So you’ve heard of Salesforce, right? Or maybe your company already uses it? Either way, you know that Salesforce is, arguably, the best customer relationship management (CRM) software out there–when used properly. But to take advantage of its true power, Salesforce needs to be fully embedded in your website — and that usually means custom. Which means you need a web development company proficient in Salesforce integration services to make sure you are fully optimized.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is the leading CRM solution for businesses. It allows you to create, track and analyze your team’s relationships with every customer and potential customer, from first contact to real time. When used effectively, Salesforce enables brands to customize their communications with individual customers, including marketing, sales communications and brand experiences.
Just out-of-the-box, Salesforce is incredible. But only companies that invest in a custom integration can fully experience the powerhouse that Salesforce truly delivers. What does a custom Salesforce integration offer to you and your customers?
A lot.
Salesforce Benefits
Despite the way it sounds, Salesforce is not just a behind-the-scenes platform for your reps. Effective usage can have game-changing benefits at every level of interaction, including company, sales rep, marketing and end customer.
Company Benefits
- Higher ROI for marketing and sales efforts
- Proactive and predictive sales
- More efficient sales team, resulting in less wasted time
- Decreased sales cycle with sales and marketing based on behavior rather than standardized process
- internal sales processes
- Enables more accurate forecasting utilizing real data and analytical tools
- Complete 360-degree transparency of sales efforts
- Identify emerging trends in real time and positioning reps to act quickly
- Discover new business opportunities based on behaviors and customer feedback
Sales Rep Benefits
- Increase motivation, with goals tied to clear metrics
- Prioritize next steps quickly based on data rather than intuition or mood
- Help close leads faster by identifying leads when they are “hot”
- Raise commissions by increasing monthly sales
- Accessible data all in one location
- Decreases micro-management from supervisors, since all information is available in real time via Salesforce
- More efficient upwards reporting using customized reporting tools
- Lower customer attrition by identifying at-risk customers and customers that have been neglected
Marketing Benefits
- Better understanding of where customer is in sales process, enabling targeted messaging
- Marketing based on behavioral triggers rather than mass communications
- Past behavioral data enables predictive marketing and ability to lead customers towards purchasing actions more efficiently
- Coordinate communications with sales team, avoiding over- or under-communication during sensitive segments of customer cycle
Customer Benefits
- More personalized treatment from marketing and sales reps
- Better customer service, with agents able to view entire lifecycle of relationship
- Communication timing tailored towards individual
- Treated as a whole person, collecting data from interactions in all channels, rather than individual instances
- Fosters positive association and sense of brand loyalty
Salesforce Website Integration
Almost any company can purchase Salesforce and start using it right away. Yet, this type of investment is the least effective utilization of the tool possible. Chances are, you’ll never achieve 100% rep adoption, you will miss out on key, transformative applications and not fully utilize all of the powerful data and analysis available at your fingertips.
Let’s face it – Salesforce isn’t a cheap solution. So if you have already taken this step, don’t undercut it by not customizing it for your business. Consulting with a web development team experienced in custom Salesforce integration services will allow you to maximize your investment on all levels.
To understand exactly what a custom Salesforce integration services company can offer, let’s examine the full integration process.
Custom Salesforce Integration Services
Step 1: Initiation
Before moving forward, your web development team needs to develop a full understanding of your company, your goals and your complete sales cycle. Undoubtedly, any company not using a fully automated CRM solution deals with redundancies and inefficiencies in information and reporting.
Everything from sales reps keeping a paper calendar, to tracking things in Excel, to having separate and disjointed customer communications from the marketing and sales team.
The initial meeting should include representatives from your sales team, management and marketing, so the Salesforce integration team understands exactly how customer data is being currently collected, tracked, analyzed and used throughout the sales process.
Step 2: Analysis
After meeting with your team, your Salesforce integration consultant will perform a full analysis of your current sales process and identify any recommendations for improvements to align with Salesforce capabilities.
Your Salesforce consultants will outline your full sales cycle, highlighting how Salesforce integrates with the process at every step along the way. After the initial interviews, your development team will be able to suggest specific features that will make the biggest impact to your sales team and your ROI.
For example, if you are a retailer or company with both in-person and online options, experienced Salesforce integration service professionals will be able to show you how to create a unified, multi-channel sales environment. This will allow you to combine in-store data with your rep’s files, developing a complete customer profile.
Step 3: Development
This is where Salesforce gets customized for your company’s individual needs. Cosmetic issues such as branding and the user interface can be designed to your individual specifications. Any industry-specific fields, objects, workflows, rules, formulas, dashboards or security settings are built in order to simplify the data entry process and enable quick and easy reporting and usage.
