Customer relationship management (CRM) software enables businesses to manage the full sales and marketing mix, such as accounts and contacts, activities, opportunity management and campaigns, all in one platform.
However, to fully exploit the potential of CRM software, provide organisations with a 360 degree view of activities, and to realise substantial benefits around time to market, improved cash flow and agility, CRM software needs to be integrated with other business systems.
BPA Platform can integrate CRM software (Agile CRM, Brightstar CRM, SugarCRM ERP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Infor CRM, Sage CRM, Salesforce) with accounting, courier, eCommerce or ERP systems to synchronise customer data in real-time, thus eliminating manual processing and making sure that each system has accurate, up-to-date information.
Pushing business data into CRM systems
Everything to do with new product information, changes to pricing, the availability of stock and setting up of new suppliers, usually happens in an ERP or warehouse management system. All this information can be automatically uploaded into sales team management software or CRM system, enabling sales staff to work solely in that product rather than having to switch between systems, and vice versa.
Invoice details and tracking numbers can also be pulled back from the warehouse following completion of the order and uploaded into a CRM system so that the sales team has a better picture of what has been invoiced and dispatched.
Accounting and ERP software will contain useful financial data that can be utilised by the sales and marketing teams: what invoices are outstanding, sales and purchases history, average days to pay etc. This information needs to be pushed into a CRM system so that they have complete visibility and able to assess new or existing customers.
BPA Platform can be used to automate workflows based on this data (invoice is now overdue = follow up call, invoice has been paid = thank you call) by retrieving it from the accounting or ERP software and pushing it into the CRM system.
CRM integration with marketing applications
Most CRM systems include a wide range of sales and marketing features to help drive business campaigns and strategies. However, many businesses like to use dedicated marketing applications (dotdigital, HubSpot, MailChimp, Marketo) to manage their campaigns.
As many organisations will update customer and prospect information in CRM systems, a marketing team that is using a dedicated application will want to have that information pushed into these tools so they have the most accurate system of record to use for their campaigns. Similarly, any leads generated within the marketing application need to be shared with the CRM system.
When a business lead visits a page on a website, attends a tradeshow or downloads a whitepaper, the action is often captured within the marketing application. This information will be highly important to the sales team or account manager and, therefore, a system needs to be in place to automatically notify them as well as be able to update the CRM system.
Additionally, it is a legal requirement for organisations to process email campaign unsubscribes. Each system will therefore need to be updated with these requests.
BPA Platform can easily integrate these applications and then automatically create or update marketing lists, import leads generated, process unsubscribes and hard bounces from email campaigns, or manually create and send campaign reports for analysis.
By integrating your CRM system with all your other business applications you will remove the need to manually rekey customer, prospect and lead data between business applications, improve data accuracy and drive commercial performance.
[Related Article: Exploring the long-term benefits of CRM integration].
