The 12 Days of Salesforce for 2024 (Day Four: Integrations)
TL;DR: Here is my list of things you should be considering as you reboot your business for 2024, focusing on Salesforce generally and Integrations specifically.
Here’s the first post in this series, which includes background and how you can save $150k/year: https://medium.com/@kmcafeesf/the-12-days-of-salesforce-for-2024-day-one-dd8051e0adee
Day Four (of Twelve): Integration with External Systems
What you should consider: Integrate Salesforce with other business systems to streamline data exchange and eliminate manual data entry.
What you should evaluate: Evaluate the reduction in manual data entry time and potential errors. Consider the impact on operational efficiency.
Annualized cost savings (est. based on 30 users): $20,000.
How I would approach Day Four and Integration:
This one’s tricky. There are so many excellent reasons to integrate external systems. Question One ought to be: what is the true benefit of doing so?
Some of the integrations are OOTB (out of the box) these days, with packages from the AppExchange for things like LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Pitchbook, etc., and there are more being published all the time.
Companies who own the information realize that it might be worthless unless you (their customer) can put it in your own context.
But back to Question One: is your users’ display already so dense with information that you’d be displacing something? If so, how do you prioritize that?
Clearly, investigation (or maybe a ride-along for your user groups) is required.
Can you evaluate ultimately how valuable that data might be? More deals closed faster, etc.? Well, as I am a broken record about, first baseline your results and then measure the impact.
Question Two might be are there specific activities that your users are translating into your CRM? Is there some transform function that they’re performing in the process?
For instance, are they summarizing meeting notes? If so, find a tool like UpdateAI to do that job for them and set up the integration.
Also remember that, just because you want the data in your analysis, you don’t necessarily have to present it to the end users, as it can live in the background.
The bottom line here is that if your users are “swivel-chairing” between applications, there is an opportunity to share all or some of that information to streamline their activities.
Go get ’em, Sherlock!
This is a part of the 12 Days of Salesforce for 2024 series. Here are links to the other initiatives you should consider, and as always, please reach out to me if you’d like some counsel or my approach via my team at Rule Six Consulting LLC.
Day One: Automation of Repetitive Tasks
Day Two: Data Cleanup & Deduplication
Day Three: Analytics & Reporting
Day Six: User Training & Adoption
Day Seven: Mobile Optimization
Day Eight: Artifical Intelligence
Day Nine: Communities and Portals
Day Eleven: Security & Compliance
Day Twelve (Hooray!): Improvement Cycles & Feedback
I appreciate you spending some time thinking about these topics with me, and I welcome feedback and additions.
