How to Integrate Any App With Salesforce (And Why You Should)

Back in the day, business owners frequently interacted with their customers on a personal level. They formed intimate relationships and often got to know each by name.

Nowadays, businesses and customers interact much differently. Between them is a rift filled with web applications and their corresponding data. It’s up to the business owners whether this will separate them or bring them closerto their employees.

If you can’t connect the dots between data points in your web applications, your processes, and your customers, you’ll be separated rather than joined—dooming your interactions with an impersonal and generic feel.

That’s the quick explanation we give our clients when talking about Salesforce integrations.

Salesforce (or your CRM, for that matter) is where your customer data lives. By maintaining a complete picture of your customer and automating actions based on that data, you can create a personal feel for your brand and operations without too much headache.

Which Applications Integrate with Salesforce?

A better question would be who doesn’t integrate with Salesforce?

Salesforce plays a huge role in delivering many business applications and is the indisputable leading provider of CRM software.

That means that when developers build custom applications, Salesforce is typically the first integration that they’re looking to build out. So you shouldn’t worry too much about your software products integrating with Salesforce. They have a strong group of open APIs (that follow industry standards such as REST and SOAP), which means integrations aren’t a problem.

That goes for your custom web applications as well—if they don’t integrate yet, we are experts at building custom web applications that integrate with Salesforce and would be happy to help you out.

Strategizing Your Salesforce Integrations

Having all your data connected in your CRM is the first step. From there, it’s about automating actions and creating insights from that data.

If you haven’t already, you should take this quick tour of the Salesforce platform. It’s pretty eye-opening to see everything that you can do in there once all of your systems are integrating into the platform.

Here are the modules that the tour consists of:

1. Building data models. This deals with objects, which are the building blocks that contain data in Salesforce.
2. Integrating data from other sources into Salesforce. This is a key function. In the example, they show a simple integration from an SAP platform, but we can integrate just about anything from anywhere (yea, we’ve done a lot of work with this and it’s pretty exciting to us).
3. Pulling in customer data from custom apps. Once again this step involves pulling in customer information from a mobile app that was built on Heroku, a Salesforce product. It doesn’t matter how your mobile app is built, however—we can create the integration for you. (or, if you don’t have a mobile app, we can build that too).
4. Connecting IoT Data. Pretty self-explanatory. Here, you’ll pull in data from connected devices.
5. Predict customer net promoter scores. This uses Einstein, Salesforce’s artificial intelligence platform.
6. Building an app for product managers. This is like a dashboard where all the data you created before can be displayed.
7. Building a process. Automated actions based on the data you gather.

It takes a little planning and know-how to execute, but you can build some incredible processes once you get all your applications and data meshing together in Salesforce.

Have integration questions for us? Want to build a custom application, then integrate it? Let’s talk.

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