details such as invoices payments, credits, cash sales, really the whole AR side of a NetSuite household. We can sync down into Salesforce to help, again, drive some reporting, drive some visibility to anyone that doesn’t necessarily have access into NetSuite. But again, if we want, we can run that on a schedule or run it on demand. Maybe it’s month-end close in NetSuite. We want to make sure, as we lock down our periods in our AR, that everything is up to date there. We can go ahead and, again, run that off-cycle if it is something we’re only running maybe once a week or once a day. We just want to make sure it’s all up to date. And that will then get processed and put into our job queue where then we can see it’s in progress, and we can monitor it if we’d like. But ideally, this is something where we don’t want to be in the system watching the spinning wheel all day. So what we will allow you to do is set up as many users as you’d like within the system. There’s no user license component within Celigo, so very different from the seating model you might see with a Salesforce or you might see within a NetSuite. So you can come in here, set up different people with different levels of access, where Manage allows us to actually affect the integration. I can change different things around. I can adjust our field mappings. User module is much more read-only. But anyone that you set up can come in here and essentially establish their own subscription preference here and their own notifications. So if certain people should be notified when specific jobs have errors, then this is all I will see in my inbox. So for example, I only want to see NetSuite-centric, job-error notifications. Again, that’s all I’ll see. Or if a connection to either Salesforce or NetSuite goes down for any reason, we’ll allow you to also be notified of that as well. So at the end of the day, really only need to log into Celigo when you have to and having it act almost like a utility in the back end, right, where the lights are on, the water is running. You only need to log in if you want to adjust something or you want to change something around or troubleshoot any kind of error that might take place. Now, coming back to our flows here, let’s go ahead and pull up one of these flows just to talk to a little bit more of a visual of what a flow kind of is at its core here. So where we have our Flow Builder screen here, this is really the kind of skeleton behind the scenes of all the product types, integration apps and integration templates, where we have to find sources for our data and destinations for that data. And then we’re always going to have some kind of category of data that we’re going to be moving left or right. So from the source side of things, this is where we can define within these real-time things when we want certain things to take place. So if I drill into that here, really, the focus– because a lot of this, again, it’s pre-built, we already know we’re looking at the record type of an account within Salesforce. So the focus tends to be more so around criteria for our sync, so ensuring that we’re only pulling data when we want. So this allows us to leverage any type of standard or custom field on that account record to say, “These things need to be met. These criteria have to be met in order to sync this data.” So maybe I don’t want a certain customer type, but I want to make sure their billing information has been filled out. And so based on that, it will actually build the expression for us. So again, that theme of the drop-downs and the tick lists is something that permeates throughout the entire platform, so you don’t need to be inherently technical. You do not need to be a developer in order to maintain this tool. So once we go ahead and say, “Okay, that’s our criteria. That’s what we want,” then it really kind of defines the source side, when we’re going to pull data out. And the next side is going to be around importing, so how we’re going to map our fields and, once we ultimately do, pull them out, in this case, from Salesforce. So when I pull up my field mapping here, this will circle us back to kind of the pre-built nature of the integration application. And Mark had already touched on this a little bit where we have a lot of the field mapping already defined. And I would say we cover a lot of the kind of tedious field mapping. So things like phone numbers and company names, the things we know that are going to be part of this integration have already been mapped. And here, I’ve only maybe added one or two fields into this mapping, but everything else will come day one for you out of the box with this pre-built integration. And anytime you want to add any other fields, if you’re adding custom fields into Salesforce or into NetSuite, you want to make sure those sync up, all we need to do is say where we want to pull that from in Salesforce. So this is intelligently and dynamically looking into our accounts to pull in all of that detail there. So if we also want to go in and map that to a corresponding field within NetSuite, it’s just that easy to say, “Field A from Salesforce should map to field B on the NetSuite side of things.” Now, we can also give you a more visual experience when it comes to mapping fields instead of kind of scrolling through all those different fields that might come with those records, which for accounts of customers can be quite a lot there. We also give you a NetSuite Assistant. This will actually pull up our preferred forms within NetSuite, and we’d be able to then go in and point and click to establish which fields we want to map in as a part of this thing. So really very easy to map that in there. And again, we’re not going to have to require you to code or anything like that in order to maintain it on an ongoing basis. So again, if you want to have your kind of guru, go to resource. It could be a business process owner or something like that. To be able to maintain it’s, again, really very easy to set them up to that level. I mean all they got to do is find that field on the corresponding side of the integration data