(Part 1) Best Salesforce Integrations available for Sales and Marketing Teams in CY22
Salesforce is not just a CRM but rather a powerful platform that could be used to automate multiple business processes in your organisation. Salesforce is not only used by sales teams to automate sales processes such as lead generation, deal registration but also captures critical data and analytics. Similarly, Salesforce also provides good tools to marketers to track efficiency of campaigns and provide personalisation to customers to convert more leads into paying customers.
Salesforce is a very popular CRM, but you need to be aware that Salesforce may not have everything right out of the box. Salesforce provides over 2,500 connections and apps, allowing for customisation and extending on existing functionality so you can scale according to your business needs. While having so many options is fantastic, picking the right app or connector for your business requirement may become a daunting task.
In this article, we discuss why we need salesforce integrations and what are the best salesforce integrations available this year to organisations for fulfilling their sales and marketing tasks efficiently.
Why do we need Salesforce Integrations?
According to Siftery G2, many large organizations utilize an average of 37 distinct tools or software platforms to conduct their day-to-day operations. As a result, we are seeing an increasing number of organizations integrating Salesforce CRM with other systems in order to increase productivity and reduce tedious processes.
Here are some key areas where salesforce integrations add a lot of value to the organizations on a daily basis:
1. Reports — Having all your data in one place allows you to make faster and better decisions which boosts ROI, improves performance and productivity.
2. Efficiency — Transferring data from one platform to another platform takes a lot of time and effort and becomes more challenging if there is critical information required for the business. With Salesforce integration, we are passing data from one platform to another which not only helps you reduce manual errors but minimizes the chance of data being uploaded incorrectly, helping to save time and effort.
3. Internal Communication — Internal Communication plays a key role in organisations as marketing and sales would need to work together on a qualifying lead and in particular have conversations to speed up conversion and sales cycle with good collaboration. Internal communication becomes easy with Salesforce integration when all the data is easily accessible to various teams within the organisation.
Best Salesforce Integrations for Marketing:
Marketers would need to use a range of distinct tools in order to track efficiency of campaigns and get relevant analytics. They often require automation to increase productivity and this could be achieved with salesforce integration in less time. Let’s take a look at the broad areas where the salesforce integrations have added incredible value for Marketing teams.
1) Analytics and Attributes
2) Campaign Management
3) Lead Generation
4) Event Management
5) Marketing Automation
1) Analytics and Attributes — To gain a deeper understanding of customer experience, you would need to connect salesforce CRM with Analytics and Attributes solutions. Here is a selection of some of the best Salesforce Integrations available for Analytics and Attributes.
a. Ruler Analytics — Ruler Analytics is a tracking and marketing attribution tool that supports marketers to link their website and lead data to their closed revenue data. This tool allows you to make data-driven decisions by integrating your website, salesforce CRM and any marketing apps to view the data and works on closed-loop marketing principles.
Pros:
- Ruler Analytics offers multiple attribution models and you can easily switch between each channel to see how it works at driving stages of the customer’s journey.
- Ruler Analytics Opportunity pipeline provides greater visibility over how users are driven throughout your pipeline. This data facilitates better reporting capabilities.
- Onboarding with Ruler Analytics is very simple and all you need to do is add a little bit of code to your website and link your current apps with Ruler.
Cons:
- Ruler Analytics is a marketing attribution tool and does not provide everything such as automation or content distribution.
- Ruler Analytics has a higher price than average price among attribution tools.
- Limit on integrating multiple accounts into one.
b. Brainshark Analytics — Brainshark Analytics is a data-driven platform for sales enablement and readiness teams. Organizations use the brainshark platform to provide training, coaching and materials to sales people. Brainshark platform gives knowledge, skills and insights they need to perform at a high level with their customers.
Pros:
- Brainshark integrated with CRM provides SCORM compliance, so that channel partners have their training materials inside their LMS or CRM systems.
- Brainshark provides both online and offline access to view the training materials from anywhere.
- Provides easy content authoring capabilities to create personalized training to engage with channel partners.
- Provides good reporting and analytics to make informed decisions about improving training engagements and results.
Cons:
- Brainshark is more of an education platform rather than sales enablement due to lack of aligning the learnings with KPI
- Ability to send feedback or scores to users in a specific hierarchy is not available in the current version.
c. Zoho Analytics — Zoho Analytics is a data visualization tool with over 100 ready made dashboard templates. Zoho combines the power of BI, data analytics and your customer information. Everyone from a small to large organisation can quickly gain valuable insights and track key sales metrics using this app. When integrated with Salesforce, users can take KPIs, create and monitor sales funnels, view win/loss rates, put together sales forecasts and gauge sales teams performance regularly. It’s easy to share reports and dashboards with colleagues and other teams with customisable access control permissions.
Pros:
- Zoho analytics is affordable with Zoho one offering access to all products at $30 a month making it hard to beat by competition.
- Zoho provides great customer service by providing repeating pre-emptive prompts and help even in their free version.
- Short learning curve and enables users to easily master the platform when compared to others.
Cons:
- Zoho does not offer the ability to customise built-in dashboards.
- Lack of support documentation to help resolve issues.
2) Campaign Management: Campaign management software is used for planning, executing, tracking and analyzing marketing initiatives, sometimes centered on a product launch or event. Campaign management software integrated with Salesforce can help organizations save time and money by automating time-consuming processes by providing mission critical data. Let’s take a look at some of the best salesforce integrations available for Campaign Management.
a. Campaign Status by AAkonsult — AAkonsult is a Salesforce partner specialised in providing consulting and development services. AAkonsult’s campaign status allows you to create custom default status for your campaigns and assign those defaults to recurring campaigns.
b. Allocadia — Allocadia is a robust marketing tool which provides marketers a planning and budgeting platform. Marketing leaders and their teams can build marketing plans that are aligned to corporate strategic goals and then measure program performance which helps companies optimize their investments to accelerate business growth.
c. Terminus — Salesforce out of the box is not built for account-based marketing (ABM). Terminus Salesforce integration makes it easy for marketers to target, engage, manage and report on their account-based advertising efforts. Terminus enables you to target companies, interact with key decision makers, and increase the velocity of your sales pipeline. Customers using this salesforce integration with Terminus can import account, contact and campaign information into their Terminus account automatically.
3) Lead Generation: Lead generation software is used by companies to convert leads to customers. It is a crucial part of the sales process and here are some of the best salesforce integrations available in Lead generation software.
a. Clearbit — Clearbit integrated with Salesforce enables you to connect existing customer data with other decision makers. It gives precise contact information to your CRM, allowing you to focus on identifying the proper prospects and customers.
b. Cognism — Cognism is a powerful sales intelligence platform and with salesforce integration, it provides high-quality B2B contact data to sales and marketing teams. Cognism tool when connected with salesforce allows to reach out to most prospects that are fit for your company and generating multiple leads based on the company’s customer personas.
c. Calendly — Calendly is an industry-leading meeting scheduling software which allows you to schedule appointments online at any time during the sales process. This tool allows visitors to automatically schedule a product demo or consulting and bookings get automatically synced with salesforce and your calendar. Calendly automatically sends out custom confirmation emails and event reminders to invitees, and notifies all meeting participants via email if an attendee reschedules
Part-2 with next set of Salesforce Integrations and apps is available from here.
This article was originally published on my blog https://supercrmbytes.blogspot.com on 8th October, 2022.