Features Comparison

Accounts, Contacts and Lead Management

NetSuite CRM offers quick and real-time access to actionable data about future customers and opportunities. It also allows efficient opportunities management based on status, revenue, notes and relevant documents.

With Salesforce Sales Cloud, you get a 360-degree view of customers and their activity history including key contacts, customer communications and internal account discussions. It also provides actionable insights from popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Winner: Salesforce Sales Cloud gains the edge with its social media insights.

Team Collaboration

While NetSuite CRM lacks collaboration capabilities like social feeds and @mentions, Salesforce Sales Cloud excels in this area. It provides a social feed with @mentions, and mobile accessibility, keeping teams updated on critical projects, topics, and interactions. It also uses recommendations to connect people, files, and data based on activities and interests.

Winner: Salesforce Sales Cloud’s accessibility and social feed make it a clear winner.

Artificial Intelligence

Currently, NetSuite CRM lacks AI capabilities but has development plans. In contrast, Salesforce Sales Cloud employs AI effectively through Einstein, its AI-supported CRM assistant. Einstein offers automation, sales insights, voice assistance, and predictive recommendations.

Winner: Salesforce’s AI, Einstein, gives it a significant advantage.

Quotes, Orders and Invoices

NetSuite CRM converts quotes to approved sales orders with integrated quote-to-order, cash and fulfillment features. It streamlines sales processes and provides recommendations using buying patterns. Automated tax and shipping-rate calculations, pricing, and discounting rules are available. Users can also employ online approvals and automated workflows to facilitate order management activities.

Sales Cloud provides built-in quoting features to auto-populate quotes with relevant customer data and generate PDFs from approved templates. However, you’ll need billing and CPQ add-ons for complete quote-to-cash functionality.

Winner: NetSuite CRM’s out-of-the-box features for quote-to-cash processes give it the upper hand.

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Sales Performance Management

With NetSuite CRM, users can rely on probability-based forecasting to anticipate prospective orders and opportunities. It supports calculation of projected amount, close probability and weighted amount for an accurate forecast, along with the ability to generate multiple forecasts.

Sales Cloud tracks sales representatives’ performance with real-time leaderboards for smarter decision-making and real-time views of a team’s forecast. Einstein AI also offers predictive and collaborative forecasting.

Winner: Salesforce Sales Cloud takes first spot with AI-driven predictive forecasting.

Email Integration

NetSuite CRM relies on third-party integrations for Outlook and Gmail functionality, whereas Salesforce Sales Cloud seamlessly integrates with Gmail and Outlook. It offers Salesforce Inbox for task streamlining and pipeline updates with built-in AI capabilities.

Winner: Salesforce Sales Cloud’s built-in email integration secures the victory.

Mobile Access

NetSuite CRM offers customizable mobile apps for Android and iOS to enable users to access business information on the fly. Manage leads, generate quotes and orders and check forecasts remotely. Additionally, the SuitePhone browser is accessible with any Android, iPhone or Windows device, sans app.

Sales representatives can use Salesforce native mobile apps for Android and iOS to manage their day, handle sales, access dashboards and files, join conference calls, add meeting notes and collaborate with team members. Custom-branded mobile apps from mySalesforce help access CRM data, track accounts and manage deals in real time.

Winner: NetSuite CRM wins with its appless SuitePhone browser access on mobile devices.

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Partner Management

Control partner-focused sales and marketing processes using NetSuite CRM, including joint marketing campaigns, lead management, and sales forecasting. It also delivers real-time information and helps you support partner marketing initiatives using campaign tracking. Partners can register, track leads, and measure acquisition and conversion rates.

On the Sales Cloud side, you can customize channel programs, co-create account plans and track KPIs. You can initiate predetermined actions based on real-time events like logins, training progress and more. It also helps create personalized cross-channel experiences for the partner lifecycle.

Winner: NetSuite CRM offers more off-the-shelf features for partner management.

Process Automation

NetSuite users can customize and automate business processes with specific triggers using graphical point-and-click tools from Suiteflow. Create automated processes for lead nurturing, collections management, sales discounting approvals and purchase order approvals.

Salesforce’s Lightning Process Builder enables users to create multiple processes and view a graphical representation. Set up validation rules to ensure data quality and use predefined workflow rules to automate internal processes, like following up before contract expiration and reporting unassigned leads.

Winner: It’s a tie between NetSuite CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud in process automation.

