Swit Bridges Engineers from Mars and Sales Reps from Venus

Published in

Taste of Teamwork

6 min readDec 19, 2019

Front Office vs. Back Office

According to functional divisions of office work, enterprise software can be roughly categorized into front office and back office applications. We often refer to tools that have direct relations to customers as front office and ones that don’t like administrative support roles as back office. The development of enterprise tools have long been focused on meeting the needs of one specific division — either front office or back office, never both.

Emergence of the Out-of-Office Product Category

In the modern business world, things have become a lot more complicated, and there is often a crossover between what once constituted front office and back office. To elaborate, many enterprise IT professionals have tried to connect these end-to-end work functions by directly integrating all the related systems only to realize that this created more communication overhead among cross-functional teams while making their dependency on the legacy systems unnecessarily heavier. During this process, many enterprises felt a need for a new “hub” to bridge them all more efficiently. Such need called for the beginning of a new industry called Team Collaboration, which rests under the enterprise software umbrella of Out-of-Office (OOO) tools.

The Legacy Ends

The so-called Digital Transformation (DT), an enterprise-level conversion of its business processes, replacing on-premise infrastructure with cloud technologies played an important role in the birth of the OOO market. Constantly developing, maintaining, or updating tools to comply with the ever-evolving business logics is not only costly, but also time-consuming, making what is supposed to be new obsolete by the time the development is complete. Under the rigid on-premise infrastructure, keeping softwares up to date with the newest requirements while maintaining the Line Of Business (LOB) was unattainable due to the lack of agility for new development and reusability of the already developed. With such issues of the legacy systems, cloud came into the picture.

I Call It Neo-Legacy

The cloud that enabled serverless computing soon became a sweet spot that every software provider wanted a share. It saved the time and cost of building apps and moved up the era of SaaS. While many SaaS products that poured into the market during this time satisfied the need of a new hub bridging the front and back office tools, instead of making enterprises directly integrate them from end to end, this OOO category quickly became saturated and overly segmented with indistinguishably similar single-function SaaS products. Simply put, the bridging hub became too fragmented and fragile. This leaves no options to users but to integrate them all, just like stitching rags with ‘s’lack seams. I call this Neo-Legacy, a phenomenon bringing a similar vicious cycle to the one found before the DT. Take Slack (chat) or Trello (tasks), for instance.

Employee eXperience, hence Customer eXperience

But, the technological factors are not the only cause that brought on this enterprise platform revolution. Many believe that the Digital Transformation is a re-birth journey starting from the innovation of Employee Experience to that of Customer Experience. I myself share the vision that, without a change from within, its mission for Digital Business can’t be completed. Regardless of roles, whether it be engineers or sales representatives, people aspire to communicate faster and collaborate more efficiently. It’s no surprise that Digital Workplace (see the image below), once the smallest component of the DT journey, now serves as the biggest hub to get the mission done. This is how team collaboration tools [resting under the umbrella of Out-of-office] took the place of siloed email and back office products (e.g., ERP) for the purpose of integrating front office products (e.g., CRM) and became a hub for all. This explains why the Salesforce, the biggest CRM tool in the world, acquired a team productivity tool called Quip in 2016.

Swit Empowers Salesforce

In this irresistible yet inevitable trend, we’re pleased to introduce one of the best ways to connect EX to CX by streamlining cross-functional workflows between engineers and sales representatives — the Salesforce CRM Integration powered by Swit.

The Connector that your Sales Reps Love

We’ve often witnessed pain points from sales roles about their communication disconnect with members from other divisions (typically engineers in IT companies). Updating client inquiries on SFDC and repeating the same process to create a ticket on tools like Asana, Trello, or Jira seemed redundant and wasteful of one’s energy and time. Even with an app-to-app integration, people needed to manually copy and paste the same information on both ends and repeat over and over again until the deal closes.

Today, there are a number of third-party “connectors” built specifically for the purpose of bridging the front office and OOO tools.

Yet, Swit prides as the best one out there for four reasons: a. powerful multi-connections, b. customizable configurability, c. advanced notifications, and d. automatic two-way synchronization.

Our SFDC integration v.1.0 allows your sales reps and engineers

to connect up to 10 SFDC instances to one Swit workspace in all plans — available even in the Free tier.
to configure and choose which and how many SFDC objects and fields to link to a Swit task card.
to receive real-time notifications on updates from SFDC objects and fields as “Activity” and “Project Unreads” in Swit — not in email.
to have SFDC updates auto-reflected in real-time on both platforms.

Enjoy your trip from Mars to Venus

There is no doubt that SFDC is the best CRM, not just because of the product, but mainly because of the partnership-oriented platform ecosystem powered by Salesforce Lightning Component, the core engine for App Exchange, I believe. Swit has the same technology embedded in its product — custom metadata configuration app platform, aspiring to become a Salesforce in the team collaboration industry. As the Salesforce-to-be in OOO, we’re happy to launch the SFDC connector as our first third-party app integration!

Our connector helps your engineers stay synced with the sales reps in full transparency by seamlessly linking any SFDC object and field data with relevant Swit task cards. Plus, it helps your sales reps focus on managing contacts, tracking opportunities, and closing deals faster. Try Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM platform powered by Swit, the world’s BEST collaboration hub (available in the Advanced tier). Digitalize your SDRs!