that they match to. So again, we’re trying to make that as easy as possible for all of you to go ahead and sync this information, okay? And then we also have a couple of other pieces of information here as far as the different categories of data, again, that we’re going to be syncing between the two systems there. So again, the financials and the product information. What’s really nice about this and I think really speaks to the time to value is when you go and you establish your connections, we’ll also include a managed package install within Salesforce to manage bundle install within NetSuite. And ultimately what that would do for you is create all the necessary pieces of information, like custom fields, for example, to help facilitate the integration and start moving that data between the two. And we’ll also, in the case of Salesforce, include some custom objects to hold some of the data that NetSuite would be producing. So if I just want to hop into Salesforce real quick just to give you a view for what this would look like, sort of a day-to-day user experience, we can come in here. If I scroll down just a little bit, you can see some different fields that get added to our page layouts. So any of these fields really appended with that IO in parentheses, it’s going to be a part of that package install. And so at the end of the day, it just means you don’t have to sit there and configure Salesforce, configure NetSuite to just start pushing information. That’s going to come again as part of that kind of day one installation process. I’d also mentioned some custom objects we’d create. So if I scroll down here just a bit, there’s NetSuite financials record. It’s really like an umbrella record. So we’re capturing all the AR transactions in NetSuite. Cash sales, credits, refunds, deposits, invoices, payments. And you can cherry pick what transactions you want to bring. For example, not everyone uses cash sales. But again, you have total control and autonomy over the level of data that you want to bring back and for which transactions even. And so if we want to join just a step further to a specific record here, we can look at invoice details. You can also lock these records down. I highly recommend that specifically when it comes to financials. But you can lock these fields down. But we can see what’s been paid, what’s still open, anything that’s due. We can also pull back line-level detail of those invoices. This can help drive some really nice reporting for you. We can also bring back files so we can exchange files between the two systems. And in this case, we have the invoice PDF that NetSuite actually sent out to our end customer, brought that into Salesforce. So if someone has an issue with a line of charge of that invoice, we can bring it up, go line by line with them, and then from here determine, “Does this warrant a credit? Does it need a refund? Do we need to issue an RMA? What needs to take place from this point on?” So again, we don’t have to chase anyone down to get this invoice detail, and all the while the customer is going to be sitting on the phone kind of waiting for us. We can pull it up, go line by line with them, and have a much more informed kind of conversation with them, okay? So again this record gets created for you. All the fields are mapped to the corresponding fields within NetSuite. And if you need to add additional ones you can add them just like we had walked through previously through our platform in order to facilitate mapping additional data. So again if we have to sync from NetSuite to Salesforce, we can launch that NetSuite Assistant. Or again, if we want to sync up fields from NetSuite on the Salesforce side of things, our connector is also going to bring in your Salesforce page layouts. So again, giving you the same pages that you’re used to and you’re working with. So it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation when it comes to what fields you need to map and you’re not having to memorize the API name of a field or the field IDs of the field in NetSuite. And again, just being able to point and click to get the field that you need and that are relevant to your integration needs. And with that, Mark, I think I will push it back to you and then we can talk about some other situations we might run into there. Fantastic, Chris. As I was watching that, one of the things that came up for me was just seeing like– well, if I’m in an organization and my salespeople– they don’t have visibility into some of it– especially some of that account-based financial information coming back into Salesforce. And very likely they don’t have direct access to the ERP. I’m curious, it seems like they go from spending a lot of time asking other people in the organization, “Hey, what’s the overdue balance on this account? What’s the status of this? Has this invoice been paid? Has this been shipped?” And what I’m seeing here is really capabilities to reduce a lot of back and forth and bring really that key account-based information for an account executive right into Salesforce. Exactly. And also at the end of the day, help reduce things like license spend. Right. So you’re making sure that only having relevant licenses to systems that they’re working in on a day-to-day basis. They’re not having to jump into and out of different systems to get information. So being able to kind of centralize that data, standardize the way that we’re managing it for you, what people are able to see and interact with, drive reporting from, and have that all kind of pre-built. But still give the flexibility to where it’s not a black box that you’re locked into. Flexibility to change that and build on it and really scale with the solution and grow with it. So at the end of the day, you have something that will be there from garage to IPO. Fantastic. That’s awesome. Now that brings up another question for me, which is what kind of resource is needed to work to implement our platform? Because I didn’t see any code there or anything what I would consider really that technical. Yeah, I would say a lot of times system administrators are