The CRM system is the heart of a business's sales and marketing efforts. It contains everything the business needs to know about customers and leads — valuable information that it can use to direct sales and marketing efforts. The right CRM with the right feature set can be a true difference-maker, allowing a business to increase profitability and improve the customer experience as it grows.
The information contained within a CRM holds value for more than just lead management. Every team that even tangentially interacts with a business's customers stands to gain a great deal from that data. This is a detail that most businesses seem to forget.
As a result, its CRM exists separately from the software systems used to manage things like customer service and customer success. In some cases, it's even siloed off from other sales and marketing tools. This means that critical data which should be flowing freely between departments instead exists in a silo.
CRM integration is the solution to this problem.
What is CRM Integration?
CRM integration connects the various customer-facing tools and technologies within your business to your CRM system. In addition to promoting greater alignment between your sales and marketing teams, this establishes an accurate single source of truth for customer data. It also helps streamline and unify both lead management and customer support.
When integrating other business tools and processes into your CRM, you may be tempted to focus exclusively on the basics, those being sales, marketing, and customer service. While such integrations are extremely important, the actual list of systems and processes which may benefit from a connection to your CRM is much longer. Other potential CRM integrations include:
- Accounting and billing.
- Contracts, proposals, and other legal documents.
- Time and attendance tracking.
- Customer support.
- Email.
- Live chat.
- Social media.
- Sales enablement.
- Customer training.
- Paid advertising.
- Project management.
- Data management.
- Marketing automation.
- eCommerce tools.
It's even possible to integrate tools that help you track offline conversions into your CRM.
Benefits of CRM Integration
Improved Personalization
The most significant benefit of CRM integration is that it allows you to communicate far more effectively with your customers. Your marketing team, for instance, can use your CRM tool to automatically send targeted, personalized communications to customers based on a wide range of different rules. Access to deeper knowledge about each customer can also help sales teams establish a deeper relationship with qualified leads and give customer support a better idea of how to help a customer with their problems.
And that's just the beginning. By connecting your CRM solution to an email marketing tool with automation capabilities, you can leverage details in your customer data as triggers for specific email flows.
Better Customer Care
Expanded Functionality
Connecting your CRM system to other business systems can potentially unlock new workflows and interactions. We already provided an example earlier, when we mentioned the ability to trigger email flows based on information contained within the CRM.
No More Data Silos
Siloed data makes it borderline impossible to provide your leads with a cohesive, streamlined experience. At best, their sales journey will be cumbersome and inefficient as employees waste valuable time searching for information. At worst, the prospect's interactions with your business will become disjointed as each team with which they interact has a different set of data about them.
CRM integration shatters data silos by ensuring that everyone has access to the same customer records.
Streamlined Technology
Consider for a moment that the average organization uses close to a thousand separate applications. It's difficult to say how many of these tools are even strictly necessary for the business's day-to-day. Either way, for a mid-sized business with limited resources, that kind of software stack is completely unsustainable.
Believe it or not, CRM integration can actually help you address this problem. Let's say, for instance, that the CRM solution you choose offers several features that are identical to those provided by some of your existing software. As part of the integration process, you could potentially decommission those tools in favor of your CRM.
Better Insights
A well-integrated CRM system provides you with a holistic view of the entire customer journey, from initial contact through to onboarding. You can pair analytics with observation to see exactly how and where each lead interacted with your brand, potentially cluing you in to bottlenecks in your sales process.
Operational Efficiency
Provided you have the tools in place for sales automation, CRM integration greatly reduces the need for manual data entry. In addition to saving considerable time for your employees, it also reduces the likelihood that a customer's records might contain errors. It also reduces the need for employees to jump between multiple applications as they manage leads and sales.
Organizational Alignment
It's not just sales and marketing that are better-aligned with one another through CRM integration. Everyone is able to share and leverage customer data with ease. This level of deep collaboration is immensely valuable, as it contributes heavily to an improved customer experience.
Harnessing the Power of CRM Integration
You have a few options when it comes to integrating your CRM with the rest of your technology stack:
- Choose Software from the Same Provider: Many CRM vendors also offer a ton of related products and services. Choosing one such vendor allows you to easily integrate your CRM with other elements of their portfolio. The trade-off, aside from the chance that you might end up locked in a contract, is that most vendors don't offer every tool your business will need.
- Develop the Code Yourself: If you find the idea of limiting yourself to a single product portfolio unappealing, you could instead go the complete opposite route. You could write and maintain your own integration code, giving you the freedom to truly connect any app you choose. Because it's so highly technical, this approach is quite difficult to follow.
- Use APIs: For CRM integration, an API is often your best bet. In addition to offering the flexibility and freedom of in-house development, it allows you to easily integrate whatever other systems and tools you need.
Strategies and Best Practices for Successful CRM Software Integration
Before you start looking into integration, you should carefully consider your specific needs and which CRM solution may be the best fit. Some CRM tools are designed for businesses of a specific size, while others are meant to be exclusively used in larger businesses. Some other best practices include:
- If you find the process of integrating your business systems with your CRM too daunting, consider looking into CRM integration tools as an alternative
- Don't overdo it or overthink things with automation. It's a powerful technology, but taking it too far can actually end up hobbling your sales and marketing efforts.
- Always do your utmost to maintain data integrity, something that's particularly important when dealing with regulatory compliance.
- Establish goals and milestones to help you track the progress, success rate and return on investment of your CRM strategy.
- While you shouldn't be afraid to customize your CRM software initially upon receipt, don't overdo it. Remember that in marketing as well as sales, consistency is everything — and failure to remain consistent could be incredibly jarring to your prospects.
Selecting the Right CRM Integration Software
Your business's CRM system is the core of its sales and marketing efforts. By choosing the right CRM solution and ensuring it's properly integrated with the rest of your tools, you can streamline every facet of how your business interacts with customers and manages customer data. What you must do first, however, is choose the right CRM.
Fireberry is designed to be both integration-friendly and easy to use. With a powerful API and a high degree of customizability, it's the perfect option for any mid-sized business.
Reach out to us today, and we'll prove it to you.
