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Under Pressure: 78 Percent of People Feel More Pressure from their Employer than Family When Making Big Decisions

February 6, 2020 NetSuite

Business executives are more anxious about big decisions at work than critical decisions at home that impact their family, according to a new study conducted by Oracle NetSuite. The new study, Unlocking Growth, which provides insights from more than 1,000 business executives in the UK, France, Germany, UAE, Benelux and the Nordics, found that 94 percent are overwhelmed by data when making decisions. Over a quarter are putting risk mitigation ahead of potential success to avoid impacting their career, and 21 percent rely on gut feel and intuition to make critical decisions.

“There’s a lot of talk about a changing economic, technological and political backdrop, but when you step back, organizations across Europe have an increasing number of growth opportunities if they can focus their time and resources in the right places,” said Nicky Tozer, VP EMEA, Oracle NetSuite. “To achieve that focus, organizations need to address the decision-making and planning challenges identified in this study so they can use data to adapt to change faster than their competition and unlock new growth opportunities.”

A Culture of Decision-Making Pressure

Executives across countries and industries are under immense pressure when making critical business decisions and as a result many are putting risk mitigation ahead of potential success.

Most executives (78 percent) said they experience more pressure when making a big decision at work than in their personal life.
Fears about negatively impacting revenue (40 percent), damaging personal reputation (22 percent), losing their job (17 percent), and adversely impacting co-workers (13 percent) are the top four areas executives are concerned about.
Risk aversion is even higher amongst organizations that define themselves as high-performers – 62 percent admit they actively pursue risk-averse decisions, even in the knowledge their choice may not be as successful.

An Unhealthy Relationship with Data

Information overload, time pressure and a lack of trust in senior management is strangling the decision-making process and leading executives to default to ‘gut feel’ to inform their decision-making strategy.

Almost all (94 percent) executives are overwhelmed by data during the decision-making process. Executives in France (99 percent) reported the biggest issues with data, while executives in the UK (92 percent) reported the least.
Time pressure and more complex processes are also making decision-making harder. 27 percent of executives have had less time to focus on critical decisions in the last year and 28 percent note more people have become involved in the process, an issue that was particularly prevalent in the UAE (51 percent).
Only 19 percent – falling to 12 percent in the Nordics – of business executives noted they trust senior management when seeking decision-making guidance. Colleagues (39 percent) and industry peers (21 percent) were the most trusted.
41 percent of respondents expect to turn to a robot as a source of support when making critical decisions in the next year. Executives in France (51 percent) were the most likely, while executives in the UK (33 percent) were the least.
67 percent acknowledge they are not making highly data-driven decisions, with UK executives (73 percent) the most likely to only partially consider data or default to “gut feel”.

A Positive Outlook for Growth and Message to Senior Management

Executives across countries and industries expect their organizations to grow, but highlighted the need to rethink the planning process to ensure data can be used to adjust business plans and that everyone is working towards a clear plan for success.

56 percent of executives expect their business to grow in the next two years. Executives from the UK were the most positive (63 percent) followed by the United Arab Emirates (57 percent), Germany (56 percent), Nordics (54 percent), Benelux (50 percent) and France (49 percent).
Retail industry executives (33 percent) were the most confident that their organizations will exceed growth targets followed by manufacturing (27 percent), distribution (22 percent), and software and technology (29 percent). Executives in professional services (16 percent) and nonprofit organizations (11 percent) had the least confidence.
Almost three quarters (74 percent) of executives say their organization is good at capitalizing on new opportunities, but there are serious concerns about the planning process. Only 31 percent say they are proficient at adjusting business plans based on data analysis and almost one quarter (24 percent) do not think senior management provides a clear plan for success, dropping to just 16 percent in the Nordics.

Methodology
For this study, NetSuite partnered with Raconteur to survey 1,050 manager level and above employees. Respondents originated from the UK (300 respondents), France (150 respondents), Germany (150 respondents), United Arab Emirates (150 respondents), Benelux (150 respondents) and Nordics (150 respondents) and represented small and mid-sized organisations from across a range of industries. Participants took part in an online questionnaire and were surveyed in October and November 2019.

About Oracle NetSuite
For more than 20 years, Oracle NetSuite has helped organizations grow, scale and adapt to change. NetSuite provides a suite of cloud-based applications, which includes financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR, professional services automation and omnichannel commerce, used by more than 19,000 customers in 203 countries and dependent territories.

For more information, please visit https://www.netsuite.com.

Follow NetSuite’s Cloud blog, Facebook page and @NetSuite Twitter handle for real-time updates.

About Oracle
The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.

