Quick And Dirty Salesforce.com Integration Strategies

When working quickly, beware distractions.

What’s the best approach for quick and dirty Salesforce.com data integration?

Here at Innoveer, we get that question a lot, and our recommendation is weigh these three approaches:

• Punt integration until later
• Use a one-off data load to get essential information into Salesforce.com
• Set up recurring batch loads (avoiding real-time when possible)

One caveat is scope: Some customers’ Salesforce.com projects require more integration from the start. Other companies, meanwhile, add in the integration but leave it switched off, at least initially. Others have no integration at all.

Regardless of the approach, for companies that want to get up and running quickly, focus on keeping integration lean and mean, if you do any at all.

Gauge Your Integration Tolerance

How can you tell which level of integration to pursue? First, audit your existing interfaces — how systems are currently integrated — and deduce what’s essential. Also compute the tradeoffs between having:

1. a longer, more expensive phase 1 of your project, versus
2. a more agile phase 1 that gets people up and running on the system, and which helps users gain familiarity with the look of the system, and how it operates.

It’s important to note that the second — more bottoms-up — approach may make you rethink your overall integration strategy. (That’s a good thing.) Notably, Salesforce.com users often find that they need less integration than they’d assumed, back before the software got implemented.

For Phase 1: Why Not Keep It Simple?

Using the least amount of integration necessary to get the job done sometimes means using no integration at all, at least for the first phase of a project. For example, one large financial services firm, an Innoveer client, opted to rapidly roll out Salesforce.com without doing any integration. Instead, it focused on getting killer new SFA capabilities into salespeople’s hands, and enticing them to adopt the software, which they did in spades. Now, building on that successful rollout, it’s adding some basic integration with other systems, and may go for more complex integration in the future.

Dispatch One-Off Data Loads With Aplomb

Sometimes, however, you need legacy data in your Salesforce.com system from the get-go. For example, one Innoveer client — a manufacturing company — doesn’t just sell its products, but also schedules when they’ll be installed. Furthermore, it wanted to maintain all account and contact information in its legacy system, yet process orders and track service performance using Salesforce.com.

Accordingly, we helped the company rapidly deploy Salesforce.com, and used the Apex Data Loader (good for handling data sets that aren’t too big) to get its essential data into Salesforce.com. (That’s one huge benefit of using cloud-based CRM software: it comes with tools designed to get crucial data into the system.) Now, on a daily basis, the company has its legacy system automatically generate a flat file that gets pushed to Salesforce.com and automatically loaded via Apex, thus keeping the two systems in sync.

Leverage Quick & Dirty iFrame Integration

For a service company that’s an Innoveer client, we took a similar approach, though used Informatica Cloud Express service to handle the data load (Cast Iron would also have worked well), since there was more data than Apex could handle. The service company did a one-time load of account and contact data, which it will continue to manage using its legacy application, while it schedules service visits using Salesforce.com. (To keep the systems in sync, it’s pushing daily batch updates from the legacy application to Salesforce.com.) Furthermore, we created an iFrame to link the legacy system with Salesforce.com, which gives users the ability to update account records with schedule details from within Salesforce.com.

Extra points for style: Going forward, that company could even use style sheets to make the iFrame window in Salesforce.com identical to the actual Salesforce.com interface, so users would be none the wiser that they were interfacing with multiple systems in one window.

Use Real Time Only If Required

While we’ve detailed one-off data loads and batch data transfers, what about something faster? Well, this may come as a surprise, but beware real-time integration. That’s because it’s typically more costly to build, versus regular batch processes, since you’ll have to ensure that transferred data is perfectly formatted every time, so as to not break other systems.

Instead, consider the virtues of near-real-time integration. For example, one Innoveer client, a bank, was researching the best way to handle background checks for loans with its new Salesforce.com rollout. Previously, the bank had relied on a batch process that pushed credit check information, but only on a daily basis. The bank, however, was able to set up a faster batch process that now runs every 10 minutes. Accordingly, it’s met users’ requirements for faster access to relevant information, without having to deal with the complexity of using real-time integration.

Define Business Requirements, Then Decide Integration

As that highlights, rather than fixating on one style of integration or another, always focus on business requirements first. Then find the least complex approach that will meet those requirements. At least, that’s the strategy that we recommend if you want to keep your approach to Salesforce.com integration as quick, dirty, and effective as possible.

Learn More

To ensure that your cloud CRM program excels, review our “top 10” marketing, sales or service steps to see how your program compares to best practices and our benchmarks.

To enable organizations to identify the best way to embrace cloud-based CRM, Innoveer also helps businesses identify their business requirements through brief workshops, then plan CRM projects, select the right vendor, and implement the best CRM software (if required, in just four weeks).

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Alaskan Dude.