Document Management

NetSuite CRM offers a separate system for document management to organize and publish content that service reps and customers can easily find and use.

Sales Cloud’s in-built document management system enables sales and marketing teams to collaborate and manage presentations, contracts and proposals. It provides thorough control and access to documents through a library, with real-time alerts for content updates across libraries. Drag-and-drop functionality lets you move multiple files at a time.

Winner: Salesforce Sales Cloud wins with its integrated document management system.

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Integrations

NetSuite integrates with on-premise applications and third-party cloud environments using SuiteCloud technology. Users can create lightweight custom mobile applications and build website-to-NetSuite integrations.

Salesforce enables cloud-based integration with ERP software, e-commerce platforms, ITSM, accounting software, social media, document managers and content management systems to facilitate mutual data exchange and an aligned workflow between integrated systems.

Winner: Salesforce Sales Cloud’s flexible integration capabilities give it the edge.

Marketing Automation

Create, track and analyze marketing campaigns for direct mail, events or multichannel campaigns with NetSuite CRM. Speed up content creation and personalize marketing with segmentation. It supports large-scale email campaigns alongside email personalization and includes database management and SPAM-compliant auto-unsubscribe.

Sales Cloud doesn’t have native marketing automation capabilities. However, the Sales Engage add-on offers personalized messaging to customers using the Salesforce mobile app or desktop client. An interactive graphical dashboard enables campaign performance tracking. Other features include a library of marketing-approved campaign templates, along with a detailed history of and real-time alerts about prospects.

Winner: With built-in marketing automation capabilities, NetSuite CRM claims the victory.

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Dashboards and Reporting

Real-time dashboards and customizable, role-based reports in NetSuite CRM help track achieved versus quota, actual versus forecasted sales and sales pipeline data. Measure sales performance using KPIs and monitor customer service metrics. It also provides analysis of lead-to-close metrics, the number of unique visitors to your website and customer acquisition rates for better insights.

With Sales Cloud, you can build custom reports and dashboards using drag-and-drop fields, filters, groupings and charts. Use your custom reports to assess and measure metrics for team performance, email data, opportunity management, tasks and collaboration details.

Winner: NetSuite CRM takes the gold with more focused marketing and customer service reporting.

Landing Pages and Web Forms

NetSuite CRM helps you create landing pages from reusable templates with a drag-and-drop interface to automate lead capture from websites, search engines and more. The webform submission functionality generates leads in real-time and delivers each lead to the correct sales rep.

Marketing automation features like landing pages and web forms aren’t available in Sales Cloud. These capabilities are offered separately with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Winner: NetSuite CRM wins with its built-in landing pages and web forms.

Charts and Visualizations

NetSuite CRM integrates with Analytics dashboards, using SuiteApp for charting capabilities. Salesforce Sales Cloud provides built-in charting and visualization features. Users can identify trends with custom reports using treemaps and bar, line, scatter, pie and matrix charts.

Winner: Salesforce Sales Cloud excels with its in-built charting capabilities.

Pricing and Other Considerations

Unlike economic theories, you can’t make software decisions with the assumption of all things being equal. We’ll break down the difference in pricing and other pointers to remember before you pick your winner:

Pricing: Sales Cloud has a four-tier subscription-based pricing model. Users can purchase the Essentials tier at $25 per user per month, Professional at $75, Enterprise at $150 and Unlimited at $300. All options require a commitment of one year, except the Essential tier, which provides monthly billing. NetSuite provides custom pricing on request. Both products offer a free trial.

Customization: Sales Cloud may be a better bet if you’re looking for a highly customized solution. Use point-and-click configuration or coding to create custom objects, fields, tabs and templates. Alternatively, NetSuite offers fewer off-the-shelf packages for customization.

Customer Support: All NetSuite’s pricing models have basic support, which includes online case submissions, 24/7 critical concerns and a user community with premium support available for additional needs. Sales Cloud provides 24/7 support for premium support plans with self-support from the Trailblazer community.

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Next Steps

After drilling down feature and module comparisons for Salesforce vs. NetSuite, Salesforce Sales Cloud comes out trumps. However, software selection is never quite so straightforward. It’s crucial to match your unique requirements with the features each solution offers.

Still not 100% sure about either product? Check out our free comparison report for a side-by-side analysis of NetSuite vs. Salesforce plus a third (or fourth, or fifth) option. Happy shopping!

What are the deciding factors for your business when choosing Salesforce vs. NetSuite? Let us know in the comment section below.

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