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Meena is Google’s attempt at making true conversational AI

January 29, 2020 Big Data

Conversational AI is a catch-all term for natural language models for artificial intelligence that can interpret human words, speak to people, or carry out tasks or computation with natural language.

But talk to any of the best-known AI assistants today — Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant — and they’re not exactly conversational. They can tell you jokes, answer factual questions, and even respond to multiple queries without the need to keep repeating a wake word, but conversation or chit-chat is still very much a human endeavor.

To share progress towards deep learning designed to carry a conversation, Google today introduced Meena, a neural network with 2.6 billion parameters. Meena can handle multiturn dialogue, and Google claims it’s better than other AI agents built for conversation and available online today. It even told an off-the-cuff joke.

Google today also released Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), a metric created by Google researchers to measure the ability of a conversational agent to maintain responses in conversation that make sense and are specific. Humans rank around 86% in SSA, and in initial tests, Meena scores a high of 79%. Mitsuku, an AI agent created by Pandora Bots that’s won the Loebner Prize for the past four years, got a 56%, while Microsoft’s XiaoIce, which speaks Mandarin Chinese, got a score of 31%.

The work is detailed in “Towards a Human-like Open Domain Chatbot,” a paper published Monday on preprint repository arXiv.

Meena is trained on 40 billion words and utilizes a seq2seq model and a variation of the popular Transformer architecture. Google first released Transformer in 2017, but since then the language has grown to rank among the highest performing language models around.

SSA evaluates dialogue based on static performance with a fixed set of prompts or interactive performance, which allows for free-flowing conversation. Each evaluated conversation was required to last at least 14 turns and no more than 28 turns. Results are then arrived at based on the percentage of turns considered specific or sensible. SSA penalizes responses with generic responses.

The SSA standard Google proposes is different than the metric other AI assistants have set for assessing a truly conversational AI.

Now in its third year, the Alexa Prize is a challenge for teams of student developers to create AI that can hold a conversation for up to 20 minutes. The finalist last year got up to about 10 minutes. The latest round of finalists will be announced in May. You can speak with last year’s finalists by simply saying “Alexa, let’s chat.”

Amazon is already beginning to grow its multiturn dialogue offerings. Conversations is a feature that packages voice app recommendations in conversational multiturn dialogue. At the time of launch last summer, Amazon VP of devices David Limp called it “the holy grail of voice science.”

Microsoft acquired the company Semantic Machines in 2018 and last year began to showcase more multiturn dialogue for users of the Microsoft Bot Framework.

AI assistants that can maintain a conversation may be able to secure closer bonds with humans and do things like provide emotional support to people, or cure the loneliness epidemic, as former Alexa Prize head and current Google Research director Ashwin Ram put it in 2017.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Samsung’s VP of research on making Ballie mobile, personable, and nonthreatening

January 26, 2020 Big Data

During a keynote at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, Samsung unveiled Ballie, a small, autonomous rolling sphere with a built-in camera, microphone, and speaker. Details were tough to come by (and still are), but in an interview with VentureBeat, Sajid Sadi, vice president of research at Samsung and the head and cofounder of the Samsung Think Tank Team, shared the vision behind the robot and his hopes for its future.

Think tank

Think Tank Team is the roughly 50-person skunkworks department behind tech underpinning products like Samsung Flow, the Galaxy Gear S2, and Samsung Health. The team is responsible for Project Beyond, a 3D omniview camera in a carryable form factor, and Project Green, an in-house farm-in-miniature that taps fogponics materials developed by NASA. Think Tank Team also developed the Spot, which turns any normal TV (and the space in front of it) into a touch- and gesture-sensitive area. And it commercialized Health+, the family of heart rate and stress-sensing algorithms on every recent Samsung smartphone.

Sadi, who graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and from MIT with a master’s degree and PhD, was also the cofounder and chief architect for education tech startup Tikatok, an acquisition target of Barnes and Noble. He was among the Think Tank Team’s founding members roughly seven years ago, and a lead on Project Small, progenitor to the Galaxy Gear.

Samsung’s VP of research on making Ballie mobile, personable, and nonthreatening

Above: The Ballie concept Samsung demoed during a keynote at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show.

Image Credit: Samsung Ballie

“We have experts in different areas — everything from physics to machine learning, computer vision, mechanical engineering, electronics, software, industrial designers, visual designers, you name it,” said Sadi. “And what this essentially allows us to do is to solve a problem with the optimal solution.”

Design

With Ballie, two issues off the bat were mobility and personability. The robot needed to be able to traverse a range of different floor types, from hardwood to tile, carpet, and concrete. And it couldn’t look intimidating to those who might encounter it, including children and pets.

