Salesforce is a great tool. The drawbacks of the system tend to come from the way it has been implemented, and your finance department may also be complaining that the costs simply don’t provide the right benefit to the organization. I refer specifically to Salesforce in this post because it is the market leader and it was a customer conversation specifically about Salesforce that gave me the impetus for this article, but the same also goes for other CRM systems...
The benefit of having a CRM support your sales process can be huge. Your sales team can make informed calls, keep an accurate account of conversations and the management process has measurable data to understand the effectiveness of the entire sales effort. At Flywheel we talk a lot about how technology can enhance a relationship-based approach. Salesforce is a great tool to help make that happen.
However, a system like Salesforce is only going to be useful when the data in the system is accurate. A classic narrative, I know. The information you get from this data is also only a small slice of the data available for your customer. That’s where Zapier comes in.
Zapier connects two completely different systems together. Using Zapier, you can build rules that move data from one system to another. This is a great way to make sure that Salesforce has the complete picture of your client.
A really simple example to help illustrate this is that when you sign up for a Flywheel newsletter on our website, that information goes directly into our Campaign Monitor account. But then our sales team (who work in Salesforce) has no idea that you are already on our email list. By using Zapier to setup a trigger to automatically share Campaign Monitor Subscribers into Salesforce, we can do a better job at reaching out to our clients to help them with the specific services they are interested - based on their newsletter preferences.
Someone reading this post could certainly make the point that you could do this the other way around. Or, you could just use Salesforce as your entire ecosystem for capturing all your contacts and sending newsletters. But the combination of Salesforce, Campaign Monitor and Zapier is easier to use, cheaper and much more effective.
We hope this tip helps you to integrate your sales and communications strategy! If you have questions, email us and ask - we're here to help.