With the CRM being the heart of most businesses, integrations between it and the key tools used throughout the organization is vital. Making CRM integrations simpler and still effective is the new expected user experience.

What does integration look like?

Users don’t want to copy and paste data between apps, upload CSVs, or write complex code. They expect data to move between apps so they can do their jobs with ease. Tasks like sending emails, booking meetings, creating invoices, and transferring orders are expected to be automated.

When selecting a CRM, this is one of the biggest points your team will need to cover. How will your CRM integrate, how will you maintain those integrations, and who will be responsible for them? 

The latter is a kicker, since SaaS applications push out new releases constantly, and your integrations can occasionally break during upgrades. You want easy integrations and the ability to keep them up and running without a developer or IT assistance.

Legacy CRMs and integrations

Legacy CRMs, like Salesforce, have a complex relationship with integrations. If you decide to build a custom Salesforce integration, you’ll need to consider factors like data mapping, what to do with duplicate records, how to handle the Salesforce ID, and batch vs. real time data exchange. These integrations will require a developer or an integration engineer who specializes in Salesforce integrations. 

Using an integration on the Salesforce AppExchange can ameliorate this process. But even that isn’t smooth sailing and will still require an integration specialist. Apps available on the Salesforce AppExchange can be either managed or unmanaged packages. You can make changes to the unmanaged packages, but not to managed packages, so your ability to get the integration to work in your unique environment may be limited.

CRMs like Salesforce are built for the Fortune 500, not for mid-sized businesses with realistic budgets. While an enterprise can absorb six-figure consultant fees and extra hires to facilitate integrations, the average mid-sized business doesn’t have that luxury. 

Making CRM integrations easy

Hiring integrators for CRM integrations contributes to a higher total cost of ownership, which again is fine for Fortune 500 companies, but can be a deterrent for mid-sized business. So when Insightly CRM started looking at ways to facilitate integrations, the goal was ‘no-code’ meaning that virtually anyone in your organization could create one. Using step-by-step guides, or recipes, it would be easy to connect Insightly to apps used in HR, IT, accounting and more.

Insightly partnered with Workato, a leader in enterprise automation with an eye on governance and security. Workato helps automate business workflows across cloud apps, so Insightly built its AppConnect product with Workato ‘under the hood’ to leverage the strength and reliability of an existing platform but deliver it in a convenient way to Insightly users.

Connect to the apps  that you already use

With AppConnect, you can easily build automations from Insightly to every other app you use to run your business. At launch, Insightly AppConnect included integrations to 500+ applications. 

That’s a nice number, but the most important integrations are the ones that you use in your business. Some of the most popular integrations are:

Finance/Accounting:

• Quickbooks
• Xero
• Sage

HR:

• Workday
• ADP
• BambooHR

Sales:

• Zoominfo
• Gong
• Docusign

Marketing:

• WordPress
• Asana
• PowerBI

Support:

• Calendly
• Jira
• Drift

IT/DevOps

• Slack
• Okta
• ServiceNow

eCommerce

• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• Magento

Success with AppConnect comes quickly

Based in London, the UK Screen Alliance is the trade association that represents companies working in production. They are users of Insightly CRM and AppConnect. 

CEO Neil Hatton says his team can quantify the benefit of having the apps across their business integrated with Insightly CRM using AppConnect. 

For instance, he says monthly invoicing went from a full day of work to 10 minutes of spot checking.

“We’re treating AppConnect as if we’ve gained an extra member of our team,” he said. “We’re a small team. It’s like AppConnect is a silent system. It just gets on with things in the background. That’s given us all more time to focus on working on behalf of our members and delivering the valuable activities they expect from us.” 

See AppConnect in action

To see how easy it is to integrate Insightly CRM using AppConnect, request a free demo today.

The post No-code CRM integrations? Explore Insightly AppConnect appeared first on Insightly.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration is essential to unlocking the true power of a CRM. Integrations add functionality to CRMs and build a reliable source of truth you can count on to make decisions across your entire organization by connecting every single application you use to run your business.

When done right, CRM integrations reduce organizational silos, save time, and bring an in-depth customer understanding to your entire organization. 

This clarity is where the CRM magic happens.

What is CRM integration?

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.

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