Think Tank Team considered a cloth design before settling on the current iteration: a two-wheeled scalloped plastic frame that’s about the size and weight of a grapefruit. The thinking was that the plastic would better stand up to wear and tear, as well as to accidental bumps and scratches inflicted by overzealous users.

“If you think about all the robots that we have in the house today — vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers, and whatever else — they basically operate behind the scenes,” said Sadi. “They’re invisible to you until you see them. Ballie is intrinsically different, because it’s … working with you much more directly. It’s more like a human being in that way, and so there’s a need for it to be safe for you mentally, not just physically — you have to relate to it in a positive way.”

To this end, Ballie communicates where it’s “looking” by physically pointing its camera (which is flanked by a flash and a four-LED status indicator) in the direction of an object (or subject). It rolls and pivots on its axis deliberately to avoid startling anyone nearby. And like a well-trained pooch, it follows behind a person upon command, maintaining a close but comfortable following distance.

Sadi notes that Ballie can be told to “go away” if a person within view doesn’t wish to be observed. It also employs AI that works without an internet connection to minimize any unnecessary transfers of data. “We want the software to be secure across the board … [and to guarantee] that data isn’t just being channeled up to some server for things to happen,” said Sadi.

Ease of use

As is true of most devices, Ballie needs to be intuitive to use. That’s why Sadi and team designed it with out-of-the-box functionality that requires little in the way of configuration. AI enables Ballie to serve as a fitness assistant, as well as an interface to various devices — like smart TVs, motorized curtains, and autonomous vacuum cleaners. It can act as a security robot, patrolling rooms at night and when folks are away during the day. And it taps into smart home device platforms, like Samsung’s SmartThings, for enhanced orchestration.

Ballie can also double as a home monitor for children, pets, and elderly users — particularly those with limited mobility. Sadi notes that Ballie’s ability to move around enables it to respond to a person wherever they are. Parents could ask Ballie to check up on kids to make sure they’ve completed their homework, for instance, or monitor the types of television shows and movies they’re watching. As it’s doing all that, it might also watch for health-related emergencies, like falls.

Above: Samsung’s Ballie can offer alerts for senior caregivers.

Image Credit: Samsung

“We’re doing a lot of research to make something that’s approachable, not just to someone who’s very technical, but to my 70-year-old dad,” said Sadi. “We want the motion to be important. [Ballie is] connected to an individual … so that [allows] care scenarios.” He added that the technology is “proactive” in this context — “you don’t have to press a button.”

Developer tools

Sadi cautioned that despite what’s been shown publicly, Ballie is internally considered a concept rather than a product — at least for now. That said, he asserts it will be priced “affordably” if and when it ever comes to market, and that it’ll improve and grow over time through regular software updates. He also expects that many of Ballie’s systems will be exposed to hobbyists who might wish to tinker.

“Not hitting a good price point and, in addition, not hitting the right feature points where people get enough value from the device [is] not having a product-market fit,” said Sadi. “We have to answer the questions: How do we take all of robotics, which has been around for just over century, into account and bring it to the house? How do we introduce people to the idea of robots that track with you? How do we make those robots useful? How do we make it hospitable? How does the robot actually fit into your life?”

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Coat Giveaway Becomes a Powerhouse Nonprofit Making Life Better for Thousands of Economically Disadvantaged Students

January 8, 2020 NetSuite

Posted by Morgan St. Clair, Social Impact Communications Manager

Clearly, Rose Hanley was onto something when, after handing out coats at an inner city elementary school in St. Louis, Mo., in 2001, she decided she’d found her mission.

In fact, she’d found even more than that: She’d discovered the seed for a trailblazing nonprofit, The Little Bit Foundation, that would grow to provide support in the form of everything from clothing and dental hygiene kits to books, STEM curriculum and career discovery for thousands of economically disadvantaged students.

But as the foundation gradually expanded its reach over its first 15 years, complexity caught up with it. With only QuickBooks to run an operation that was supplying students at more than 20 St. Louis schools, things grew chaotic.

Despite having $ 250,000 worth of inventory consisting of 400 different SKUs, the nonprofit had no inventory management capabilities, and orders were being managed by hand. The result was a lot of inaccuracy.

“We’d run out of stuff and for us that’s an issue,” said Tim Hydar, director of distribution. “We don’t want to tell a student we’re going to have a coat and then next week, when we come, we don’t have that coat.”

Add with managing more than 100 volunteers, it was clear the foundation needed a more sophisticated technology platform, one that would allow it to scale the operation by providing abundant access to data and powerful reporting capabilities.

