Business Overview:
The client is a mid-sized industrial equipment manufacturer, based in the US. They were serving a global network of B2B distributors, resellers, and direct enterprise buyers. With over two decades of experience, they specialize in producing configurable machinery and precision components used by companies operating in energy, utilities and advanced manufacturing industries.
The client had direct sales with channel partnerships across North America, Europe, and parts of APAC. To support customers, they offer pre-sales consultations, product customization services, and post-sale support via digital portals and on-ground technical reps.
- The regional sales team was managing long-cycle deals, complex quoting, compliance documentation, and custom engineering specs.
- NetSuite ERP was used for order fulfillment and invoicing.
- Salesforce Sales Cloud was being utilized for GTM and sales pipeline management across distributed teams.
Reason For Collaboration:
Despite having Salesforce and NetSuite in place, their sales and finance teams operated through scattered data, which kept creating inconsistencies like order accuracy, delays in invoicing, and a lack of transparency across the customer journey.
Quoting workflows were disconnected from inventory and billing systems. This created constant inefficiencies and frequent manual reconciliations.
They contacted us to streamline these processes as their Salesforce Integration partner. Our experts did a thorough discovery of the root causes that have been disrupting their processes and outlined a real-time, API-led Salesforce Integration Strategy. The client needed to:
- Eliminate repetitive tasks,
- Improve cross-team alignment,
- Ensure financial data integrity at all stages of the sales cycle.
Challenges:
Closed Deals didn’t instantly trigger orders
Whenever a sales rep is marking an Opportunity as “Closed Won” in Salesforce, it isn’t automatically pushed to NetSuite. They had to manually notify Finance through spreadsheets or Slack messages. This created inconsistencies like late order creation, delayed invoicing, challenges in measuring revenue recognition, and created reporting blind spots for managers in preparing quarterly close reports.
Quotes sent with wrong prices or SKUs
With real-time product sync, sales reps frequently quoted unavailable SKUs or outdated prices. Although NetSuite was considered a source of truth for inventory and pricing, its disconnection with Salesforce caused rework in quotes, missed upsell opportunities, and frustration among customers due to inconsistent information.
No Single source of truth for customer data
The sales team was using Salesforce, Finance operated through NetSuite and the Fulfilment team juggled with scattered and outdated data. Each team had partial/limited visibility, with no centralized view of a customer’s credit limit, payment status, open orders, or delivery timelines. This led to slow escalations, reactive services and constant chaos between departments.
No Timely Alert for Credit and Payment Risk
The sales team kept working without timely alerts for financial red flags. Overdue balances, delayed payments, or accounts that exceeded credit terms weren’t flagged during renewals or reorder discussions. This resulted in unaligned actions, revenue delays and reactive problem-solving.
Collection and Renewal Process lacked automation
The finance team had to follow up on overdue invoices manually with minimal workflow support. There were no CRM-based triggers to flag upcoming renewals or unpaid bills. This reactive approach delayed the payment collection process and brought more work for the team, as well as reduced visibility into cash flow risks.
Lack of a Reliable foundation for Predictive forecasting or risk insights
The managers look to move past the reactive report to predictive insights like spotting churn risks or missed revenue targets early. But with Salesforce and NetSuite data living in silos, there was no AI-ready foundation to make it possible. Sales worked with CRM and finance with ERP, leaving no single system with both context and data accuracy to support forecasting or decision-making.
Solutions:
To solve these cross-functional challenges, our Salesforce Integration experts designed a foolproof integration strategy. It included the deployment of a real-time, API-led custom Salesforce integration solution that included connecting Salesforce and NetSuite using Workato. This integration ensured automation, accuracy, and future AI-readiness.
Real-Time Order Creation Triggered from Closed Opportunities
Our Salesforce Integration Architect developed an API-led Salesforce NetSuite Integration using REST APIs and SuiteTalk, orchestrated through Workato. Once an opportunity is marked as “Closed Won” in Salesforce, Flow orchestration triggers a real-time request in NetSuite, automatically creating a sales order with accurate customer, product and pricing details.
Not only did it eliminate the manual notifications loop between teams, but ensured the finance team can proceed with invoicing without delay. As a result, order processing speed got improved, reduced billing lag and accelerated revenue recognition across all product lines.
Real-Time Product & Pricing Sync with NetSuite as Source of Truth
To avoid quoting errors and ensure sales reps always had access to valid SKUs, we scheduled NetSuite to Salesforce syncs using Workato. Product catalog, pricing tiers, and inventory availability were continuously updated in Salesforce via Apex triggers that also flagged any pricing mistakes.
This shortens the revision processes with finance and improves quote accuracy. Sales reps were now quoting quickly while maintaining the trust and transparency with customers, especially in price-sensitive B2B deals.
Unified Customer View Across Sales, Finance, and Fulfillment
We also extended the Salesforce Account object to include real-time financial insights from NetSuite, like outstanding balance, credit limits, overdue invoices, delivery timelines and payment terms. It all got fetched through the REST API and visualized in a custom lightning web component.
This gave Sales, Finance, and Fulfillment a single, unified customer profile. Reps need not wait to request data from other departments, and customer escalations were resolved faster with 360° visibility, improving internal efficiency and client satisfaction.
Embedded Credit Risk Signals within CRM Workflows
We configured Apex logic and formula fields to identify high-risk accounts based on credit breaches, overdue invoices, or frequent payment delays. These risk indicators were visible directly on Opportunities, Account pages, and in pipeline dashboards.
With this visibility, our Salesforce experts enabled their sales team to engage proactively with finance before reorders or renewals, avoiding downstream collection issues. This alignment brings down risky deal situations and makes quarterly forecasts more accurate and action-ready.
Overdue Accounts Are Followed Up Automatically
Our experts also built Flow-based automation in Salesforce to identify overdue payment statuses from NetSuite in real-time. Once triggered, the system initiates a structured follow-up sequence, like sending a reminder email, creating tasks for finance and escalating the account if there is no response within defined SLAs.
This removed the need for manual invoice follow-ups and ensured every overdue account was handled on time. The finance team experienced a significant improvement in collection timelines, and their workload dropped, resulting in increased productivity in teams.
Unified AI-Ready Forecasting Layer
To future-proof their operations, we integrated Salesforce and NetSuite data into a harmonized scheme using AWS RDS and Salesforce Data Cloud. This setup ensured their CRM and ERP datasets were unified, real-time, and queryable, eliminating fragmentation.
With this foundation, leadership teams could now use Einstein 1 Platform’s built-in intelligence to surface early risk indicators, predict churn, and refine forecasting models using real operational signals. No additional BI or generative AI tooling was needed, just clean data, smart queries, and native AI insights built directly into the platform.
Benefits:
- Sales and Finance now operate on a single, synchronized workflow from quote to cash.
- Reps have real-time visibility into inventory, pricing, and customer payment status, all within Salesforce.
- Leadership gained full-funnel transparency across CRM and ERP for smarter forecasting and risk control.
- Automated syncs and trigger-based flows eliminated manual handoffs and delayed follow-ups.
