Integration and Influences: CRM, Pipedrive, Slack

Published in

The Startup

8 min readJan 17, 2019

The rate at which technology is developing and adapting is so fast that you cannot help but be swept away in a tidal wave of progress whether you’re ready for it or not. As information travels faster, the world seems to be getting smaller and smaller, and this has a large implication on how we conduct business. In the previous article you read more about how leads can come to sales, now we are talking how to convert them. Just keep reading on and get more insight.

Business automation is one key factor which is vital to both small and big companies to keep up their relevance and stand out from their competitions. When you’re a small, growing business with lots to do, software and automation become your allies. Everything we do would be 100% harder without the tools that we use on a day-to-day basis to communicate, schedule, measure, store and automate. After putting major marketing efforts in place in a bid to create awareness, then you can put it in CRM to get the first touch from your sales.

The businesses you are up against are not just the ones from the same city as you but now the competition is global. More importantly, companies are now getting help from all over the world to help them. In today’s war of marketing, the only way to survive is by optimizing your leads and maximizing profits out of them.

Today’s customer is more discriminating and more informed than ever before, leaving you wondering how to convert leads. The short answer to this dilemma is, change the focus of your products from selling to solving problems. Here are some tips to help you convert sales leads.

Social Media- The Holy Grail Of Today’s Marketing

Instant connectivity is what people really crave for and social media is the key to keeping up with anything and everything in life. Direct messaging takes this communication style to a whole new level, giving you the opportunity to reach out to people in ways you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. An integral part of the sales process is getting to know your clients and establishing good relationships which social media can help you accomplish quickly and easily.

Instant connections with instant audiences can result in instant actions. It’s a no brainer! We could discuss more on the importance of social media but there is actually more to it; integrating these services with some sales managers such as Slack and Pipedrive is a move aimed at reducing your workload and improving your sales by a great percentage.

You may now be wondering what Slack and Pipedrive are. Well, here’s a brief introduction for you- do not worry as we’ll not get into the nitty-gritty technical details but will lay it to you in a layman language.

Slack

Slack in simple terms is basically a chat room for your whole company, which is designed to replace email as your primary method of communications and sharing of files. It enables users to communicate easily and eliminate the fatigue associated with using multiple communication applications.

Some features of Slack include direct-messaging capabilities, notifications, and alerts; file sharing, group chats, and search. It offers integration with many third-party services, including Google Drive and Dropbox.

Its workspaces allow you to organize communications by channels for group discussions and allows for private messages to share information all in one place. You can also share documents along with comments and you can make a private channel where you can chat with a specific person through a totally secure channel. This tool is mostly good for web developers, bloggers, online marketers etc.

Furthermore, you can do audio and video calls to and as individuals as well as a group. Other applications such as Twitter, Git, and Google Drive and so on can also be integrated with it.

Pipedrive

Whenever you hear of Pipedrive, think of Customer Relationship Management. CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a strategy for managing an organization’s interactions with customers and potential customers. A CRM system helps companies streamline processes, stay connected to customers and improve profitability.

Pipedrive is a CRM and sales management tool for small and medium-sized sales teams. It organizes leads in a way you’ll always have a great overview of sales and makes you focus on the important deals first.

When you use Pipedrive, you will always land on a single, streamlined view of your sales process. It also gives clarity, getting your team on the same page. Your emails, calls, and progress are automatically tracked. Pipedrive clears the way, so you can focus on doing what you do best keeping your goals realistic not idealistic.

In a nutshell, Pipedrive offers you the following;

Full email sync.
It supports multiple languages
Integration of Google maps
Overview pages of your trends
Customize what your team needs to see.

Apart from Pipedrive, there are other integration tools.

Other Tools:

1.Hubspot — This is a cloud-based software platform which helps businesses launch and controls their marketing, managing their sales processes and supporting the ongoing needs of their customer base. It is an all-in-one system that provides businesses with the data they need to make strategic decisions in their marketing, sales, and customer service processes.

