Why integrating Salesforce with your other cloud applications will boost your business

Wouldn't it be ideal if your sales staff had all relevant customer information in one dashboard or view? What if we told you this was possible with modern-day technology? In this blog we explain the benefits and commercial value proposition of such integrations and how this can be achieved. A more technical blog describing how this is done from an IT lens is available here.

Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM applications, most commonly used for maintaining information regarding customer relationships and controlling sales processes. Salesforce’s Lightning platform allows for system customisation and for adding functionality.

For example, custom applications can be built and linked to Salesforce via the Lightning platform. In addition, it allows for data to be exchanged between Salesforce and other applications.

And this is exactly what Harmonizer makes use of to flawlessly connect Salesforce to hundreds of other applications.

Why should you consider integrating Salesforce with other applications?

Integrating a CRM application like Salesforce offers huge possibilities. Integrations can provide data enrichment by feeding Salesforce data from other sources, saving copious amounts of boring manual data entry in the process:

• As an example, additional contact information can be automatically ingested from various sources, and moreover, data can be added that provides actionable insights. This could be location information on a map, or industry information and other important scoping data points, which provide your sales staff with information to better qualify leads.
• Another recent use case we implemented for a customer is continuously ingesting marketing attendance and response/ analytics information for customers in Salesforce. This provides our client’s sales staff with a single overview of their key customers’ interests (beyond subscriptions/ settings), in terms of topics, webinars, events and where you are likely to connect with them (on) next.
• Integrating Salesforce with your finance application/s is also worthwhile. This provides you insights into the ‘value’ of the customer to your organisation, based on past revenues, products/ services sold, payment terms, outstanding debts, connected purchase orders - anything that enables you to have a more well rounded conversation with your customer. This enhances customer value. In addition, you are able to maximise future revenues by having all relevant information at your fingertips. It provides your staff with a single customer view of the potential value of the customer to your company.

The above examples all illustrate that associated contact, marketing and financial information doesn’t have to be manually added to Salesforce. This means your staff can focus on more value-added work, such as reaching out to customers or generating rich insights from the combined data in Salesforce. For them, their employee experience is enhanced since boring and repetitive tasks are now automated.

By integrating Salesforce with other applications and eliminating manual data-entry work, the data quality is enhanced as well. Any manual task comes with higher error rates when compared to automated workflows - and with integrating applications this is no different.

In summary, integrating Salesforce to other relevant applications improves the customer experience, employee experience, process efficiency and data quality. We can’t possibly mention all the integration opportunities relevant to all businesses in a blog post, however we would be happy to shout you coffee to explore where these gold nuggets might lie for your circumstances. We love exploring these opportunities with you, and these conversations are always free of charge and full of honest advice, whether or not we are the right provider for what you need.

Connecting Salesforce without the need to code

To implement the use cases above in the manner described will require:

• Technical knowledge
• A suitable environment/ resources to facilitate and execute the data exchange.
• Ongoing maintenance including dealing with any changes made by Salesforce to their API.
• Monitoring of the data exchange to ensure accuracy and integrity of the data you are relying on.

Does this sound like a hassle? Harmonizer is an alternative way to integrate Salesforce to any other application - because our managed service takes the work out of it for you and you get the results you expect and desire. The use cases outlined in this article are supported by Harmonizer. In addition, maintenance and monitoring of the service is taken care of. It is truly "worry-free" for you.

Click here if you are interested in Harmonizer’s options for Salesforce integrations.