Saying that Salesforce is just a CRM is like saying that the Titanic was just a boat.
Its pre-packaged features power marketing, sales, and support at all kinds of companies, from mom and pop shops to enterprise sales teams to—yes—the U.S. government.
But when Marc Benioff started the company in 1999, its capabilities were relatively limited. With just basic sales forecasting tools and customer database management the real power of 20th-century Salesforce came from its groundbreaking customizability.
In fact, it was one of the first web APIs. Benioff knew that teams needed to share sales information across a bunch of different platforms and tools. With the API, users could “exploit the power of the Internet” for the first time, and customize their CRM to whatever tools they needed to use.
That’s easier said than done.
Even with its developer friendly platform, companies often require in-house developers to build the integrations necessary to run Salesforce alongside their tools—and boy, do we use a lot of tools. The average company uses over 30 cloud storage systems and around 40 marketing cloud apps. That’s a lot of integrations.
When it comes to streamlining your workflow, hooking up Salesforce pre-built integrations is crucial, whether it’s for prospect data enrichment, following up with leads, or scheduling your next demo. So here are 5 integrations to get you started—no developer necessary.
Analyze Performance with InsightSquared
Salesforce’s reporting tools have a lot of capabilities, but they’re notoriously hard to use. Because there are so many different kinds of reports to generate, a lot of companies don’t know how to get the most benefit out of Salesforce data until they use third-party reporting tools or hire a developer to build their own.
InsightSquared is a great one to get started with. It pulls data from Salesforce to generate intuitive and detailed reports, allowing you to look at your headline sales metrics (including bookings, win/loss ratio, and activities) and pipeline (opportunity stage, changes in value, pushed/pulled opportunities). Its forecasting tools also help teams use historic data from Salesforce to predict what quotas they’ll hit for the next quarter.
InsightSquared also integrates other SaaS metrics such as MRR and ARR, and can break everything down by account or representative. Their forecasting tool doesn’t just look at your current data—it compares the historical performance of your clients, and individuals on your team, to predict how long a lead will be in any given stage of the sales cycle. It also continues to track customers based on factors like the size of their plan and how they use it, even after the deal is closed.
If you’re not regularly generating reports, you’re letting your Salesforce data go to waste.
Share Calendars for Better Collaboration
The Salesforce calendar is great for individual users—if a team member schedules a demo with a prospect, they can quickly enter appointment information into their personal Salesforce calendar.
But Salesforce’s calendar doesn’t allow teams to send event invitations through Salesforce. Sharing event information with prospects and team members becomes a multi-step process. And in a collaborative team, quick information sharing, especially related to your calendar, is totally crucial.
With Cirrus Insight’s Salesforce plugin, you can sync your Salesforce calendar with all of your others so you only need to create one calendar event for one appointment. Easy team (and cross team!) visibility is made super simple, and team members won’t have to switch between their calendar and Salesforce constantly. It’s done with the click of a button.
Cirrus’ plugin is compatible with Google Office and Office 365. In addition to organizing your calendar, syncing your contacts will also make it follow-up and view past exchanges with your clients. Cirrus Insight also has email tracking, so team members are notified when your recipient opens your email, and you can see what kind of device they were using.
Enrich Your Leads With Company and Investor Data
Outbound sales is the best way to target your ideal customers. The only problem? It takes a lot of time to find those ideal customers.
Even with a talented team of SDRs to source prospects and AEs to close the deal, your team has to do a lot of digging to figure out whether a lead does, in fact, fit the description of your ideal customer profile. By integrating Mattermark with Salesforce, your Salesforce contacts are automatically enriched with exactly the data your team is looking for, from information about the size of the company to how fast they’re growing.
Your sales team has more important things to do than find this information themselves on LinkedIn. By enriching data with tools like this, they can focus on closing deals and contacting clients, not collecting information.
Add Mailing List Information to Contacts
MailChimp’s Salesforce integration is one of the most popular apps on the Salesforce app exchange—for a reason.
If you’re one of the 7 million MailChimp users out there, this integration is a must-have. It imports MailChimp email addresses into your Salesforce contacts to enrich the data you have on leads. When your team pulls up a lead in Salesforce, they can easily tell whether they’re on any of your MailChimp lists, what segments they belong to, and what their rating is.
It also works in reverse: MailChimp can collect email addresses from your Salesforce Contacts list automatically, and build a list from there, so you can reach out to a segment of prospects at once. The integration makes it really easy to schedule a drip campaign to MQLs or reach out to new customers.
Get Salesforce Information Directly In Slack with Workbot
Did you know Salesforce has a messaging app? That’s right. It’s called Chatter. While it has some Salesforce-specific capabilities, like the ability to post reports directly into a group chat, it’s not widely used because teams are using a different tool: Slack.
Slack is king of team messaging. If you’re using Slack and Salesforce, you need to download Workbot. Workbot allows you to control over 150 apps from Slack, but their Salesforce integration is especially powerful.
Workbot makes communicating Salesforce information with your team really simple. With simple commands directly from Slack, your team can gather information from Salesforce for personal use, or share it with the team. No app switching necessary!
Customize Salesforce to Close More Deals
Salesforce has come a long way since 1999. It has seemingly endless features for every business solution you can imagine. You just need the right combination for your company.
If you don’t have an in-house developer to build out the customizations your company needs, the Salesforce AppExchange is a great place to get started. There are way more than just these five integrations. To this day, there have been over 4 million installations on AppExchange. And each day, new integrations and plugins come out to make Salesforce an even more powerful tool for companies.
By customizing it to your exact needs, you can make Salesforce even more useful than you ever thought possible.