Use a CRM to its full potential with integrations
The CRM category, Customer Relationship Management or Customer Relationship Management in French, is one of the most popular digital or SAAS (Software As A Service) solutions for businesses. A well-built CRM, that is to say adapted to the reality of your business, your activity and your market, will help you:
- better follow up with prospects and customers
- Get to know your customer better
- maintaining the relationship
- better maintain customer information and history
- better centralize information between several people in the same department, new recruits and even with external departments
- See more clearly the portrait of your customers
- make objective business decisions based on data
In a few years, CRM has gone from visualizing business opportunities and current quotes (sales pipeline) to a real gold mine that allows all customer data to be recorded. In this way, we ensure not only to offer a better experience to our customers but also to make more informed strategic decisions while increasing productivity.
What is the purpose of a CRM for a manufacturer?
The main functions of CRM are related to the management of the relationship with the customer because it makes it possible to optimize INTERACTIONS with the latter. CRM therefore has a direct and measurable impact on activities related to sales, marketing, i.e. how you present yourself to a customer, and customer service, i.e. interactions with the customer once the sale is over, whether they are satisfied or not.
It is possible to integrate all kinds of data related to customers, such as financial data produced by accounting software, in order to have better visibility on the profitability of customers and the products they buy. From the integration of internal data, it will be possible, for example, to know what the characteristics of the average customer are and who are the most interesting customers, in a numerical and objective way.
Listen to episode 10 on integrations at the heart of CRM
Too good to be true? Not really. As you know, we are “traced” everywhere and the interoperability of systems (very clever and complicated words to say that two or more software programs talk to each other) makes it possible to avoid repeated data entry, which is a big source of irritation in all organizations. It also facilitates exchanges between technological platforms in order to more easily cross-reference data and improve monitoring and business intelligence. On the one hand, customers expect to be known and want a partner they can trust, which is especially true in B2B. On the other hand, within companies, information management is increasingly crucial.
“You get used to information being available at the click of a button. Synergies between different systems and data synchronization are the backbone of digital management systems.”
In summary, a CRM is used to optimize interactions with customers and allows you to digitize activities and business intelligence in your sales, marketing and customer service departments (the famous Customer Experience or CX for the more adventurous).
Integrations: Using a single platform on a daily basis with systems that talk to each other
Integration is simply a link between two or more computerized systems. If we schematize, we plug a device into a socket and the current flows. Over time, integrations became bi-directional, i.e. capable of sending and receiving information, so that systems could talk to each other.
When you decide to implement a CRM, the central question to ask yourself is how to maximize data collection while facilitating the work of my representatives? Your software, and in particular your CRM, must be open enough to be able to integrate or integrate with a wide variety of systems in order to obtain the right information but also to be able to send the right data.
For example, an integration between a CRM and accounting software can tell your sales representatives who their best customers are in terms of revenue, how many calls they made in the month, or who is waiting for a quote? The integration between the accounting system and the CRM is one of the most common and most requested integrations. It is often in accounting software that customer information is the most up-to-date (contact details of the main contact, company address, etc.). It is also in the latter that financial information resides, such as the amount of orders paid. This information, synchronized with your CRM, makes it possible in particular to associate value with your customers in real time and to make better strategic decisions. For example, a CRM will allow you to identify new needs among your customers in order to increase the amount of purchases (Upsell) to finally show you that your customers in transport are the most numerous and that their value is higher than in all other industries.
How do you integrate the systems?
There are three levels of integrations depending on the degree of customization you want and the budget available:
Native integrations
They use APIs, Application Programming Interface, that can be imaged through electrical sockets, which were developed directly by the software publisher. They are “ready to use” in your central system, a CRM for example. In concrete terms, this means that the paths between the two systems already exist, the connection is very fast and the data transmission is smooth.
Example: I am using HubSpot as a CRM and I want to connect my Quickbooks accounting software. In the “Market Place” section of HubSpot, I will find the socket that was developed by Quickbooks to connect HubSpot to it.
Strong point : Easy to set up and free.
Weak point : We are quickly limited and the most interesting uses are often not in the native API.
Intermediate integrations
Through IPAAS, Integration Platform As A Service, which can be visualized as connectors, the company that implements your CRM will create new connections between the software you use, without the need to program by code.
Example: I am using HubSpot as a CRM and I want to connect my Quickbooks accounting software to it. The native integration exists in HubSpot but does not meet the specific needs of my business. I'm going to use Integromat as a connector to create the desired path between Quickbooks and HubSpot.
Strengths : An IPAAS avoids managing a technological infrastructure and offers great flexibility. The costs are also more attractive than tailor-made programming.
Weak spots : You have to pay a subscription (count from one to several hundred dollars per month) to use it compared to native integrations which are completely free. Moreover, depending on the complexity of the request, it will have a certain limit and it will then be necessary to develop a tailor-made connector.
Custom integrations
Thanks to the code, they program a specific request that will make it possible to query and extract a certain data from software A to send it to software B and vice versa.
Example: I want IF in Quickbooks, the customer is not up to date with their payment THEN HubSpot will prevent the sales representative from creating a new quote UNTIL the claim is paid in Quickbooks.
Strong point : As long as the API is open, the possibilities are endless and the CRM can be really customized to the extreme so that the business derives its full potential.
Weak spots : It can quickly be very expensive. It is therefore necessary to ensure that personalization is critical to the proper functioning of the business in order to make the investment profitable.
How much do integrations cost?
As we said, it can be completely free (still count the fees of your integrator who must evaluate the most relevant solution according to your internal process and implement it), to a significant investment for the most complex custom integrations.
According to HubSpot, sales representatives spend 17% of their day, or about 1.5 hours out of an 8-hour day spent entering data. Here is a simple calculation that will allow you to quantify the cost of entering data on your finances and transactions.
Consider an average salary of $30/hour for an annual salary of around $60,000 for a single sales rep.
1.5 x 5 working days = 7.5 hours/week spent entering data
7.5 hours x 50 weeks (without vacation) = 375 hours per year
Total cost per year: 375 hours x $30 = $11,250
Cost on operations: 7.5 hours or almost one day per week
A single sales rep loses $11,250 per year and nearly one day per week entering data. And there is data entry everywhere, not just for sales. Now, do the math for your business with your hourly rate, department by department. We finally realize that this growth project that we have dreamed of for years would be accessible if we only optimized data entry.
In conclusion, integrations make it possible to minimize data entry and automate it in order to reduce the risk of error and allow teams to focus on tasks with higher added value for the company, such as talking to customers, identifying business opportunities through reports generated by the CRM or even better tracking prospects. They are now essential to the success of a digital transformation project because they make it possible in particular to take advantage of the full potential of CRM and to capitalize as much as possible on your productivity gains and to quietly promote the adoption of technologies within teams before moving on to the complete transformation of your business with the implementation of an ERP.
Watch our podcast episode on integrations at the heart of CRM
