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Beyond "Stand-Alone" CRM: Where and How Best to Integrate?
The business value of CRM investments can be greatly increased if the information generated by CRM solutions can be integrated with other business applications and used to inform key business processes. How best to select where to integrate first, what to integrate, and how to measure the effects of the efforts?
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6 Answers
Great question Michael!
There are many points of integration with a CRM that companies reach for in a sort of "knee jerk" fashion - accounting, operations, inventory, ERP, etc.
Companies typically envision tremendous productivity gains from such integration. However, its important to realize that you're integrating business processes as much as you are databases and technology.
So, the best ROI will come in areas where the business process already overlap or interact, such as where a sales person requests an "order form" from accounting, which is delivered to the customer and upon approval, the salesperson returns the approved order to accounting for invoicing and collections and then hands it off to operations to deliver.
Another area that is often overlooked is integration between marketing systems and sales systems and processes. A simple example is an email marketing campaign created and executed by marketing, which drives traffic to the website, which drives "conversions" or leads for the sales team. Marketing can mulitply the ROI of these campaigns through access to customer by customer analytics - who responded to the campaign and what did they buy? Who responded but, stalled at some point in the buying process?
Great discussion!
Craig Klein
Hi Michael,
How best to integrate: try as hard as you can to use standard APIs, minimizing the customization. You want to avoid building a behemoth. Also your disparate systems will undergo asynchronous product releases with new functionality that you want to take advantage of as soon as it is released. Making your integration as vanilla as possible will facilitate this.
Where to integrate first: depends on where your greatest business advantage is to be gained. For many it is a marketing - sales integration as both groups stand to benefit, for others it will be sales - finance or sales - service.
What to integrate: For the Sales - Marketing integration, marketing can benefit from seeing the progression of leads and contacts through the sales pipeline and the associated opportunity funnel. Sales will benefit from seeing all marketing interactions with prospects and contacts, and being alerted when specific interactions happen.
Measurement: Don't expect what you don't inspect! Ask the users if the access to the new data has changed how they do their job, improved productivity? More data is not always better.
Michael,
Systems of any type should simply mirror reality. I've had the greatest success in mapping out micro and macro processes, finding where the overlaps occur (sales to marketing, sales to operations, sales to finance, operations to finance, etc) and then digging into the details of how those individual overlaps are processed. Understanding how people, data and even widgets flow between systems today will provide you with all the detail you'll need on what to integrate.
Focus on the process and the technology will always fit well...and adoption will be higher because you proved first that you needed the integration and data that comes with it.
Michael,
At the general level an integration plan would depend, as everybody mentioned above, on your business model and above everything - legacy applications. Now, in pure integration terms one always starts with an "extraction" of *existing* business rules, understanding them and then looking for the parts that can benefit from the system, which is being proposed for an integration. Only then you will know the "delta of the integration effort" and can start figuring out an answer to you question.
Just out of curiosity: what is your understanding of a standalone CRM? Do you mean hosted solutions? If you mean hosted then your question could be narrowed down to SMBs, which makes things easier to analyze in a real life scenario.
If there where now technical restrictions and no costs I would integrate any of the systems in a company with the CRM. Unfortunatelly that's not the case. An absolute must from my perspective is to integrate that system where you can get the productivity of your clients out. A CRM without the possibility of having (in best case) real time information about the money your customers bring in is only half as useful. This integration is from my experience asked from Sales, Marketing, Finance,....
The data. Start with a study of the data collected in the various systems and how those various data components relate to each other and can support each other. Start discussions with the departmental owners of that data and educate each of them on what the other has and does with what they have. Then figure out where you can find synergies or common ground. It is rarely necessary to actually integrate the various applications and the disparate proprietary operational data systems if you can "share" important elements across the datamarts or share a common data warehouse.
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