Get the most out of your CRM with these integrations

To surpass a competition, a business must have various targets and goals. They can be short-term goals or can have a distant vision for the future of the company. An organization must have the necessary ingredients with which it can cook up its recipe for success. The fact is that companies generate revenue from customers well versed in every industry. Thus, managing a successful and long-term relationship with the customers becomes the sole purpose of every organization’s existence.

To ease the management of customers and daily business tasks customer relationship management (CRM) software were introduced. However, that was not enough because companies use various other apps that are not always directly related to customers but do help organizations manage themselves.

CRM data integrations are the solutions that enable apps from various developers to communicate with each other and with the CRM software. The degree of ease of use and accessibility that comes with such integrations is limitless, but then the question that arises is what integrations are best for your business.

In this article, we will try to establish the scenarios where the need for various integrations arises and how your business can gain from them. Third-party integrations help your organization in many ways:

• Data isolation is countered with the help of integrations as they seamlessly connect to the central repository, i.e., your CRM.
• The information that is collected via integrations is helpful in predicting customers’ purchase behavior and gives you the best idea of their persona which is helpful for successful sales.
• As the integrations work on a bi-directional basis, all the information is updated automatically via automation, and you always have the latest data from all the apps.

Let’s list down the essential integrations for your CRM.

Google Drive

The world is living in the cloud these days, digitally speaking. There was a time when people were not able to keep a tab of their data storage disks. Loss of critical data was one of the major concerns that businesses faced. The advancement that cloud technology has made provided the breakthrough for Google Drive to be the center of attraction for every business that prefers there to be available on the go.

Benefits of Google Drive integration with CRM:

– Accessibility to important data anywhere, anytime using CRM or Google Drive

– Flexibility of making changes to documents in real-time

– You can upload a file to Google Drive and share it across multiple records

– Files get uploaded very quickly.

– Makes your sales team efficient as the data is available to every involved team member

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation has become a very popular integration for CRM users. Apart from the use of CRM as customer relationship and sales management tools, their other utilities cannot be sidelined as they perfectly bridge the difference between marketing and sales departments.

If you are a small business that lacks the workforce of managing its marketing and sales team, then this integration can be valuable to you. For many well-established businesses, it is an add-on that smoothens the task of developing and managing the leads. Example: Active Campaign

Benefits of Integrating Active Campaign with CRM:

• Eliminating time-consuming tasks like import/export.
• Take new leads from nurture to conversion.
• Organize and plan your newsletters on the go.

Email Automation

Two-way sync between CRM and your regularly used email marketing tools like MailChimp make email tracking very quick and easy. You can manage all your email campaigns contacts inside the CRM system, which saves your time of switching between multiple windows and applications.

MailChimp CRM integration helps your email campaign in various ways:

– professional looking email campaigns

– send out newsletter, product and sales updates

– automation of the email campaigns help you save precious sales time

Google Calendar

Synchronize all your sales process related schedule keeping you up to speed with all the calls and meetings related to your deals.

This helps you stay in touch with your current and planned activities, and even if you forget, the CRM system prompts you about meetings, scheduled calls, and to-dos via email notification with the relevant calendar event details.

Benefits of Google Calendar integration with CRM:

– all your events and reminders are at one place

– sync the activities created inside your CRM with Google calendar

Cloud Telephony Integration

Companies doing hardcore sales will need this highly useful integration. Some CRM system provides the facility of making one-click calls to their users from within the system. Saving you the time of accessing and searching the numbers and making the outgoing call from the company telephone.

But, various organizations develop such apps; where some may allow multiple calls, other may charge per minute. So keep your calling needs and overall budget in mind before taking the plunge.

Example: RingCentral

Benefits of Integrating RingCentral with CRM:

• Centralize all your customer data in one place and access it from anywhere, any device.
• Call your customers from within the Salesmate with just a click.
• With click-to-call and auto-logging features, sales teams save time and meet their commitments on or before time.

Mobile CRM

The key features of CRM system can be developed for the mobile devices for providing mobility to your sales team. Many CRM systems allow access to their modules so that clients can use the functionality of Activities and Deals from anywhere. The real-time log creations and call/meeting schedules done with the help of mobile apps allow your sales team to save time and become productive.

Why do you need Integrations?

Let’s explain the need for a real-life scenario.

By using MailChimp, you can manage your email marketing campaigns, by creating your subscriber’s list. This is a very simple integration that can turn every subscriber into a lead and shoot your marketing emails. You can track who has opened your marketing emails and based on that you can make the first call, and the further follow-up calls from your CRM with integrations like RingCentral, which is a cloud-telephony service helping your sales reps to connect with your prospects and leads with single click calling.

Everyone understands that sales is not just a desk job, you have to go out on the field for setting up a meeting or following up on some. Here the mobile integrations come in handy. Many CRMs have their mobile apps that are integrated with apps like Google Maps, Calendar and much more. These integrations help your sales managers in streamlining the customer visits based on the location of their client meets.

Your sales manager is meeting with a client for lunch at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, Charlotte, NC. The meeting is scheduled for 1:00 PM and your manager still has 30 mins to spare before the meeting. The apps integrated with your CRM will let him know about any scheduled visit or follow-up call to the leads and contacts that are in the vicinity of the current meeting. This makes it easier for the manager to streamline their field day meeting as time is of immense importance for your business.

Concluding with a fact!

A CRM is never perfect because it adapts and adopts with the dynamic nature of the client and market need. CRM cannot do everything perfectly, but with such subtle integrations, users can streamline their entire workflow hence reducing application redundancy.

Salesmate has been developed with the motivation of providing all the features to the small and medium-sized businesses at a pocket-friendly budget. Salesmate CRM Integration with various apps will help you streamline your business and sales process in a subtle yet effective manner. We are ranked as one of the top CRMs to use for managing your leads by Software Suggest, so give us a try. To know more about our system feature, get in touch with us.