CRM Integration Services And Considerations
Chris Mulvaney is the CEO of CMDS. I make things... I’m the creative entrepreneur with passion for (re)making brands and inventing solutions to problems no one knows exist.
Quick Links to Explore CRM Integration Services
There is no doubt that integrating your CRM can help bring your business to a brand new level of focus, productivity and satisfaction, but the technicalities can often be overwhelming for your small or extremely political internal IT department. Not to mention how long it may take for all the red tapes and evaluations and other stuff like that. So what can you do? Here is the short answer: start looking for CRM integration services outside of your organization. Here are some considerations to keep in mind.
Remember the good old days of your business? The days when all you needed was a contact list, calendar book, rolodex and the balance ledger? Keeping track of your business by logging everything into its own separate place?
May as well have been using a hammer and chisel on stone.
Then you upgraded! Enter CRM. Customer Relationship Management software that helped take care of all the things you needed so desperately to track.
You thought to yourself, man, have I arrived or what?
“So you have a CRM, excellent! However, a CRM is only as good as the data it receives. Many organizations fail to integrate their website with their CRM, having never realized the benefits they could receive by doing so. However, integrating the two systems can bring a lot of added value to your organization.”
– Stella Power for Annertech
I got some bad news for you sunshine– a stand alone CRM system ain’t enough no more. (bad grammar employed for maximum attention-grabbiness) So put your ears on!
You haven’t arrived just yet.
I once heard it said that the biggest enemy of great is good.
Having CRM may be good but without integrating the rest of your critical platforms, you’ll never get the whole picture and understand your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and more.
Until you integrate your CRM across the board you’ll never be the great company you desire to be.
Okay, let’s back it up for a moment and lay a bit of a foundation for the discussion, shall we?
What is CRM?
CRM stands for CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT. It’s all about your business, your customers and how you manage that relationship. Primarily, it focuses on your potential leads, their habits, and interactions with sales and marketing initiatives.
It’s about organizing your customer database and staying on top of your sales funnel.
The Benefits of CRM
The benefits of CRM are numerous:
- CRM helps improve communication with customers
- It helps to enhance target marketing
- Allows you to effectively focus on your business plan
- Increases company profits and ROI.
- Helps track leads along the pipeline from prospect, to close and then even helps improve customer retention.
Wow, CRM is good! But it ain’t great. (did the whole bad grammar thing again)
Why do I need to Integrate my other systems with my CRM?
Your business isn’t just run by your CRM system. It’s run off of multiple systems from Google Apps, billing, customer support, to email. Yes, I’m talking about the separate and multiple programs you have open on your computer on any given work day.
You know, the ones that require multiple logins and clutter and confuse you as you navigate between screens and interfaces.
There are multiple points of data entry. Multiple points of tracking and notes. This leads to multiple points of overlap– doing things multiple times.
It’s like– all this communication takes place in your company, but no one communicates.
It can be downright mind numbing for a business to track a client through the lifecycle. Moving data from one platform to another can be time consuming and costly. Integrating CRM systems with legacy websites, apps or interfaces is the solution to the mind numbness.
“Simply put, CRM integration is building your website and CRM to function together seamlessly. Instead of using your CRM to just be a system that retains customer information based on manual entries, CRM integration promotes your CRM to work double-time, automatically bringing in valuable customer lead data directly into your CRM using information already found on your website!”
– Kyle Flanagan from Lynton Web
There are a number of strategic advantages to using CRM integration services, such as helping businesses manage the customer from initial contact to project completion. It can give visibility to sales, marketing, service and operation teams alike.
Perhaps you’re an insurance company using Salesforce as your CRM. You’ve invested time, effort and even money to turn a potential prospect into a customer. Then, when they finally become a customer, their data is entered into an entirely different system.
And what happens? You’ve just lost visibility.
In other words, you’ve just lost the ability to track the profitability of your new customer and measure against the time and effort it took for the sales and marketing teams to convert a prospect into customer.
Or let’s say you’re a technology company. You’ve dropped a ton of coin on advertising but none of your marketing is integrated with your CRM. Again, you’re unable to see a clear picture of how much it cost to acquire a particular customer who just spent $1000.
You need to be able to measure how much revenue a customer brings in, versus how much you spent on bringing him in and thereby justify your marketing expense.
Or maybe you’re a restaurant that utilizes email marketing, except whoa unto you, you’ve overlooked CRM integration. The result? Your email blasts are manually uploaded, they’re not real-time and they lack in data updates and consistency. This causes the marketing effort to be awkward and impersonal.