the ones driving this. This could be business process owners. We see a lot of finance directors and controllers, especially, that are in the mix and really driving a lot of these projects and implementing them and managing them after they go live. So we have a lot of different implementation options, but a lot of the time, because this is very much a kind of set it and forget it kind of tool and so much of it comes pre-built, it ends up being something that really doesn’t require any, again, deeply technical resources. You don’t need to outsource a third party. You don’t need to increase headcount in order to get up and live on this, and then even be able to maintain it going forward and build on top of it. Excellent. Now, seeing the capabilities of the Salesforce NetSuite integration application, seeing all that that comes pre-built based on our experience with this solution, with these customers doing this activity, that’s awesome to see all, but I also know there’s a lot of different ways that modern CRM to ERP can be integrated. There’s a lot of variations there. And so one that comes up in my mind is how do things change if a customer is using Salesforce CPQ, for example, the configure price quote functionality? Yeah, absolutely. So we work with a lot of our customers that are running Salesforce CPQ. And so our integration app can work just fine with CPQ. And something that we should have as part of a sort of a bolt-on package to our integration app is the ability to sync those CPQ quotes on to NetSuite to generate estimates. So that quote object that comes as part of the CPQ package, that is custom. We have something to help facilitate that. And also what’s nice about CPQ is a lot of the records and the objects that it’s working with are already covered within our standard package, right? It could be pulling in a opportunity information to generate a sales order, or maybe CPQ is generating an order of a contract users created, and then we pick up that order and generate that within that NetSuite pulling over maybe contract IDs and those kinds of things to run reports and group them by those IDs. So we work with CPQ very often and very well. Fantastic. That’s excellent. That really speaks to the flexibility, the combo of the integration application, and the platform there. Another one that comes up I know because so many companies that are automating quote to cash are software or I consider technology companies, and they often have a recurring billing need, and they’re using a more advanced billing solution. So we see that– I know we see SuiteBilling, for example, the SweetBilling module with NetSuite coming up quite a bit. How does that change things there if a customer has that? Yeah. And so, what we- we typically take the kind of hybrid approach, the hybrid model, where we have that prebuilt integration, which accounts for, say, 70% to 80% of all the common use cases, thinking your basic list data elements like your accounts and customers’ contacts, products, and items, those kinds of things. And then that’s really where the benefit of having this all facilitated through a single platform comes into play because oftentimes there’s different records and objects that we’re going to have to use and that are required in order to facilitate creating subscription records, for example, within that suite. And so that’s where we can start using the platform to expand upon what that prebuilt integration app will give us day one. So a lot of times with SweetBilling, we’re going to have different flows that will take an opportunity, for example. Once that opportunity gets marked close one, we want to pull that into NetSuite, we want to generate the customer. If they don’t exist, we want to generate the billing account, we need to generate the subscription and ultimately a sales order. And that’s all facilitated through one platform, one flow, everything that’s needed, and all the data that’s in both systems to create that. So again, that’s really where the power of the platform really comes into play for any of those kinds of situations where there’s additional add-ons that you might have to– Salesforce, maybe it’s a different exchange app or different module instead of NetSuite where once we get access to it, we’re interacting with all of those records that are exposed to the API. So any kind of custom record that even maybe you’re creating in-house, we can work with. Fantastic. So what I’m hearing there, because if you’ve got– not a problem if you’re using a billing solution, NetSuite’s SuiteBilling module, but in particular, you go a little bit deeper if, say, you’re taking those NetSuite subscription records, and you want to expose those in Salesforce to your account executives, your sales team, you can do that. You could build a subscription record within Salesforce and then use our platform to synchronize those alongside what the integration application is doing. Yup. And in the case of Sweet-Billing, we actually have an unmanaged package that you can install in the Salesforce that would create the subscriptions for you, the records subscription line, so you can even see which lines of the subscription have been marked active versus not. And in the case of Sweet-Billing, it’s pretty common to see other systems that are in play, especially with consumption-based billing models, for example, usage-based billing. We see a lot of different systems that are in play there that help drive the rating runs inside of NetSuite that generate the invoices. So a lot of times, we’re even facilitating bringing that usage data into NetSuite, which drives the subscriptions, that drives the invoices. And then Salesforce is kind of the end-all recipient of all the things that Celigo is kind of moving back and forth between all those systems. Perfect. So if you’re a SaaS application, for example, and you’ve got a product back end in a database, let’s say MongoDB like we use, for example, you can then leverage the Celigo iPaaS to bring in that usage data from your product platform, whatever that may be, whatever custom solution you have, feed that into