The salesperson’s job is to sell. That means building relationships, solving problems, and moving opportunities forward. It is not, however, to spend hours on frustrating administrative tasks. Research consistently shows that sales reps spend roughly two-thirds of their time on administrative tasks, with the actual process of selling often relegated to a small fraction of the workday.

This burden of administrative work is the core reason you might be losing deals: Your NetSuite CRM isn’t broken, but your workflow is.

If your sales team has to constantly toggle between their email (where the conversation is happening) and the CRM (where the data must be logged), the CRM stops feeling like a deal-closing weapon and starts feeling like a time-sucking chore. And when logging critical communication feels like a chore, valuable customer context disappears, and deal opportunities slip through the cracks.

The Hidden Cost of the “CRM Chore”

When the process of updating the CRM is slow and cumbersome, reps naturally prioritize the fastest path to closing—which means bypassing the CRM. This creates immediate and costly risks:

• Disappearing Leads and Missed Opportunities: The sales cycle lives in the inbox. When a prospect replies with a critical question, an objection, or a firm commitment, that email is the only real-time record. If the rep doesn’t stop to manually log that interaction, the context is gone. This makes accurate follow-up impossible, leading to missed opportunities that never make it into the pipeline.
• The Productivity Drain: Salespeople can spend hours per week manually transcribing details from emails and calendars into their CRM. That is time that could have been spent engaging prospects, building relationships, and, most importantly, closing deals. The manual effort alone dramatically reduces overall sales capacity.
• Poor Forecasting: If reps only update their opportunities right before the monthly forecasting meeting, the pipeline data will be inaccurate the rest of the time. Management is blind to real-time sales velocity, leading to flawed financial predictions.

The Pitfalls of Siloed Email Conversations

Keeping critical customer communication siloed in individual inboxes actively undermines the strategic value of your NetSuite CRM, turning it into a partial database rather than a complete strategic tool.

The negative consequences of siloed conversations include:

• Failure of the Single Source of Truth (SSOT): NetSuite is designed to be the central repository for all customer data. If the customer’s buying motives, specific needs, and negotiation details live only in Outlook or Gmail, NetSuite is incomplete. It ceases to be a reliable SSOT for the wider organization.
• Customer Frustration and Churn: When a rep is out, sick, or promoted, their inbox becomes a silo. The next team member who picks up the account has to ask the customer to repeat information or forward old emails, instantly damaging trust and frustrating the customer.
• Audit and Compliance Risks: Certain industries require a verifiable, chronological audit trail for all customer communications. Unlogged emails expose the business to significant compliance and legal risk, as there is no proof of communication or agreement tied to the legal transaction.
• Inconsistent Messaging: Without a shared history, marketing might send an introductory email to a customer who is already negotiating a renewal with sales, leading to embarrassing and unprofessional interactions.

The Solution: Seamless NetSuite Email Integration

The only way to ensure deal opportunities don’t slip through the cracks is to eliminate the friction between the inbox and the CRM. The CRM must integrate into the sales rep’s natural workflow, not against it. This is where dedicated email to CRM sync becomes essential, driving high CRM adoption by meeting the user where they work: in email.

ExtendSync: Your Deal-Closing Weapon

CloudExtend’s ExtendSync provides the direct solution, transforming your sales team’s workflow by integrating seamlessly with both Outlook and Gmail and your NetSuite CRM.

ExtendSync turns the administrative chore into an automated action:

• Automatic Conversation Tracking (Autopilot): ExtendSync allows a rep to enable the sync for an entire email thread (including all future replies from all parties) with a single click. The full, chronological communication history is instantly stored in NetSuite without any manual copying. This ensures that every nuance of the deal conversation is logged.
• Inbox-Based Data Management: Reps never have to toggle to NetSuite for routine admin. ExtendSync allows users to create, edit, and delete NetSuite contact records right from their inboxes using information received via email. For example, getting an email about a promotion allows the rep to update the contact record instantly, maintaining data accuracy at the source.
• Complete Context, Zero Silos: Every email synced reinforces NetSuite as the ultimate Single Source of Truth. This holistic view—from the initial marketing inquiry to the final negotiation—is instantly available to every authorized team member.

By automating the logging of critical communication, ExtendSync removes the “admin chore” and equips your sales team with a true deal-closing weapon. It frees them from logging data and gives them back the one resource they need most: time to sell.

Get your CRM back on track with email integration. Try it free for two weeks!