Any feedback based on interviews about specific requirements will be incorporated into the customized Salesforce integration. All third-party tools, databases and applications will be seamlessly linked and coded to allow easy import and export of data.
When possible, existing APIs may be used. But, depending on how your existing site is built and based on functionality needed, custom API integration will likely be required. Examples that usually require custom API integration include MailChimp, Google Apps, or Marketo.
Step 4: Data Import
Everything comes down to data. In order for Salesforce to work effectively, data must be reliable and trusted. Prior to adopting a CRM such as Salesforce, customer data may be in more than a dozen different locations. From business cards collected at trade shows, to Excel spreadsheets from the marketing department, to contacts in Outlook or other CRM solutions like InfusionSoft, to data stored in the cloud, importing customer data into Salesforce can be onerous.
Salesforce integration service companies, like CMDS, will help migrate all of your raw data into Salesforce, either by building custom code or implementing an ETL tool to transition the data.
This is likely the most time consuming step of the process, but an essential one. Improperly imported data makes any learnings useless. Investing in a qualified Salesforce integration company insures data integrity and optimal reliability.
Step 5: Training
Just having a custom Salesforce platform is only half the battle. Your entire team needs to know how to use it to access its full functionality. From training your sales reps to sort data and prioritize client actions, to teaching marketing how to export data for specific initiatives, to guiding management in opportunity analysis, benchmarking and custom reporting, proper training sets the groundwork for success.
Your Salesforce integration consultant should walk each stakeholder through the functionalities they need to do their job efficiently and effectively. In addition, they will teach you how to manipulate data and build custom reporting so you can be self-sufficient and flexible moving forward.
Step 6: Maintenance
Not every company will require ongoing maintenance services. But technology changes constantly. And as tech changes, so do the capabilities and possibilities of Salesforce. Expert Salesforce integration companies will be able to help you month after month to ensure that your site is fully up-to-date and flexible enough to interact with all third-party applications.
If you have an internal tech or IT team, they can often help you with some or all of the Salesforce maintenance and updates. If you don’t have in-house tech support, you may want to consider hiring an outside Salesforce maintenance service. Most company’s ongoing Salesforce maintenance needs are small, requiring just a few hours per week or month to keep their system up to date.
It may feel like, once you have pulled the trigger and integrated Salesforce in your company and website, you just want to be done with it – but that is not using your investment wisely. Salesforce is constantly adapting to new technologies, both by expanding its breadth of services (Pardot, Trailhead, Einstein, Lightning) and by accommodating third-party platforms.
Some benefits of keeping up with Salesforce maintenance, include:
- Easily make changes to your company data or how you organize, report or funnel sales contacts
- Keep up to date with latest Salesforce upgrades and releases
- Fully integrate any new third-party services you use in other areas of business, such as marketing or customer service
- Implement any new applications
- Migrate data from new sources
Salesforce Integrations
Nowadays, Salesforce can and should be used by businesses of all sizes, in nearly all industries. With pricing points for a full range of user quantities, Salesforce is an accessible and powerful tool to help businesses streamline and prioritize their sales efforts. Not only that, it can make your existing investments even more impactul, by networking together to create one cloud-based marketing and sales platform.
Here is just a small subset of services or programs you may already be using that a Salesforce integration team can connect:
- Marketo
- Constant Contact
- Google Apps
- Docusign
- Hubspot
- Informatica Connector
- ERP
- SurveyMonkey
- MailChimp
- Trail Tracker
Salesforce Integration—Do You Need a New Website?
The short answer – most likely not.
Salesforce is built to be flexible. An experienced web developer and Salesforce integrator can connect nearly any site with Salesforce and get you up and running.
The long answer – you might want to consider it if your site is old and outdated. Older sites just don’t have the power and capabilities of ones built on new platforms. You will certainly be able to utilize parts of Salesforce and improve your sales process.
But will you be able to do everything? It’s unlikely.
Just as with many of the newest technologies and applications on the market, they require a certain amount of computing power and backend complexity to run.
If you are in the market for a new site in the next year or two, consider coordinating it with your Salesforce integration. Your web developers will be able to truly maximize capabilities, layout and aesthetics when incorporating Salesforce from the initial stages of site development.
CMDS – Salesforce Integration Services Company
CMDS is an experienced website design and development company, with expertise in integrating Salesforce into existing websites, as well as building websites from scratch that incorporate Salesforce.
The CMDS team of developers is well versed in integrating various applications with SalesForce that can help your company’s everyday workflow and grow your business exponentially.
If you are considering adding Salesforce to your arsenal, contact CMDS to discuss the best ways to move forward. From an in-depth sales consulting session on your sales process to providing suggestions on additional ways to leverage Salesforces’ full capabilities, CMDS will make your business, their business. Contact CMDS today for a free consultation at 732-706-5555 or click here to get started.