Eventually, The Little Bit Foundation chose to deploy NetSuite after engaging with the Oracle NetSuite Social Impact team. During the fall of 2016, the foundation managed the implementation itself, although it has turned to the Suite Pro Bono and Suite Capacity teams for help solving specific problems.

Opening the Floodgates

The move to NetSuite has opened things up in a big way. In the three years since, the foundation has expanded to 42 schools, now counts 250 weekly volunteers, and is able to seamlessly process 250 orders each day. Hydar believes the nonprofit could handle 1,000 daily orders.

Operationally, the foundation is able to ensure that schools are more prepared than ever by verifying every item on every order, and providing school administrators with lists of what to expect for each student.

To accommodate the scale NetSuite helps make possible, the foundation moved out of the 3,500-square-foot donated space it occupied and into a 33,000-square-foot building it purchased. That has enabled it to expand its inventory to more than $ 1 million worth of goods representing 900 SKUs. And those goods are more varied than ever. The foundation has added a junior category for girls, and begun distributing dental and feminine hygiene kits.

The larger facility has also made it possible to create pick aisles, which has helped shrink order assembly from an average of eight minutes per order to just two minutes. Meanwhile, the foundation received two donated handheld scanners from the Schnuck’s grocery chain, and it’s deploying NetSuite’s Warehouse Management System Lite, which will enable it to take full advantage of those scanners for more efficiency.

The foundation also has been able to easily support two different distribution models. For short-term needs, the foundation establishes a stocked boutique at each of its partner schools, which students can visit if they need clothes that day, whether it’s because their clothes are tattered or they have an accident at school. For meeting longer-term needs, the foundation places orders for new items that are delivered the following week by volunteers.

The foundation’s expanded reporting capabilities are enabling it to provide schools with detailed summaries of its activities. It tracks all programming, distribution of goods, and the growing list of services it delivers, which now includes medical screenings, eye exams, and hygiene instruction. (The foundation even places washers and dryers in each school so that students and parents can do laundry free of charge, using donated detergent, which is also tracked.)

The foundation also has begun establishing mentorship programs, such as the one it’s formed with Riverview Gardens School District in which it tracks each student’s history, year by year, and provides guidance to help high school students transition into the world.

“That is just an example of how a district said, ‘Here’s an issue of ours. Our students aren’t ready. When they graduate, they don’t know what to do next,’” said Hydar. “And so we came up with a program.”

The foundation also uses NetSuite to perform voluntary audits, which it uses to demonstrate its financial and operational health to potential partners and donors.

Diving Deeper

Next summer, the nonprofit plans to revisit its CRM situation. It currently uses an application called DonorPerfect to manage information on donors and donated items, but it’s not integrated with NetSuite. Hydar said the plan may be to engineer a full integration, or simply standardize on NetSuite CRM.

In the meantime, as The Little Bit Foundation expands its NetSuite use, it constantly discovers opportunities to realize additional benefits. And while it managed the initial deployment itself, Hydar said the help the foundation has received from NetSuite and one of its partners Allied Cloud Solutions, has been invaluable as it seeks to add advanced modules and create complex reports.

“We’re able to ask NetSuite Pro Bono team and the Suite Capacity people, ‘Hey, this is a specific donor we need to report for. These are the criteria we need. Can you help us create this?’ And by the end of the Pro Bono project, we have that,” said Hydar.

“Without the partnership that NetSuite has given us, we would not have had all the success we’ve had.”

Posted on Tue, January 7, 2020
by NetSuite filed under

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How NetSuite Is Making Supply Chain Management Seamless, Efficient and Easier Than Ever

October 1, 2019 NetSuite

ns podcast 670x446 supply chain control tower lq 092619 How NetSuite Is Making Supply Chain Management Seamless, Efficient and Easier Than Ever

Posted by Kendall Fisher, Executive Producer and Host of The NetSuite Podcast

Product companies have always focused on excellence in supply chain management. However, with the acceleration of technology over the last several years, there’s an ever-increasing focus on optimizing supply chains. Not to mention, many companies are executing new strategies to keep up or get ahead of competitive forces, requiring enhanced supply chain management.

So, what does this all mean?

Across businesses of all sizes and industries, improved supply chain management means improved production processes, which results in faster, more efficient shipping and delivery of products and therefore happier customers.

In order to optimize the supply chain, companies need to look into the right supply chain management solution that fits their specific needs—needs that will continue to change with the ever-evolving world of technology. Not to mention, a supply chain never stops, and therefore, management solutions need to be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and provide real-time visibility in order to avoid issues or delays.

