CRM integration: What it is, why is it essential, and 4 key integrations

A CRM is mission-critical sales technology that guides and manages interactions with current and potential customers. It helps companies build relationships with their target audience to improve the customer experience, increase sales and improve profit margins. 

Given this definition, it’s easy to see why your CRM must be integrated with the rest of your tech stack. CRM integration allows customer information to flow freely between all the applications you use to run your business. It’s a 360-degree view of customer data since your data synchronizes across all systems. 

CRM integration creates an accurate, comprehensive picture of your customers and prospects. It improves how you communicate with customers, delivering more value from every interaction.

Why integrate your CRM with other tools?

Sure, you can run your CRM without integrating it with your other systems, but you’ll be missing out on a host of benefits. When you integrate your CRM, you can expect to experience the following: 

• Increased customer interaction: Delivering solid customer support should be at the top of your list to guarantee customer satisfaction. Sharing data quickly among platforms gives an up-to-the minute view of data across your business, empowering your team to serve.
• Reduced manual processes: Manually transferring data from apps to spreadsheets is labor-intensive and error-prone, and keeps  businesses from maximizing their human resources. Plus, manual processes are more prone to errors, leading to a potential decrease in accuracy and, in turn, customer satisfaction. 
• Improved reporting: When data across systems is shared, you get an end-to-end view of your organization which empowers your team and your leaders to make better, more informed decisions. 

Additional benefits include: 

• A complete view of your customers for all users
• Improved, long lasting customer relationships
• An overall increase in sales velocity

The no-code/low-code approach

So, you’re convinced that integrating your CRM is the right move. You may now be wondering how expensive and time consuming that is going to be. The answer depends upon the type of CRM you have implemented. It’s true that some CRMs will require you to work with an outside firm, require developers to write code, and it will a long time to enable your requests.

However, if you’ve selected a modern, unified CRM like Insightly, the process looks much different. Insightly’s AppConnect is a dynamic and easy-to-use, no-code integration engine. It lets you build sophisticated integrations and workflows between Insightly and hundreds of applications you use across your entire organization.

Using AppConnect, Insightly facilitates CRM integration without long development cycles. The best part is that you don’t have to be a software engineer to build integrations in your CRM system due to the intuitive, user-friendly interface. So if you’re already using Slack, GSuite, NetSuite, Oracle, or any of hundreds of other platforms, AppConnect is ready to help.

4 Essential CRM integrations for functional teams

Now you know that CRM integrations allow your team to maximize and optimize tasks and perform their jobs more effectively. The more you can integrate CRM technology with your teams and their workflows, the better you’ll be able to focus on what counts — your customers’ experience and their goals. 

You likely want all of the integrations right now, but how do you decide which to prioritize? Talk with your teams to discover and understand their frequent and high visibility needs to gain momentum when kicking off enhancement projects. This approach will simplify processes and provide a clear roadmap to help you determine and prioritize what integrations will deliver the best ROI and limit scope creep during the building sessions. The good news is that Insightly AppConnect is so easy to use, that you can tackle many integrations right away.

Finance and accounting

Empowering your team by integrating their SAP, Quickbooks, and DocuSign processes into a CRM can free them from unproductive platform toggling. They can automate the entire end-to-end process and securely sync and store vital vendor and organizational data, too.

Frequently used requests or processes (payment, invoicing, ordering, quoting, etc.) can be triggered and routed automatically to and from platforms like SAP and Quickbooks that record each step’s signing-off (DocuSign) status and history. CRM integrations also allow you to make sure all needed and required compliance documents are automatically uploaded and organized proactively, so you don’t have to put in the effort to meet regulatory filing and audit checkpoints.

Using integrated dashboards, you will never be far away from reporting status. All your spend and revenue data is ready and at your fingertips to provide critical insights and empower agile business decisions in real-time.

Human resources

Hiring great talent can be a challenge. With integrations to Talent Management platforms like Greenhouse, you can automate referrals and recruitment processes like scheduling interviews, and manage interview feedback communications effortlessly.

Enhanced integrations can also help save HR staff time by keeping job descriptions up-to-date, improving resume scoring, and surfacing better candidate choices, all while syncing it with your HR solutions and platforms.

It can take a considerable amount of time to hire someone, and you want to get them onboarded and productive as fast as possible. Integrating apps like BambooHR, Workday, and OKTA can automate onboarding and offboarding sequences for account generation or deletion, and grant permissions, benefits selection, and HR-based equipment provisioning.

IT and operations

Any downtime means a loss to the bottom line. IT integrations can help detect problems and proactively initiate incident resolution processes. Integrating your CRM with platforms like ServiceNow can automate and prioritize incident ticket generation, which will help decrease resolution times. Users can stay up to date with real-time communications via chatbots and collaboration tools like Slack. This can serve to communicate status in areas like ticket escalation, ticket assignments, and incident alerts. Help Desk staff can access best-practice knowledge libraries from multiple systems, so they have one source of truth when researching solutions.

Sales and marketing

When marketing and sales are in sync, the odds of success dramatically increase. Teams can elevate and strengthen marketing and sales impact by integrating a number of applications to help support and enhance collaboration. Some examples include:

• Keep lines of communication open with the Slack connector. Celebrate victories with closed-won deals auto-populating to a “wins” channel. Receive alerts to approve deals or when prospects are hot and ready for a call. 
• Rather than going back and forth between systems, trigger quotes and invoices via an integration with Quickbooks online, access your online store using a Shopify integration, or trigger DocuSign to get the deal sign-off now.
• Generate roll-up reports on campaign effectiveness without switching apps when you integrate with your ERP (e.g. NetSuite).
• Leverage communications tools by integrating with Gong and SalesLoft to get insights into lead qualification.

These are just a few examples of the benefits of enhancing your sales and marketing collaboration; in fact, there are hundreds of sales and marketing applications you could use to create velocity through the sales and marketing process. 

Insightly: An integrated CRM that goes beyond integration

Your business is about more than just transactions. It’s about building customer relationships that make your clients feel valued and confident about their purchases. 

You already know the importance of centralizing customer knowledge in one place, so your entire team has instant access to essential, reliable data. 

Insightly AppConnect is a powerful automation tool that makes it easy to build sophisticated integrations and workflows between Insightly and hundreds of applications you use across your entire organization. 

Test out the Insightly CRM with a free trial to see all the great features and discover how you can grow your business today.