NetSuite, and then that would, in turn, get consumed by the Sweet-Billing module cycle back. You can bring as much of that upstream as you need to Salesforce as well. Correct. Yeah, we work with a lot of companies that have, for example, license-based billing. So based on different users being activated, deactivated, those numbers are all getting kind of aggregated within take, for example, a database. And so we’re pulling that data out of, say, a usage table that’s in and running within that database and pushing that down to update those specific lines of the subscription that drive the usage component of that invoicing cycle. Excellent. Excellent. Well, one final question here, Chris. Does any of this change if you use a third-party billing solution, maybe Zone Advanced Billing as an example? Yeah. So Zone Advanced Billing is pretty similar in terms of how we would build the solution around having– we’d have that pre-built integration, again, to handle the usual suspects. And then we also have integration templates which are very similar to integration apps in terms of how they give you a head start. We have predefined flows, exports, imports, field mapping to generate necessary records. And so we already have something that’s built to pull in opportunity and order data out of Salesforce to generate the subscriptions for Zone Advanced Billing. So that would be a great use case and a good example of having different custom records get created as a part of a bundle install within NetSuite and then having Celigo be able to work with those once we get everything connected to the platform. Perfect. That’s really informative, Chris. And this brings us kind of full circle back to this slide here. And the key thing here is when we think about our solution, our Salesforce and NetSuite integration application– so we have that pre-build that Chris just showed us. So you can get that incredible time to value. You don’t need a developer to get this up and running. You don’t need a developer to manage it. You can use a tech-savvy business analyst in-house to own and manage that integration, and you can start there. That may be where your needs begin, and that’s where you’re at right now from a need standpoint. But the point is here, as you move on, as you grow as a business, if you don’t have a recurring billing solution right now, but you know your business model is headed in that direction, or maybe you’re still in early stages and you’re tracking that fairly manually, but as you grow and you implement those solutions across this perspective spectrum from maybe a Zuora down all the way through SuiteBilling, Zone Advanced Billing, any of those options, we can accommodate through the capabilities of our platforms, and in a lot of cases, the pre-built solutions that we bring as well on top of this integration application. And I think that’s– as you think about it, as you’re building your company and defining your automation roadmap, you don’t need to know exactly where you’re going because no one’s crystal ball is perfect. But we all know that change, growth, and that you’re going to be adding new systems and looking at what’s going to set you up best, for now, get you the best time to value, and get you the best flexibility in the future. And that’s really exactly what we’ve tried to do with the Celigo platform is provide both those options in one, and really the only iPaaS that does that is bring both of those options to the market. So we think about bringing these prebuilt solutions for you like Salesforce NetSuite on top of our core integration platform, so we can really handle all of these needs in the future and anything else that may come up like that product usage data. You may need that or something else that we haven’t even discussed here. We can connect anything to anything as part of your broader quote-to-cash automation solution. So I covered a lot there as far as the product, what we can do, how it ties together. But how success, who’s done this? And we want to share a couple of customer success stories with you. One fantastic one is ZoomInfo. I think a lot of people out there have heard about this success story over the last couple of years ago. ZoomInfo brings some fantastic customer enrichment data to the sales space. And so many companies leverage this data now as a critical part of their sales process, and ZoomInfo was seeing some tremendous growth and they were on their way to IPO and seeing this tremendous growth and they were looking at having to hire multiple people. I think it was over six contractors in their order processing team in order to handle the anticipated growth. And instead of moving forward with more manual processes, they took a step back, “Hey, we’ve got an automation need here. What can we do? What’s a better way to do this?” And they leveraged our Salesforce NetSuite integration application for their needs, got this up and running very quickly with an internal resource that is not a developer. The director of financial systems, Dave Woody was able to handle this himself, get the solution successfully launched, and they saw over $200,000 per year in cost savings with just this one solution with us as a starting point. And we’ve seen that story repeated multiple times. It’s a great example of what you can accomplish with automation and especially when you’re ahead of the curve. Thinking about it before, as you’re expanding, and the earlier the better. Another example ample here is CommsChoice which leveraged our solution as well to connect their Salesforce CRM to nets NetSuite and again, they had a data gap in sales orders. They weren’t flowing between these applications, and that was inhibiting their growth as a cloud communications provider. And by setting up the integration application, they were able to get the synchronization of both sales orders, contact information, and supporting files between Salesforce and NetSuite. And that gave them the solution they need to reduce a lot of time-consuming effort and prevented a need for much more costly and complex integrations that they initially looked at for building