In the early 2000s, there was a small boy with a dream. He dreamed that one day there would be one package of software to do it all. Well, the boy wasn’t that small, and his name was Bill Gates. Bill wasn’t the only one with that dream though. The executives of SAP, Oracle and others believed the same and set out to create software empires to do that.
However, 20 years on, the world isn’t as they imagined. The business software users of the world rejected homogenisation at the expense of usability. There is no point in having the supposed frictionless-ness of one package of software to run every element of your business if it delivers those elements in a sub-par experience. Instead, the best businesses run a suite of three to five best-of-breed packages but utilise the latest integration technology to help bind them together seamlessly.
For over 10 years, BuddyCRM has been at the forefront of this approach. Offering best in class sales, marketing and service SaaS software whilst making it ridiculously easy to integrate with other key packages in your business such as your accounting software, ERP or technical estimating tool.
Here are our top 5 most powerful integrations for your CRM Software and tips on how to do it. This is just a flavour of what we can do, if you’d like a bespoke consultation, please don’t hesitate to reach out to one of our team.
1. Web leads sent automatically to CRM
A huge amount of research data shows that the company that responds fastest to an inbound lead will be the one who wins it.
First impressions count!
Whilst BuddyCRM offers easy-to-build forms to embed in your website and landing pages, we also understand that sometimes businesses have complex logic that can only be handled through your own website custom coding. No problem, simply whip out the API magic wand Zapier and plug your website into your BuddyCRM account. This enables you to perform validation and assign leads to the correct person.
This is just one of the many out-of-the-box Zapier “Zaps” available. We can also customise to your business need with our “Setup all-inclusive” pricing.
2. Sync your sales data into CRM
The biggest complaint from good salespeople is often the lack of insight into their accounts from business intelligence. I remember one customer saying that before they bought BuddyCRM, they were a “mushroom”, by which they then explained they were “kept in the dark and fed excrement”!
The Single Customer View in BuddyCRM gives your sales, marketing, and customer service teams the information they neec to provide the best customer experience and make each customer interaction cost-effective. In addition, BuddyCRM allows simple integration with almost any modern (or semi-modern!) accounting or ERP software to feed headline and detailed sales information into company record cards daily or more frequently.
3. Opportunity win in CRM creates invoice in accounts package
One area we see consistent duplication of effort is the hand-off of sales processing to the accounting department. This duplication causes an increase in staff time, potential errors and delays in processing, and getting invoices paid by clients.
Using BuddyCRM’s built in integrations (or webhooks) – this process can be automated to send the details of a won opportunity directly to your accounting packages such as Xero or Quickbooks. This removes the need for double entry and ensures invoices are seamlessly produced and sent to clients, reducing the time taken for money to come in!
4. Opportunity win in CRM creates delivery job in ERP
Similar to sending won opportunities to your accounting package, for many businesses, the next step in delivery is not just creating the invoice but sending the job to an Enterprise Resource Planning or other fulfilment tools. These may be systems such as SAP or Sage. BuddyCRM can create workflows to send the details of a client and won opportunity to these 3rd party tools to improve speed, reduce errors and remove unnecessary admin.
5. Opportunity created in CRM sends job to estimating tool
Many organisations don’t have as simple a sales model as identifying opportunities and then closing an opportunity. There may be a whole pre-sales element in between.
Whilst BuddyCRM has a huge amount of rich functionality in terms of opportunity management, quotation and proposal production, there are some business cases where the pre-sales process is highly technical and industry-specific.
Therefore, rather than try and give an non-optimal solution here, BuddyCRM allows you to easily send key opportunity data to third party pre-sales or estimating tools to enable that best-of-class system to do the job it was designed for. The salesperson may send this manually or automated when the opportunity hits a certain % progression. Key data can then be sent back to the BuddyCRM opportunity once it is ready to be taken to the next stage in the sales process.
Summary
Too often, integrations cost the earth and encourage businesses to leave their systems siloed, giving poor business visibility and lots of wasted admin time. Overcoming this is BuddyCRM’s mission, and as such, we have made it super straightforward.
Give us a call to discuss setting up your integrations with third-party software and take advantage of automation in your team.