Great Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Salesforce Integration

Integrating your customer relationship management system (CRM) with Salesforce is crucial to creating accurate pipeline reports and tracking key metrics to drive success. However, integration can be more than just a direct line between the systems—it should be part of your team’s routine! The more you integrate with Salesforce, the more you and your team can get out of it and move your CRM and Salesforce integration into a strategic partnership that will drive real business value. 

Automate Your Integration

The number one reason people use an external CRM is that they want their “data in [their] own system but don’t want to do it by hand.” Using data for automated triggers is the first step to automation. Before you can automate, though, you need your data flowing in real-time.

Data that’s out-of-date is of no value. If there are gaps between integrations, data is missing, and reports are inaccurate.

Identify the Right Data to Integrate

It’s not just about getting your data into Salesforce. You need to make sure you are integrating the correct information at the right time. These are some of the common questions most people have when they start their integration process:

• Which information needs to be included in my synchronization?
• What is the best way to set up this integration?

Your organization should identify the most crucial parts of your CRM data that need to show up in Salesforce, so you can measure essential metrics and have real-time access. However, we completely understand that it’s not easy to get the maximum out of integrations. To achieve that, it’s usually best to hire a Salesforce CRM consultant and make the whole process much easier. 

Know When & How Often You’re Integrating your CRM with Salesforce

There is a big difference between once a day and every hour, so identify the best frequencies for your organization. Some of the most popular frequencies include:

• Hourly
• Daily
• Weekly (best used for Sales teams with basic reporting needs or if there are no time-sensitive deals in play)
• Monthly (used when the data is not time-sensitive and want to limit how much they’re pulling in) 

Analyze Your Data to Identify What Your Team Needs

This gets back to the importance of knowing your CRM data. If your team isn’t looking at this information on a day-to-day basis, they won’t know what information is relevant. Set up reports or dashboards that highlight the data your team needs to see in Salesforce—this will make it easier for them to understand why the integration with Salesforce is so critical.

Monitor Your Connections & Collaborate on Integration Issues

Your Salesforce Administrator should be able to monitor the status of your integration, but you may want to check in every so often. If there are any issues or anything seems off, take a look at how often the connection is being made.

If you have an hourly integration, and it’s not updating within that window, you can reset it without having to go through Salesforce support.

Once you know your data, how often it needs to be synchronized, and what frequency works best for you and your team—you’ll be on the fast track to maximizing your investment in Salesforce and seeing real-time benefits!

Good luck!