On this episode of “The NetSuite Podcast,” Vice President of Vertical Product Management, Paul Farrell, discusses how Oracle NetSuite is hyper-focused on addressing these concerns, pouring 3.8 million person-hours of development into the NetSuite solution over the last year and ensuring NetSuite’s 2019.2 release addresses customers’ supply chain needs.

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One of the biggest initiatives within the product is NetSuite’s supply chain control tower functionality, allowing planners to view every element of the supply chain in one place. The solution also uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict supply chain issues and recommend solutions.

NetSuite ensures companies have the most differentiated tools on the marketplace, allowing them to optimize supply chains and compete in a world where time and quality are of the utmost importance.

Learn more about NetSuite’s supply chain management solution by listening in to this podcast episode on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud and YouTube.

And for more about supply chain management, click here.

Posted on Mon, September 30, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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5 Tips for Making the Secret Sauce of a Sales Rockstar

September 15, 2019 CRM News and Info

Too often, sales teams and successful reps are shrouded in an air of mystery. Many can’t tell you exactly how they do what they do. Nowadays, they do it behind a screen, which limits the potential for apprenticeship, immersive learning and modeling. It offers little data beyond outcomes for managers attempting to dissect what’s really working.

So, what is the secret sauce of a sales rockstar? While there isn’t a single end-all-be-all ingredient, I’ve unlocked some tricks of the trade for reps looking to rise to the next level, tips for sales enablement and for trainers to grow their teams, and more.

1. Unearth the Voice of the Customer

Stop resisting and let artificial intelligence fix an age-old problem: the lack of input into a CRM. Your teams need to better understand the voice of the customer and actually apply learnings from prospect-facing calls.

Currently, the only way to do that is through an updated CRM. Teams use it as the proxy to evaluate the health of an opportunity. However, when
fewer than 5 percent of calls make it into that database, how do you know what’s happening between reps and prospects? Where a rep is missing the mark or failing to grasp what customers actually want from you?

Reps are putting in a really loose set of notes to satisfy the requirement of inputting data and not truly representing their conversation or opportunity. That means you don’t have the full story, and if you’re not getting the full picture, you’re guessing.

I don’t care what you use to record your calls — just do it. Once those calls are recorded, make sure you have AI in place to take key moments from conversations and automatically log the info into your preferred CRM. You’ll free up reps’ time to research, train and conduct more prospect-facing conversations. Additionally, you’ll have a true understanding of the deal.

2. Measure It to Improve It, Track It to Disseminate It

Sales teams already deploy monitoring tools like one-to-ones for training, strict requirements for logging info in CRMs (which may fall on deaf ears as we’ve discussed), and taking notes from calls, usually through recording.

Where sales will find real success is in taking the next step: finding a way to capture what’s working during those business conversations, and disseminating that tribal knowledge to the rest of the group.

The best and fastest-growing companies in the world are the ones that identify what top salespeople are doing and share that information across the company. Doing so gives underperformers, laggards and new hires an opportunity to learn best practices.

It’s not about creating a drone or clone. It’s about delivering the knowledge veterans have obtained.

3. Create a Culture of Sharing

Let me tell you a story: In the early days of my previous job, we focused on staffing and getting product to market, but didn’t really focus on the buyer. We had a roundtable in the war room so we could uncover that vital information, which included our head of sales, CEO, VP of product, business development representatives and a few sales reps.

Embarrassing but true, at one point, one of our BDRs said, “We do really well with companies that have two names. Like, the name is two words stitched together.”

Honestly, I lost it because I thought it was silly, but what we soon realized was, he meant we performed well with Software as a Service companies, which at the time often had two names mashed together.

Our ideal customer profile (ICP) bull’s-eye was SaaS, specifically venture-backed SaaS. This guy, six months out of college, identified who we were — and should be — selling to, because he was collecting information and making sense of it.

Why does this matter? It’s indicative of team members having aha moments and real revelations but only sharing the info when a roundtable was called. Likely, this meant that he knew about this for a while and the person sitting next to him had no idea and couldn’t benefit from the knowledge his peer obtained.
Establishing a culture of sharing will raise everyone to the next level.

4. Cultivate a Genuine Desire to Help Your Customers

Remember the guy in my example above? He had a real desire to understand our customers. His genuine, earnest curiosity helped us narrow down on our ICP. I’m not talking about just their pain points, but a whole range of things that made life hard for them.

If you have that genuine desire to help — not to win — you earn the right to sell. A quick way to do this is replacing seller steps with buyer stages. Think Bezos and Amazon leading the charge with customer obsession.