from scratch on Legacy iPaaS platforms that would have been much, much more expensive both to build and maintain. So just quickly, in summary here before we go, I hope we’ve given everybody here that attended a glimpse of some of the capabilities with our Salesforce NetSuite integration application, how to solve that acute problem. But would love to make sure that everyone also leaves this session with an understanding that it isn’t just that if you just solve that problem, you’re not doing everything you can for your own organization. There’s a demand and need for broader integration and broader automation. And think very hard about what your needs will be in the future and look at where you’re going as a company, and make sure you account for the flexibility that’s needed and platform capabilities. How can you choose something now like Senkos iPaaS in combination with the Salesforce NetSuite integration application to meet those needs, but also lay out the growth path for the future for you so you have that foundation when a need comes up? You have the tool right here. Rapidly deploy it and solve your problem, and keep your business moving forward. And with that, I want to open it up to questions. I know a couple came in earlier, so hopefully, we can get a few in here before we wrap up. Let me take a look. So I see some questions here I can help answer so one from Vince. Are we able to map to custom objects in Salesforce? The answer to that is yes, absolutely. So we work with and play with custom objects all day long inside of Salesforce. It’s one of those systems that tends to be kind of like the wild, wild west in terms of what you’re able to do. So we can definitely help moving data into or out of those custom objects you’ve set up in Salesforce. Yeah, we could also handle custom objects on the NetSuite side as well so both sides of the integration. Absolutely. I see another question here. Sorry, go ahead, Mark. I see one more ques–I see someone ask. A Salesforce account team has offered to integrate our Salesforce instance with NetSuite through them. What are the benefits if I refuse that and it’s just integration through your Salesforce? There’s varying approaches to integration. One of the things is that as a team and our solution, we are experts and we have a class-leading integration solution on both Salesforce and NetSuite. So we’re experts at both of those. And the tools that the Salesforce team leverage are a different set and they’re optimized for Salesforce but they their expertise is not within NetSuite. So we have the most advanced connector application into NetSuite, and we also integrate with more NetSuite customers than any other provider in the NetSuite ecosystem. And the combination of those capabilities, plus being a true iPaaS and being able to solve really any integration problem that may come up, that’s really the additional value we can provide. Let’s see here. Oh, there’s a question. When we buy Celigo integration, do we get the Celigo team for implementation, or do we use third-party integrator for data mapping and integration? All of the above are possibilities. So we have a full suite of professional services offerings that can be tailored for– that can meet your needs. So we have everything from essentially self-driven implementation, so that you can, through some online learning and walkthroughs on the platforms backed up by office hour support staff so you can actually implement the integration application yourself. You can go for a more engaged model with our team or leverage one of our partners out there. We’ve got currently about 100 strategic partners that are certified on our platform, as well as an even broader set of referral partners, some of which are certified as well. And so through that network, combined with our own solution, we can work with you to identify the best path to success to meet your capabilities and needs in the future. I think we’ve got time for maybe one more question. Okay, something about beyond data-loading transactions, do you require a solution like Celigo if you’re only doing uploads on a weekly basis? And that’s a really good question to ask. And it speaks to when do you start integration work. And I think a key thing is if you’re only synchronizing data on a weekly basis, that means you probably don’t have a lot of volume right now. But I’m sure you’re planning for that volume to grow. You’re going to be growing your business. And so very likely, you might be doing it on a weekly basis, but there’s actually a drag on the business because that data isn’t synchronized more frequently. And so likely right now, there would be tangible benefits to synchronizing that data daily or in real-time. And certainly, as you grow, you’re going to run into some limitations there. So you’re far better off to be slightly in front of that demand. And your business is going to benefit from the efficiencies you see by leading out from an automation perspective. So I’d take a close look at that and just make sure there’ll be a right time before it becomes an acute problem when it’s on the horizon and you’ll get benefits. But it isn’t a blocking issue for the business quite yet. And so take a look, analyze, and make your choice on when that best time is to move. But sooner is almost always better than later. And with that, I think we will– oh, I think we have one more question come in at the end here. One or two. Do we have to reserve one license for Celigo in NetSuite and Salesforce? No, you don’t have to reserve a user license. You can create an integration token within the platform that won’t consume a user license but our integrations do consume concurrency. So if you have other integrations or other third-party apps, you have to make sure you’re thinking about and you have a good strategy for managing concurrency and integration throughput in and out of NetSuite. That’s pretty much all the time we have. So very much appreciate everyone for attending. Thank you very much. And I hope you found it useful. Please reach out for any of your automation integration needs. Thank you everyone.

