If you hear about a CRM failure, what is the first thing that comes to mind?  Likely, it’s that the sales team failed to adopt it and/or didn’t enter useful data.  No doubt, the value of a CRM is dependent on adoption and usage by the sales team. But let’s not be too quick to blame the sales force.  Is your CRM giving the sales team what it needs?

While threatening to withhold commissions might drive adoption, does it really produce the desired VALUE that companies need from their CRM?  Probably not!  The key to success, of course, is valuable and useful information.  But that value can’t just be delivered to the organization through input from the sales force.  In order to entice salespeople to participate in the CRM, they need to be provided with information to make their jobs easier, and improve their relationships with their customers.  So what information can be provided to the users to entice them into the CRM in the first place, and motivate them to continue using it?

Many of our customers have found that answer in their business systems.  Whether it’s sales history, project or customer financial data, proposals, inventory, installation schedules or AR activity, transactional business systems are a treasure trove of critical information that salespeople don’t typically have access to due to things like ERP license costs or the lack of time to find and correlate the information in these systems themselves.

Enter system integration.  By opening up the CRM to integrate with other business systems in the ecosystem, company leaders can pick and choose the best information to provide their sales organization to enrich their day-to-day interactions with their customers.  By linking this data to customers, leads and opportunities in the CRM, salespeople no longer need to waste time hunting for this information on multiple systems.  The CRM becomes their central portal.  Examples could include:

1. When a sales person can analyze the buying history of their customers, it allow them to anticipate when their next buying cycle may occur, and the products that may be most appropriate for updates or replacement. 
2. If a salesperson can have ready access to inventory for products that his customer regularly consumes, they can provide advance notice for the best timing to place orders.
3. If a salesperson has visibility to AR activity for all of their customers, they can have proactive conversations about project completion requirements.

Empact IT has extensive experience integrating with CRM systems including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Hubspot and our own Matrix for CRM platform.  If your business systems have well defined APIs, or even if they don’t, our Matrix for Integration platform has the technology to bring data together from multiple systems to enhance their CRM experience!

Empact IT is ready to help you with your integration needs including:

1. Enterprise data inventory and mapping
2. Platform and data integration planning
3. API development
4. System and data integration consolidation and transformation using our cost effective Matrix for Integration cloud platform.

For more information, visit us at our website at https://empactit.com/ or get in touch by phone at 1-833-EMPACTIT or email at info@empactit.com.  We’re looking forward to hearing from you!