Speak this mantra: If I remove my needs and my company, and the only thing I care about is helping this customer succeed, then I’m behaving in a customer-centric way.

Consider how often you listen for the customer’s pain point and launch into an assault about how you can fix it. Usually, any time sales reps ask a question, it’s to hunt for a customer’s weakness that can be exploited later in a conversation.

Everything a customer reveals, reps write down in order to win a deal later. That is not the right way to approach the conversation. Reps need to develop a genuine desire to make the customer more successful.

Help your customers accomplish their missions, and you inevitably will make more money and win more deals. If you aren’t finding success with this method, then it probably means you have not subscribed to being customer-obsessed.

5. Manage Rookies Leading Rookies

I have another real-life anecdote I want to share: In a previous role, I found myself in a classic venture-backed, hyper-growth scenario that resulted in
rookies managing and leading rookies. You know, when first-time reps come out of college and do BDR for a few months, then they become an account exec and within a year want to move up to midmarket? That’s the situation I’m talking about.

If the top layer of reps become managers, that means about 50 percent of the sales team has one year of experience or less. That’s great for their own growth, but how do they continue to learn or train the new class of reps just hired?

To fight this issue, I decided to implement a platform that recorded calls, automatically input data into our CRM, allowed me to curate playlists of top-performing reps, create personalized training, and learn the voice of the customer by pulling out key moments in conversations. The results?

I shaved a quarter of ramp time. It used to take seven months to get new hires or poor performers to the average productivity of a veteran. I shaved three months of ramp time of 15 people, which equates to 45 months of quota attainment for the company. That’s a 25 percent lift.
The 15 people I promoted (that would normally take seven months to ramp), were ready in four. That means there were three extra months of productivity. Instead of the normal five months of productivity, we got eight months from each person. What’s more, we didn’t have to pay extra or get pipeline for them.

Creating a culture of sharing, becoming customer-obsessed and combating hyper-growth scenarios where rookies are left to lead other rookies to the promised land are just the tip of the iceberg. If you apply the tips above, you’ll see some serious positive impact to your bottom line.

Joe%20Caprio 5 Tips for Making the Secret Sauce of a Sales Rockstar
Joe Caprio is VP of sales at
Chorus.ai.

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CRM Buyer

New Making Tax Digital Initiative in the UK Creates Special Requirements for Charities

September 12, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Morgan St. Clair, Social Impact Communications Manager

New regulations that require charities across the UK to submit their taxes through Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HRMC)-compliant software are set to go into effect 1^st Oct. This new mandate can create challenges for organisations that will need to understand all the complexities and the best ways to digitize taxes.

Oracle NetSuite recently teamed up for an informative webinar with Charity Digital, a charity that provides resources to organizations to help them with their operations. Grant Thornton’s Alex Baulf, International Indirect Tax Director; Kamlesh Rajyagaru, global tax director at Oracle NetSuite; Stefan Perez, Social Impact account Executive; and Chris Hall, marketing manager at Charity Digital were all speakers on the webinar.

The Making Tax Digital (MTD) is a key part of the government’s plans to make it easier for individuals and businesses to get their tax right and keep on top of their affairs. As part of the initiative, businesses, including charities will need to submit an electronic or digital format record keeping to the HRMC. It can be an electronic or digital transfer of data between software programs.

Currently there are over 250 approved compatible software products listed on the HMRC website. Yet, webinar participants warned that organisations should keep in mind that some listed only do VAT submissions and not all of accounting. Additionally, charities should consider their process and prepare for the changes ahead of time, they warned. That includes creating a blueprint of existing systems first, accessing the MTD requirements, analyzing the data, implementing the software and finally, testing systems.

Important Dates to remember to ensure MTD compliance:

1^st April 2019 / 1st Oct. 2019 (if deferred) – Most domestic businesses were mandated to keep records digitally (for VAT purposes only) and submit monthly/quarterly submissions of VAT100 to HMRC via MTD compatible software.
April 2019 / October 2019 (if deferred) – March 2020 / September 2020 (if deferred) – HMRC will not enforce the requirement to have digital links between software programs (i.e. ‘soft landing period’) to make the transition easier. After that, all transfers of data between digital records must be made digitally.
April 2020 – MTD will incorporate other taxes such as corporation tax and other transactional reporting beyond that.

Watch the full webinar:

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NetSuite is designed to help global organizations meet their complex tax compliance and reporting requirements and is compliant with the MTD initiative. It supports more than 100 countries, delivering automatic feature updates in line with changes to local tax requirements, meaning that customers are seamlessly compliant.