Hubspot can assist you by;

Tracking your contact leads and deals in one single place.
Integrating with your email to automatically send relevant and personalized messages.
Autocompleting contacts and company details with HubSpot Insights
Customizing the layout of details with drag-and-drop features.

2. Salesforce marketing — Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a CRM platform for marketers which allows them to create and manage marketing relationships and campaigns with customers. It incorporates integrated solutions for customer journey management, emails, mobile, social media, web personalization, data analysis, advertising, content creation, and management. This software has predictive analytics to help make decisions.

The features from salesforce include;

Customizable fields to track anything you need
It includes analytics, dashboards, and reports to make sense of your data
Deep email integration
Using Chatter to keep in touch with the entire team

3.Infusionsoft — Infusionsoft helps small and medium businesses to automate their sales and marketing without adding your staff. Infusionsoft is a fully integrated CRM, marketing & commerce solution. It links your contacts to the right sales funnel automatically giving the right information to the right clients and of course, at the right time.

The features of Infusionsoft include;

Ability to show your tasks and appointments together with quick previews of the contacts’ data
Helps you to track information about your clients, including pages they have viewed, former purchases etc.
Automatically place contacts based on history and demographics to explain who you should focus on and when
It has a built-in eCommerce store to help you sell services or products

You may already be impressed by such tools but there is a major problem; they do not provide custom automation even though they have a possibility to build their own workflow. These tools need to be integrated for an easier and more efficient working, hence the introduction of integration tools such as Zapier.

Zapier is an automated, online task management program which allows you to connect different apps and tasks into workflows which keep data consistent across different web applications. What Zapier does, simply put is take two or more services and act as a middle man for their Application Program Interface (APIs): It is a tool for connecting all the different apps you use. Most of these tools would otherwise not work together without Zapier connecting them.

There are several other alternatives to Zapier such as;

IFTTT
Automate.io
Integromat
Workato
Piesync etc

Importance of Integration

You may actually be wondering why you should integrate them and here’s why;

You will be able to share Pipedrive contacts and contact information to ensure easier and quicker ways to enhance advanced and secure communication.
It not only sets up channels for teams but also for private channels between managers and other senior or important members.
It automatically posts added deals and in some cases adjustments if changes occur at some point.
It updates users on personal deal statuses.
Integration also provides a running feed for deals won.
It also searches contacts in Pipedrive using the Pipedrive-Slack command, which is also done by drip marketing.

Tracking and Evaluation

Data entry is a very boring process, especially when it’s unnecessary. The last thing you want to be doing is entering each sale you receive into Quickbooks, especially when there are hundreds of applications that have the capability to send data into this widely adopted small business accounting systems. As people do their routine jobs, they are likely to get tired and make terrible mistakes.

A tracking system will do your business a great favor especially when you automate things like creating a task, filling of notes, to book time, send messages or to call. You should do all these using a single app. Right integration will enable you to get your client into a whole new level.

Moreover, why pay a human to do a task that can easily be automated? We are in an era of interoperability, so using manual processes just seems ridiculous. Herein not forgetting the speed and consistency you stand to benefit from using such integration tools.

Conclusion

The end goal for any business; whether a marketing firm or any other firm is to rake up a lot in terms of profit. They need to go with the flow and automate their systems through the integration of these and other tools. Being realistic enough, sending and receiving instant deal updates to and from your team is not only obvious for your business but is also a must. Whether you need to coordinate multiple people to help close deals or you simply want to keep everyone in the company informed about deal status, you need an intervention of app integration to increase efficiency.

Team players can keep managers and colleagues informed on the go without having to schedule meetings or write lengthy emails. To ensure this is done we strongly encourage you to make sure you use these integrations which will streamline your team’s communication in many ways that were almost impossible even a few years ago.

Whichever tools you choose, our team is always ready to help you close that next big deal. Even though you may be late to the game, it’s never too late to catch up.

How Slack Helped us Close 100% of the Pipedrive Deals

Subscribe to our social networks:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/realomat/

Linkedin: https: www.linkedin.com/company/realomat/

Twitter: twitter.com/realomat_biz

Instagram: realomat_biz

Our website: realomat.com