What is CRM Integration? Tools and Examples for your Business

In this article, Toptal Software Developer Leif Gensert outlines the basic challenges of CRM integration and explains what you can do to make the process as efficient and frictionless as possible. Workflow automation can save your business money and boost your… This article is for small business owners looking to use their CRM platform to its full potential as the primary driver of their technology suite. The average small business uses nearly 100 technology applications outside its primary CRM system. Dashboard analytics generate automated reports that provide insight into your call center activity to inform decision-making. The CRM system doesn’t work for your specific needs (53% of businesses don’t think theirs does).

For sales reps who focus on selling at virtual events such as webinars, integrating your CRM with a system such as GoToWebinar can be a time-saving activity. By connecting your webinar system with your CRM, you can easily send registration event reminders to your contact list, create targeted follow-up campaigns, and create robust funnel reports to understand your event ROI. These integrations connect your CRM to a variety of applications to expand functionality. You can create custom integrations to facilitate specific tasks to create automated workflows. Some of our favorite connector integrations include Zapier, which automatically transfers information between your CRM and over 1,000 third-party apps, and Make.

That way, turning one-time visitors into regular buyers becomes significantly easier. So, in order to avoid potential issues in the long term, make sure you have eliminated all obstacles that prevented production usage of the system. Communicate often between teams to get new requirements aligned. And if you find out that the system is just not going to work for you, turn off the integration. It sounds harsh and can feel very frustrating, but it’s less frustrating than always having to fix data inconsistency issues and deal with workarounds. Depending on what features the system offers, the integration task can vary in complexity and implementation time.

Sync cases to make sales aware of issues

Read this white paper from IDC and Salesforce to learn how business leaders are shifting transformation roadmaps and responding to new imperatives. Process APIs are the second tier and combine system APIs for a specific business purpose. In the case of the shipping update, a company may need multiple system APIs — from the shipping company and from toll shipments — to alert the customer to a shipment’s location, whether it’s delayed, and more.

• Integrating the CRM system within this system will help you work with customers more effectively.
• That way, your operations and finance teams can better manage inventory and allocate resources appropriately over time (e.g. employing a certain number of employees in the data warehouse over a given week).
• Finally, with a fully integrated CRM, data silos are removed, making cross-departmental collaboration easy so that you can present a united front to customers.
• These programs form the basis for adding even more digital tools to help you improve the customer experience.
• This helps the rep better assess the customer’s needs, answer questions, and provide assistance.

It’s not as much of a challenge to provide consistent messaging when you have all the contextual information available in cross-functional software. HubSpot is one of the best choices for CRM marketing automation tools because the HubSpot Marketing Hub includes the foundational CRM functionalities, so you have both software in one. The tools you’re using place an administrative burden on your sales teams (55% of companies find their CRM too burdensome). Without a CRM phone integration, your sales and support agents have no choice but to work with disparate systems. Generally, working with siloed tools means that your sales and support agents have to do more things manually.

Customer & Prospect Communications

She is passionate about economic development and is on the board of two non-profit organizations seeking to revitalize her former railroad town. Prior to joining the team at Forbes Advisor, Cassie was a Content Operations CRM Integration Manager and Copywriting Manager at Fit Small Business. At 18 he ran away and saw the world with a backpack and a credit card, discovering that the true value of any point or mile is the experience it facilitates.

If your CRM operated independent from the rest of your tech stack, your team would be forced to perform data entry for every bit of information you wanted to add, either in your CRM or from your CRM to another app. Integrations are powerful resources that can help you save time manually working with systems and data. With a powerful CRM at the center of your processes and integrations helping systems run smoothly, you can focus on doing what you do best — selling.

What Is CRM Integration?

An operational CRM helps to align your teams across marketing, customer service and sales via automation. In doing so, it allows these functions to work together using one customer or lead view and, ultimately, offer a smooth and positive experience while ushering leads from awareness to conversion and beyond. Its automation capabilities free up your team members to ditch repetitive, tedious tasks, so they can focus on tasks only humans can do. For example, if your field sales reps aren’t inputting notes about their face-to-face conversations with leads or customers, that data will not be made visible within your CRM for other business functions to access.

By forcing the additional step of replicating the configuration from the test system to the production, you will most likely end up with a slimmer configuration on your production system. To mitigate this, you could test with a small data set and slowly increase the number throughout the implementation to remain within the API’s limit. For the initial migration, plan it out over multiple days or on a weekend.

