This HealthTech company faced challenges with an overly customized Salesforce setup and inefficient integration with NetSuite, leading to manual data transfers and revenue tracking issues. Spaulding Ridge streamlined their order-to-cash process by standardizing sales workflows, automating integrations, and improving revenue management. These changes eliminated inefficiencies, enhanced financial accuracy, enabled cross-selling, and ensured seamless revenue recognition, providing a scalable foundation for growth.
About the Organization:
This company provides electronic medical record and practice management software. Their software helps manage practice revenue trends, enhances patient engagement, and increases productivity through its mobile platform.
The company serves more than 16,000 physicians, 5,550 practices, and over 60,000 office staff members across the clinical specialties of dermatology, ophthalmology, orthopedics, plastic surgery, and med spa.
Before:
Manual Data Transfers and Integration Bottlenecks
The HealthTech company’s existing Salesforce CRM implementation made it difficult to track revenue and manage sales. The platform was overly customized, making simple tasks complicated, while also losing core benefits of the platform. Their previous implementation had left them with an even more complicated system. This had resulted in:
- Inefficient Data Management: Subscription data was hard for them to manage, with most of it stored in a separate SQL server instead of being natively integrated into Salesforce or NetSuite. This made handling large volumes of data inefficient and complex.
- Cumbersome Integration with NetSuite: Extracting data for invoicing was time-consuming. Users had to manually extract data from their isolated SQL server and transfer it to NetSuite, increasing their workload and requiring valuable hours from their team.
- Complex Subscription Tracking: They struggled to track billing and revenue recognition because there was no direct, one-to-one link between subscriptions and their corresponding invoices in NetSuite. This resulted in inefficiencies and a higher risk of billing errors.
- Outdated Revenue Management Practices: They faced inefficiencies in revenue recognition for subscription-based services because they relied on Classic Revenue Management in NetSuite instead of Advanced Revenue Management.
Solution:
Automating Integration Between Technologies
To ensure that the sales team could readily access data to make the right calls at crucial stages, Spaulding Ridge implemented a solution that simplified the connection between Salesforce and NetSuite. The approach focused on streamlining processes, keeping the integration simple and ensuring a smooth transition between systems.
We standardized the Sales process within Salesforce by implementing multi-dimensional quoting with advanced approvals. This allowed sales reps to configure the quote according to standardized products and pricing, then request finance and sales leadership approval based on pre-determined approval rules tailored to specific deal types. We configured the system for contracts and subscriptions, allowing the HealthTech company to amend and renew deals. This approach aligned with the expectations of a mature SaaS business model, moving away from a month-to-month or evergreen deal structure.
To simplify subscription billing processes, we developed an automated system to transfer subscription-based products into the SuiteBilling module, eliminating the need for SQL server and manual data transfers. Order-splitting logic was introduced to differentiate between one-time and subscription-based products, ensuring they were processed correctly within NetSuite. We ensured that they transitioned from their previous Classic Revenue Management to Advanced Revenue Management, allowing for better revenue tracking and recognition. We also established automated billing cycles to generate invoices at different intervals, while revenue arrangements and plans were created to maintain accurate financial records.
This end-to-end process enabled seamless revenue recognition journal entries at the end of each month. Additionally, the new system allowed cross-selling between subsidiaries by enabling product additions from multiple subsidiaries onto a single quote, providing greater flexibility and sales opportunities.
After:
Improved Sales and Cross-Selling Opportunities
Our implementation resulted in significant improvements across the sales, finance, and operations teams for the HealthTech giant.
Sales efficiency improved through standardized quoting and approval workflows in Salesforce, reducing manual errors and ensuring regulatory compliance. This enabled them to operate from a standardized product catalog and pricing structure. The new system allowed cross-selling between subsidiaries by enabling product additions from multiple subsidiaries onto a single quote, and it reduced order processing errors by simplifying the Salesforce workflow and eliminating unnecessary customizations. By leveraging contracts and subscriptions, they can better manage SaaS deals and recurring revenue.
The company’s finance operations were also streamlined as manual data transfers were eliminated with the deprecation of SQL server, cutting down inefficiencies and data integrity issues. This saved them a huge amount of time and manual labor. The solution established a single source of truth for subscription-based revenue tracking within NetSuite and reduced revenue leakage by ensuring accurate tracking of billed versus recognized revenue.
Additionally, financial accuracy and reporting were enhanced, providing better visibility for the finance team, and enabled accurate month-end and quarter-end closing. The new system ensured seamless revenue recognition in line with GAAP standards, eliminating discrepancies between billed and recognized revenue, making financial reporting more reliable.
