CRM and ERP connectivity synchronize these software systems together seamlessly, guaranteeing accurate, consistent information to enhance customer satisfaction, customer interactions, customer services, potential customer, customer retention, sales growth and productivity in any organization. In your company's case, departments covered by both systems might differ, as do their use cases - so data integration guarantees accurate and up-to-date info that results in one source of truth for optimal performance and customer experience.
Why Should You Integrate Them?
Enterprise resource planning or ERP software will cover data across your entire company. An ERP system will likely prove invaluable for most eCommerce organizations encompassing divisions like supply chain management, procurement, accounting and human resources - for instance, SAP NetSuite or Epicor Prophet 21 may offer these features, among many more.
CRM (customer relationship management) systems are essential in supporting marketing and sales teams during transition periods, keeping track of data on clients, prospects, and previous leads; examples such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, HubSpot, and Salesforce may serve this function well.
Larger and core business processes need both. Common ERP programs don't offer all CRM platform functionality, while ERP provides company wide data that would otherwise be difficult to compile via CRM platforms.
The Benefits Of CRM-ERP Integration
Your business decisions may save time and resources by CRM and ERP integration, which reduce human data entry while guaranteeing accurate front-office employee views of backend data. Incorporating such solutions will lead to improved client interactions and faster resolution of company demands more efficiently than before.
Compare some benefits against current procedures before leaping ERP and CRM integration systems to one single integrated platform.
More Accurate Quotes, Discounts, And Upsells
With integrated technology, sales teams can now gain real-time insight into inventory management and timelines in an almost real-time format from an all-angle view. Not only can prices be modified according to upsells/cross sells/direct consumer purchases two goods that match well with manufacturing operations, but your staff will be better at creating accurate quotes due to all this intelligence gathering.
Your operations could quickly recognize new or impending sales orders that require their services, and make plans accordingly for their fulfillment. More accuracy results from closer cohesion between operations and sales teams.
Faster Sales Cycles
Integrating high-quality applications can shorten sales cycles and produce offers with greater precision. Processes that rely on teams physically sharing spreadsheets or other forms of data manually can be time-consuming and may take additional steps before creating estimates or concluding transactions, like taking extra steps to validate data before producing assessments or transactions; alternatively, they could forego these steps altogether and give misleading quotations resulting in annoying delivery delays and damaged trust between buyers and suppliers.
Better Customer Satisfaction
Client service issues typically don't surface immediately after closing a sale when client data is stored in two different places. Yet, over time, the two data sets could become increasingly disparate, leading to customer service teams dissatisfaction and problems with corporate operations.
When your contact moves on or is promoted, their fulfillment team should notify sales teams. Unfortunately, that can sometimes leave sales teams unaware and cause confusion or even more serious complications down the road.
Clearer Insights And Forecasting
Sales teams can more accurately forecast future sales with access to client data from other departments. If a representative expects to close an important renewal deal but discovers instead that payment has fallen three months late, their projections might need adjusting accordingly. Real-time data can quickly become siloed, leaving it unavailable for teams to use to anticipate future occurrences and make accurate forecasting impossible. This leads to poor decision-making and incorrect leadership, resulting in inaccurate predictions if created from scratch instead. Designing such systems allows more reliable forecasting predictions.
Optimize Efficiency And Profitability
According to Salesforce research, sales representatives spend as much as 21% of their time searching for missing data, including searching through redundant files or comparing files between systems to see which has the latest updates. Your staff are potentially wasting valuable hours.
Your team can save time with an integrated CRM-ERP interface by creating a single source of truth for data collection and examination. While your staff might be used to examining data manually, an integration can reduce constraints that otherwise impede progress; with effective integrations, you can handle more accounts without compromising efficiency or scaling capabilities.
Most Common Integration Touchpoints
Any field shared between CRM and ERP systems could serve as an integration touchpoint; however, certain ones will likely be more widely adopted and easier to include than others; be sure to select an optimal starting point.
- Account Information. For business intelligence just starting with a CRM-ERP interface, synchronizing data on invoicing, shipping, contact details, and payment methods offers some of the greatest rewards.
- Information About Their Contact Info. Frequently, the key details regarding your primary contacts are their phone number, email address and any other pertinent contact info - not so much their overall company info.
- Costing. Pricing is precise and transparent throughout your company as all prices remain aligned across it.