The solution to all of these issues can be solved by CRM integration. An agency like CMDS can solve these problems for you by providing the CRM integration services you need.
What kinds of CRM Integrations are there?
Chris Wen, at getvoip.com, believes there are 9 essential integrations your CRM software could have.
1. Cloud Integration
Especially useful for small businesses, Cloud CRM offers a scalable CRM, be it robust or small. It can be monitored, upgraded and managed offsite by a third party vendor.
2. Email Integration
Bringing CRM and email together is one of the most obvious ways of utilizing your first party data for marketing purposes. It helps streamline your email marketing by providing you with a depth of knowledge on the consumer, their actions, preferences and other details you can bank on to make your emails more personalized, timely and effective.
3. Phone Integration
Allows for a “one-click” call from your contact list to potential or warm leads. It also allows for notes and updates shared within the entire system. Hooking up your phone system also allows for holistic tracking of marketing efforts when you have dedicated phone numbers for various marketing campaigns.
4. Calendar Integration
Schedule appointments, tasks and events in a centralized location, along multiple departments. There are many CRMs that integrate popular workplace calendars, like Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar and Apple Calendar.
5. Marketing Automation Integration
The Smarketing (alignment of sales and marketing) solution. This integration allows for sales and marketing platforms to sync up and get on the same page. Better monitoring of the sales funnel and better lead management.
“Marketing automation is an increasingly common CRM integration; software providers like HubSpot or Marketo, which allow for generated, scored and qualified leads to be forwarded to sales teams, have integration features with CRMs like SugarCRM, Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Other CRM vendors provide an all-in-one solution; Infusionsoft has built their platform around the native integration of CRM, sales and marketing features. Their platform is aimed at small businesses that generally lack dedicated sales and marketing departments.”
– Chris Wen
6. Social Media Integration
How does our company trend on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc? Not only can you have real-time visibility into your current audiences engagement, but also you can have actionable data easy to push into marketing initiatives.
7. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Integration
This most often deals with accounting software and generally utilized by large companies with a robust customer base. This integration can help aid in mapping a customer’s information across platforms, from a customer’s financial summary, to invoice and sales order history and can be a huge time saver in data entry while eliminating duplicates, altogether.
8. Help desk Integration
Syncing help desk tickets to CRM can help track support issues, while simultaneously updating the customer’s account information.
9. Mobile Integration
This is about mobile-friendliness. Do you have the ability to update CRM accounts via mobile device? This functionality could be a great tool, especially for employees in the field.
4 Reasons Why You Need CRM Integration?
Accurate and timely Information
When your marketing, sales platforms, CRM and websites, are integrated you have the ability to update information across multiple platforms, at once. This is especially helpful to the customer service rep who can view previous help desk issues, previous billing information and purchases all at the same time.
Eliminates Redundancies
Redundancies are… redundant. Constantly entering the same data into multiple interfaces because the platforms aren’t integrated is a waste of time and money.
“By opting for an automated integration between the two systems, you’re reducing your administration overhead (and hence saving both time and money) as all that manual copy and paste, or export and import, is removed. This leads to increased productivity as it frees up your staff to work on other tasks.”
– Stella Power for Annertech
Improved Target Marketing
When CRM services have been integrated, you’ll have better, more accurate and up to date information about your customer or lead. From buying habits, product searches on your website, to interactions with sales and marketing; more knowledge and understanding means a better grasp of your target demographic and customer relationship. Through customer data, we gain a deeper understanding of your audience and their behavior. You’ll be better equipped to provide your customer or lead with their exact need.
Improved Sales
So now you have better information along with faster access and a stronger understanding of your target market. The result can’t help but be better conversion rates and customer response.
“By integrating your website with your CRM, it streamlines the sales funnel, as immediately after the initial contact there are potential leads in the system, and it offers your sales team better data to work with, eventually leading to more sales.”
– Amit Shah, E-Commerce Expert and Co-Founder at AppJetty
How do you find the best CRM Integration Services for your business?
CRM integration can be quite a challenge for any size business, even ones with internal IT departments. Looking for partners who do CRM integrations all day long and have tons of experience with various systems is the simplest and most expedient route to go.
That’s why we recommend finding an agency that provides CRM integration services.
Experienced companies like CMDS will help you avoid all the research but, even better, they’ll integrate your critical platforms, now, not in six months as your internal IT department estimated. CMDS can offer advice on the best CRM for your business, the kind of integrations your company requires and how the process works. Our developers can fulfill all your CRM integration needs.
Trade the due diligence, the worry and the work to the professionals at CMDS in exchange for peace of mind. Start integrating your CRM today. Give us a call at 732-706-5551.