To learn more about Oracle NetSuite Social Impact for your organisation click here.

Learn more about the UK’s digital tax initiative for charities in a blog from NetSuite’s Global Tax Director, Kamlesh R, regarding the MTD announcement last spring.

For more information check out Charity Digital’s charity tax resources.

Posted on Wed, September 11, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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Three Critical Mistakes Struggling Brands Are Making

September 12, 2019 BI News and Info

It’s a good time to be a small business owner in the United States. The economy is clicking on all cylinders, tax laws are friendly, and discretionary spending is up.

Thanks to growth in cloud technology and the democratization of the Internet, barriers to entry are comparatively low. This means industries that were once dominated by a few major players can now be infiltrated by smaller companies that have unique value to offer customers.

Despite all the positive trends and signs, however, some brands continue to miss the mark and make one costly mistake after another.

Three mistakes brands make

If your business isn’t experiencing growth in this economy, you’re probably going nuts trying to figure out why this is the case. When you dig and explore the underlying factors, you may find you’re making one of the following common, yet critical, errors.

1. It’s all about me

In previous decades, marketing was heavily brand-centric. Everything centered on the brand and what set it apart from the competition.

Today, this is only a small part of the content in digital marketing. If you make the story too much about yourself, you’re liable to turn people off. What you might need is a customer-centric strategy.

A customer-centric marketing strategy labors to put the customers and their needs first. Instead of touting your brand as the best at X, Y, and Z, you start by acknowledging that your customers have struggles (which you’ll ultimately suggest may be solved by X, Y, and Z).

Today, the most customer-centric companies in the marketplace are focused on such things as:

Performance video: Visual content like performance video is more powerful than ever. Not only can it be engaging from a viewer’s perspective, but it’s easy to track and optimize from the brand side of things.

Social media: Selfish brands view social media as a captive audience they can spray unceasingly with ads and promotional marketing. Customer-centric brands regard it more as a two-way street, where listening is just as important as speaking.

Content marketing: Content is how you cultivate trust. By creating content that provides value to your readers – such as how-to articles and guides – you show them that you understand and you care.

Ditch the me-first mentality and prioritize your clients. Counter-intuitive though it may seem, you’ll end up getting better long-term results.

2. Not actively monitoring your brand

It’s easy to let your own thoughts and opinions about your brand color reality. In other words, you might think one thing is true about your brand, but the majority of the marketplace may feel another way.

If you aren’t actively monitoring your brand image online, you can’t be sure. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to monitor what others are saying about your product or service.

Social listening tools are easily obtainable, and you can track details like brand mentions and backlinks with just a few clicks. Take advantage of this, and use the results to optimize your marketing and branding efforts.

3. Failing to connect with influencers

Influencer marketing is invaluable in today’s social media-focused arena. Unfortunately, many brands don’t bother to leverage social influencers. Of the ones that do connect with social media influencers, only a small percentage of brands employ them with skill.

A common mistake brands make is not being organic enough. They try to demand too much from influencers, which ends up compromising the partnership and creating a whole host of problems.

“One, this makes the [content] less trustworthy, as the tone of voice and personality will disappear from the content,” advertising expert Helene Thorsen writes. “Two, it decreases relevance and the organic reach gained from using influencer platforms. Three, it might result in the influencers not wanting to be part of the campaign.”

The key with influencer partnerships is to step back and rely on the other party to connect with their audience. If you take the time to select the right influencers, you won’t have to worry about your product reaching and appealing to their followers.

Refining your strategy

Let this article serve as a mirror for your current marketing and branding efforts. If you notice something is off, now’s the time to take corrective action.

It’s not enough to recognize you have a problem. In order to nudge your business in the right direction, you have to turn away from your mistakes and toward a better strategy.

Discover how packaged tools and services help your organization with a successful migration to SAP S/4HANA in our Webinar series on the SAP S/4HANA Movement program.

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Making a Square Animation

August 2, 2019 BI News and Info

Can I use mathematica to show an animation of

A 2×2 square
..with its lower left quadrant colored
..then with all of the square colored ?

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The Making of a Pop Star: How Preferred Popcorn Earned Half the US Market

May 22, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Barney Beal, Content Director

Americans eat 13 billion quarts of popped popcorn per year – that’s 42 quarts for every person in the United States, according to the Popcorn Board. It’s a wonderfully wholesome and economic food, the website says, evidenced by the fact that even during the Great Depression, popcorn sales increased, a likely effect of its debut in movie theaters around that time.