Third-party services like Salesforce

Finally, use a soft rollout to make sure you have the right fit before committing. Your team members are experts in how to do their jobs successfully and, more importantly, how their jobs can be done even more successfully via added efficiencies. So, at a minimum, consult with your marketing, sales and customer service teams. Ask them to list their customer and lead relationship-management goals in order of importance. With importance scoring, if budget-related compromises must be made, a satisfactory solution will be easier to delineate. While most CRMs have a standard set of key features—like pipeline management and marketing automation—others have standout features that fit certain companies and their goals best.

CallRail — Call tracking software that automatically syncs call and text message activity with CRM. Stay on top of key tasks by syncing your Google or Outlook calendar with your CRM. Using two-way integration with your CRM and Google or Outlook calendar, you can instantly log a meeting in your CRM, create meeting notices, and send invites to meeting guests.

Syncing the data between the apps allows your team to avoid data entry, which all but ensures that the data in your CRM and ERP is kept accurate and up to date. By connecting the two systems and allowing the data to flow between them seamlessly, these silos are inherently stripped away—along with the negative consequences they once created. Jon Gitlin is the Managing Editor of The Connector, where you can get the latest news on Workato and uncover tips, examples, and frameworks for implementing powerful integrations and automations. In his free time, he loves to run outside, watch soccer (er…football) matches, and explore local restaurants. Once a lead is created or updated in Salesforce, the workflow gets triggered. It’s a technology platform that lets you manage client and prospect relationships.

IT Professionals and Businesses Face a Challenge

If not, you might be able to connect them using Zapier or a similar alternative. If your business uses videos for marketing your brand or sharing information with leads, you can integrate your CRM software with video platforms like YouTube. These integrations are perfect for companies using document proposal software and electronic signature tools to close leads. Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM solutions on the market. So it should come as no surprise that this tool supports a plethora of different CRM integrations in every category imaginable. The Salesforce AppExchange is a cloud marketplace where you can find 4,000+ solutions to extend the platform’s functionality.

— HubSpot

Below are the specific benefits gained through the integration of key business processes which are the cornerstone of CRM. Don’t dive head-first into a CRM platform without checking the integration list first. The vast majority of CRM tools let you browse through an app marketplace or integration page without the need to create an account. You can find conferencing calling or video chat integrations that you use to manage client communications within your CRM. I’m referring to tools like Zoom, RingCentral, Dialpad Meetings, 8×8, and more. Your ecommerce platform contains tons of valuable customer data.

CRM and Marketing Automation

All integration platforms have pre-built connectors for the most common applications which complement CRM systems. Some integration platforms have prebuilt recipes and automated process integrations which require little or low code to implement. Integration platforms can also be used to function as a workflow engine, as well as functioning as the primary controller or governor orchestrating workflows resident in ERP, CRM, and other systems. Every interaction based on CRM creates an opportunity for your customer to have a more personal, compelling experience. It’s also an opportunity for you to build brand equity, improve satisfaction, and make more sales. And that’s how you create customer loyalty and increase revenue.

That means a large amount of granular data tracking – likely more than your sales team can handle alone. Enter marketing automation CRM integrations, which scan prospect data and automate the delivery of timely marketing content. These integrations can connect your CRM software to the third-party platforms that are home to this data. This way, your sales reps have all the data they need to understand their leads whenever they need. Turning prospects into loyal customers is a multi-step process requiring the combined efforts of cross-functional teams.

Sales and marketing automation

Customers will always pay attention to pricing, but modern customers are also looking for companies that are responsive. With the expectations for a good customer experience at an all-time high, SMBs have to do more than the bare minimum to deliver a good customer experience. CRM integration with a webinar or virtual event platform or virtual meeting platform can simplify the process. You can easily send registration event reminders to your contact list, create targeted follow-up campaigns, and create robust funnel reports to understand your event ROI. Email marketing capabilities are usually limited in most CRM systems, and some companies use more robust external direct email marketing systems.

But please keep in mind that you will need to poll the system on a regular interval. And even if it comes to integrating custom data , Zapier Webhooks can act as a middleman for your integration. You need more visibility on profitability and you want to acquire bigger clients that need more sophisticated invoicing.

Then, use those tags to act on each segment, offering personalized sales outreach, marketing campaigns or upsell opportunities your customers will love. For example, you can launch a marketing campaign that targets leads with sales that make your brand seem in-tune with their in-the-moment needs. Lead tagging and scoring allow you to define audience segments based on their personal data or stage in the buyer journey. By working on a segment-by-segment basis, this segmentation makes it easy to personalize audience journeys with your company via targeted outreach. In the end, personalization through segmentation leads to better customer experiences and, therefore, more conversions, higher customer retention and even higher customer lifetime values.