Custom tags are the most overlooked feature on SuiteSqr

I set "Claude Configuration" as a custom tag on New Day's SuiteSqr profile for a few reasons. We use it every day. We are confident in our ability to integrate it into our clients' workflows. It is changing the NetSuite landscape, and I want to be at the forefront of that change.

Then, mostly out of curiosity, I searched "Claude" on the platform. One result came back. New Day.

I would like to think I am not the only NetSuite consultant or firm building with and using AI. I would even guess that 99% of the people reading this used AI at some point this week, whether for scripts, for documentation, or just for thinking through something conceptually. But right now I am the only one who put it somewhere a customer could find it.

The gap between what you can do and what a customer can find

That gap is familiar to me, and it is close to the reason SuiteSqr exists in the first place.

This ecosystem has always known who is good at what. That knowledge has always lived in private conversations, text threads, and calls between consultants, rather than anywhere a customer could go and search. If you need someone who has actually survived a Supply Allocation rollout in a make to order shop, there is a person three messages away in someone's phone who is perfect for it. The customer with that problem has no way to reach that person. They post in a group, they get five replies from firms that sell everything, and they pick based on who answered fastest.

AI capability is just the newest version of the same problem. The skill is real and it is spread across dozens of firms. The record of it is nowhere.

Why the standard tags cannot solve this

Custom tags are the part of the platform that fixes this, and they are the most overlooked thing on it.

The standard tag options cover the shared ground: the modules, the industries, and the specialties most of us can legitimately claim. That list has to be generic, and that is a feature rather than an oversight. A shared vocabulary is what makes browsing work at all. When a customer filters for Advanced Manufacturing or for Wholesale Distribution, they need every firm that does that work to have described it the same way, or the filter returns noise.

The cost of that shared vocabulary is that everyone choosing from the list ends up described in the same language. Two firms can select an identical set of standard tags and be nothing alike in practice. One has run twelve manufacturing implementations. The other did one, four years ago, and would take another if it came in.

The custom tags are where everything that separates you goes.

Two things about how they work that I think people miss

▶️ They are private to you. Other providers cannot see the custom tags on your profile. You are not publishing your positioning for a competitor to read and copy, which is normally the reason firms keep their sharpest capabilities off their website in the first place.

▶️ They only surface on a match. Nothing sits on your listing as clutter. The tag waits until someone searches the exact thing you do, and then it returns you.

The second one has a consequence worth sitting with. If a tag costs you nothing when nobody searches it, then the only reason not to add a capability you actually have is that you do not have it. There is no design budget to protect, no page to keep clean, no risk of looking unfocused. The usual argument against listing everything you can do simply does not apply here.

How I would spend fifteen tags

NetSuite service providers get up to 15 custom tags. Fifteen is enough to be precise and not enough to be lazy, so it rewards a little thought.

Three things I would keep in mind:

▶️ Write the words the customer would type, not the words you use internally. A controller in trouble does not search for "complex revenue arrangements." They search for the thing that is broken, or the system they are trying to connect, or the tool their board asked about.

▶️ Go one level more specific than the standard list already covers. If a standard tag already says Manufacturing, spending a custom tag on "manufacturing" wastes it. Spend it on the version of manufacturing you have actually done, down to the process or the pain.

▶️ Only tag what you would be happy to be reviewed on. Reviews attach to your profile on SuiteSqr, and a tag that wins you work you cannot deliver eventually costs more than the work was worth.

That third one is where I would slow down. This is just my opinion, based on what I have seen work, but a short list of tags you can defend in a first call beats a long list that gets you into rooms you should not be in.

Being early is most of the advantage

Search is a matching problem, and matching problems reward whoever showed up first with the right words attached.

Being the only result for a term you can genuinely back up is the strongest position there is on a directory. It is not a position that lasts forever. AI capability in particular is going to stop being a differentiator on this platform at some point, in the same way that "we know SuiteScript" stopped being one a decade ago. But it is a differentiator today, and the same is true of whatever else you do that the standard list has no word for.

I think the firms that start using custom tags now are going to be easy to find later. The ones that wait will be competing on the same generic list as everyone else, at exactly the moment when a customer is trying to tell them apart.

This is what I built them for

I built custom tags so you could separate yourself from the crowd. I know firms and consultants have real skills that cannot be lumped in with the general tags SuiteSqr offers, because I have those skills too and I ran into the same wall trying to describe them.

There is no paid placement here and no tier that buys you a better position in the results, which means the only thing putting you in front of a customer is an accurate description of what you actually do. Open your profile, look at the fifteen, and spend a few minutes on them. If you are doing something in this ecosystem that nobody else is doing, that is the place to say so.