- History of Orders. Your sales team can use customer orders and payment history to effectively tailor offers, such as offering preferential terms or courtesy reminders when appropriate.
- Sales professionals may keep an informal mental list of past discounts, promotions and sales pipeline strategies; however, observing this data organized and coordinated across departments brings many advantages.
- Inventory Status. Sales processes teams can offer customers products that are in stock or have realistic delivery dates using real-time inventory status data.
- Dates of Shipment. Accurate data helps your fulfillment and sales staff anticipate outcomes more precisely in today's volatile supply chain, ultimately creating happier consumers.
- Sales forecasting professionals can more precisely forecast sales from prospects by reviewing purchase history data and using it to adjust pricing based on past quotations and volumes.
Integration Best Practices
Integrating CRMs and ERPs is becoming more widespread, sharing information between systems for improved marketing, customer support, customer communication, customer base, customer contacts, customer service interactions, sales reps performance and overall business operations. If implemented effectively, connecting CRM ERP can simplify your life; here are a few best practices you should remember before integrating these two programs.
Upgrade Legacy Systems
Integrating ERP and CRM solutions can increase productivity and efficiency within any company, yet implementing such integration requires spending money, time, effort and other resources to complete. If configured on old systems, updating could require going through this whole procedure again when updating (or when the old one breaks).
Integrating on-premise systems is one of the biggest headaches. Due to factors like bandwidth limitations and server outages, correct integration often cannot happen smoothly. Instead of making this transition - cloud SaaS ERP/CRM solutions may offer better integration results than local programs.
Choose An Integration Platform Over Point-To-Point
Point-to-point (P2P) and application programming interface (API) application connectors can be divided into two general groups. P2P was popular during the early days of computers; since these connectors are built specifically for each platform, any changes that arise to its underlying technologies would necessitate rewriting these specific connectors.
API provides an updated approach. By taking advantage of an established and stable framework that remains functional even after platforms change, API connections are used by modern integration tools like Integrator.
Select Data Beforehand
Before beginning, decide exactly which data you intend to sync between ERP and CRM systems. Though adjustments can always be made later on if needed, failure to plan could cause confusion or issues later down the road. Before initiating, select the most common data touchpoints from above and consult all pertinent departments.
Determine Sync Frequency
Your team has several options for updating data sources - manually or automated - every few minutes or once every month, making plans accordingly for their refresh frequency and consumption of resources. While less frequent updates consume fewer resources overall, they could cost productivity gains in lost productivity improvements from not meeting close enough distance between updates so no data goes unaccounted for.
Integrator allows you to choose between Batch and Dynamic synchronization options for pipe synchronization. The Batch gathers and unifies all data simultaneously at regular intervals; dynamic updates occur by fetching data directly in real-time. While Batch provides superior performance and is the more commonly utilized approach to this practice, Dynamic is faster.
Common Issues And Troubleshooting
Now that we understand what constitutes fundamental knowledge for system integration, let's review some frequent challenges which could occur and how best to avoid them.
Data Isn't Standardized
ERP and CRM apps both record similar information; however, they must first be combined as two distinct platforms. Therefore, data stored may differ and require clarification before merging together; additionally, establishing data entry formats before going live is also a smart practice.
Data Is Outdated
Substantial amounts of outdated data being synchronized across platforms are one of the primary issues with ERP CRM data connections, often creating more issues than it resolves. Resynchronizing outdated information may create further complications than it solves.
Dun & Bradstreet research shows that 91% of CRM data is incomplete. Before beginning integration efforts, ensure you filter, clean or archive data if it seems similar - otherwise, creating an unwieldy system could become far more cumbersome than expected.
Problems During Deployment
Finally, business growth often runs into unexpected issues upon initiating integration projects. While it is impossible to anticipate every possible event that could arise when going online, inadequate testing before deployment remains one of the top most frequent causes for concern.
Inspect all pipes multiple times before beginning the integration process, since any problems that arise during deployment could become harder to solve once in two places.
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Conclusion
Integrating ERP and CRM systems can elevate your company to new heights. For long-term success, select an easy, seamless integration single platform. Enterprises must establish an ERP-CRM connection to remain competitive given customers' instantaneous demands for results; business requirements of all sizes across both B2B and B2C industries should implement smooth integration between platforms to stay profitable; future advancements of ERP-CRM integration may focus on optimizing user experiences while increasing automation intelligence, giving decision-makers access to real-time information etc.