Bolstering popcorn’s reputation as a wholesome, economic food is one of the missions of Andrea Plucker, the third generation of her family working in the popcorn business. Plucker grew up next to the Chapman, Neb.-based processing facility that has now become the hub of Preferred Popcorn. More than 20 years ago, community farmers who were expert popcorn growers came together to purchase the plant, looking to bring something different to a saturated popcorn market.

Today, the 100% farmer-owned company provides more than half of the kernels popped at US-based movie theaters.

“We’re first and foremost farmers. We want to make sure we have the very best in seed genetics and the most effective conservation and “green” farming practices,” said Plucker, Preferred Popcorn’s Director of Marketing. “We’re also looking at how we can offer both organic and conventional popcorn, as a very healthy, wholesome, allergen-free, non-GMO and fun snack to more consumers.”

It’s an impressive business journey for a company founded by four farmers in 1997. Facing a crowded US market, Preferred Popcorn started by selling its product overseas in places like Indonesia, moving into North America by way of Mexico, where it quickly garnered a reputation for exceptional service.

In just a decade, it had become a major supplier for 40 different countries, and began to eye strategic acquisitions to gain a stronger foothold in the US market. In 2010, it added an additional processing facility in Indiana, in 2012 bought a Kentucky-based popcorn company, and five years later brought on a Missouri-based business that enabled it to sell organic kernels.

By 2016, the business was selling more than 12 different varietals of seed – all of which met very specific customer requirements in terms of moisture, color, kernel size and more. Inventory spanned 50 farms across seven different states, as well as international growers who produced the product for sale in their home countries. What’s more, the business at that time had more than 400 customers, but maintained early customer service processes that allowed its clients to place very customized orders to meet their unique business goals.

Amidst that landscape, Preferred Popcorn had no ERP system. Excel spreadsheets held all of its inventory information on what was stored in grain bins across seven states – tracking a popcorn seed supply totaling hundreds of millions of pounds. The business couldn’t look to any central location to be more accurate in terms of figuring out purchasing and growing requirements.

Adding another layer of difficulty was the fact that that all inventory must be planned and contracted in bulk prior to the spring planting season. While popcorn is a fairly shelf stable crop, organic popcorn can’t be held for a long period of time, and conventional kernels can’t be held indefinitely. Without visibility into exactly what they had and where, over and under-purchasing inventory was an easy, and costly, mistake to make.

“It was overwhelming to say the least,” said Brenda Budzinski, Preferred Popcorn’s Director of Finance. “I was concerned about that lack of control over the inventory.”

Budzinski, who joined the business in 2016, knew her first order of business would be helping move off QuickBooks and Excel. She helped lead the business through the selection and implementation of NetSuite, which it picked over Infor and Microsoft Dynamics largely because of the unique SuiteSuccess implementation methodology, which included on-site support, plus a fixed rate and timeline that couldn’t be matched by those competitors. With the SuiteSuccess methodology, the business went live with finance, inventory management and CRM functionality in 90 days, launching in August of 2018, a crucial deadline to meet for the upcoming fall harvest.

Preferred Popcorn gained a single view of item, order and customer data to replace QuickBooks and a myriad of Excel spreadsheets, and gained the ability to easily identify buying trends, surpluses and optimize product promotion.

“It’s really helped give (the business) visibility into what they need to be growing and what areas, what locations, need to have a certain variety than another location, and to see what kind of carryover they have,” Budzinski said. “That’s been a big improvement in efficiency and cost savings.”

With streamlined operations and analysis capabilities, Preferred Popcorn now maintains the industry’s highest customer retention rate.

“There were so many points of visibility that were available almost instantly. It really made a huge difference on my team,” Plucker said. “We went from very limited visibility to being able to see which products were shipping and at what price points and to which locations as well as monitoring and comparing customer pull rates. NetSuite allowed us to ask better questions and make more strategic contact when customers weren’t pulling on trend.”

Today, the US market comprises more than half of Preferred Popcorn’s total sales, as it boasts 500 customers across 65 countries. The business has time to devote attention to industry leadership in both agronomy and advancing farming techniques overseas, as well as expanding direct to consumer sales as it aims to convey popcorn’s value as an allergen-free snack.

NetSuite will scale to enable a possible direct to consumer expansion. It also provides the business with access to information and efficiencies that allow it to spend time on its overriding mission of spreading popcorn’s promise. That mission encompasses evangelizing the health benefits for consumers, and the benefits the popcorn economy can bring to places like India, where some 400 farmers, many of them women, plant seeds by hand and grow for the Indian market, or in Mexico, where it works to pay its employees a living wage.

“We are deeply focused on bringing quality and integrity to everything that we do,” Plucker said.

Posted on Tue, May 21, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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