Delayed response time to your leads can affect your sales opportunities extremely. Imagine you want to buy a TV, and a sales rep is not ready to answer your questions at the moment and tell you that he will come back within 24 hours. Too long, isn’t it? Yeah, this exact number indicates an average first response time to web-generated lead, according to a research, where 2,241 U.S. companies were audited.Â
One more interesting fact is that 50% of sales representatives address the vendor that responds first. Information barriers and the absence of immediate access to real-time data in the company lead to delays in responding to your leads and, eventually, decrease your level of customer satisfaction. To address this issue, enterprises choose the solution of integration of their ERP software with Salesforce, a cloud-based CRM platform, which gives salespersons fast access to critical data and streamlines collaborations between company teams.
How Salesforce Connection with ERP Can Benefit Your Business
Data integration provides a set of opportunities for all members across departments in the company:
- There is no need to duplicate information in multiple databases; thus this benefit impacts the reduction of human errors and enhances data quality.
- With streamlined business processes, employees become more productive and oriented on income generation rather than on repetitive and daily routine activities.
- Instant access to data empowers sales representatives with real-time information that can enormously simplify workflows and internal communications, as well as enhance customer service.
- Synchronized information enables complete visibility of customers across departments and can be updated from any end.
What Solution to Choose for Salesforce-ERP Integration?
Before making a decision to connect the CRM system with your ERP software, you should approach different options and analyze which one will suit best your business needs and goals.
To get effective customization, it is recommended to conduct an initial evaluation of your business and see what will be more impactful for you. There are two ways of doing Salesforce-ERP data integration: custom integration and ready-made integration platform. Let’s dive deeper into each of them to outline the key benefits.
Custom integration vs. integration platforms
At first glance, it may seem that setting up a custom integration is a good alternative over a ready-made integration platform, especially when you have a development team that can make integration exactly tailored to your needs and your budget expectations. The thing is that compared to ready-to-use integration platforms, the costs for the development of custom integration might be higher since the work has to be done from scratch. The plus is that the maintenance of custom-developed integration may be cheaper. But not always. You need to think in a long-term perspective since your business scales, and over time there can be much more need for maintenance flexibility, which means new upgrading challenges that you need to solve in the future.
With pre-configured integration templates, data integration platforms offer extended functionality (e.g., error processing, scheduling, monitoring), making them more robust, user-friendly, and quicker to set up. Eventually, you can always minimize data integration costs if you think forward and weigh all benefits and risks beforehand.
Use Cases of Salesforce-ERP Integration
- Account and customer integration
Integrating the Salesforce system, where you have all data relating to your sales funnels and customer journeys, with ERP software, where all billing information is stored, will ensure consistency and accuracy in customer lists. Instead of tedious data duplicating across multiple applications, customer data will be synchronized and reflected in both systems.
- Product & price list
Inserting manual data in one system from another will probably turn out to be error-prone and can even provide misleading information to your customers. All information about products and prices is stored in ERP software which, integrated with the Salesforce system, will be automatically updated whenever there are new changes.
- Sales and payment history
In order to improve user adoption of Salesforce, integration with ERP will be the best option. Having access to invoices and sales history in the CRM system, sales teams can analyze data, make valuable reports, or use this information to create new discounts, for example.
- Quotes & Opportunities
Salesforce-ERP integration enables converting proposals into accurate orders. This can help resolve problems relating to complex product configurations, thereby providing more visibility to order processes and delivering accurate sales quotes in time.