About The Speaker

Mark Simon

VP Strategy
Celigo

Mark comes to Celigo having spent the last 21 years in technology. He started his career as a software developer in 1997, building e-commerce applications and custom integrations for several years. He then co-founded and led technology and operations as CTO for Evo, a successful e-commerce company that grew from $0 to $13M in revenue in three years. He then moved on to start a career in consulting with Explore Consulting, an award-winning Solution Provider and VAR. Mark has worked with clients across several industries including multiple software clients and publicly traded companies pre and post IPO. His efforts for software clients included designing and developing automated processes for sales order processing, subscription management, and provisioning among others.

Chris McCarthy

Sr. Solution Consultant
Celigo

Client-focused Senior Solution Consultant with extensive experience advising a wide-variety of customers and industries with leading practices to help maximize their investment in their ERP/CRM/E-commerce systems, adopt new business processes, and relieve pain points in order to build a foundation to facilitate growth and scalability.

Subject Matter Expert with both functional and technical acumen of complex, cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management systems.

Proven ability to understand complex business problems and assess technical challenges to transform innovative ideas into feasible, scalable solutions across multiple platforms.

Meet Celigo

Celigo automates your quote-to-cash process with an easy & reusable integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), trusted by thousands of eCommerce and SaaS companies worldwide.

Use it now and later to expedite integration work without adding more data silos, specialized technical skillsets or one-off projects.

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