CRM data and data integration 

Best Practices | Business & tech | Data & Reporting

by   Val Riley

Let’s explore the meaning of CRM data and data integrations. 

To start, CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) is software used by businesses to manage engagement with current and prospective customers throughout their lifecycle. Many businesses use CRM as the single source of truth for the operation. A familiar quote is, “If it’s not in the CRM, it didn’t happen.” This means that the CRM should be kept up to date with all information about the business.

When used properly, CRM software can drastically improve the sales cycle and the customer lifetime experience with your company. It has an impact in both B2B (business to business) sales growth and B2C (business to consumer) sales growth. 

For example, let’s say you run a swimming pool company. You can keep track of your customer’s pool wear and tear, recommend periodic maintenance, suggest upgrades, and offer add ons like heating panels. You can make these offers personalized to your customers to increase sales and create valuable and lasting customer relationships. 

When you integrate your CRM with the other applications, this is called CRM data integration. It makes your business more cohesive by moving data to and from your CRM to the other platforms and applications that you use to run your business. 

In this article, we’ll review the benefits of CRM integration, technical side of integrations, and the most popular applications that CRMs integrate with.

Jerome Redmond, CEO of American Truck Training on generating CRM reports to understand the financial health of his business. “If 20% of my business is coming from one source and only 5% from another, I know where to focus my efforts.”

The benefits of CRM data integration

A 360-degree view of the customer journey – With a CRM that’s integrated, your customer-facing teams (also known as your go-to-market teams) have access to all data about customers, such as customer interactions and  customer satisfaction. This can include past orders, conversation notes, communication preferences, campaign history, emails, etc. Your sales, marketing, and customer service teams will all be able to see this information. 

Avoiding errors and omissions – When you rely on people to input data across systems, errors will happen. Integrations move data automatically without human intervention, so the order data in one system matches the order data in another system. Keypunch errors are a thing of the past and your data is clean and reliable. This also means you can scale your business exponentially since data moves instantaneously vs. waiting for a human.

Align teams – When teams are working in different platforms that are not integrated, their work can be isolated to only benefiting their team. When data passes among systems, teams can see each other’s efforts and have a greater understanding of the performance of others. This encourages collaboration. For example, if the marketing team is looking for a customer quote, it’s easy to find a happy customer when you have access to the customer service call logs and tickets. 

Popular CRM integrations

If you are thinking about CRM integrations, these are the platforms that will most likely rise to the top of your list. They are the most common CRM integrations and for good reason. They offer a tremendous amount of value quickly to all stakeholders. 

Integrating CRM + marketing automation platforms

Marketing automation platforms help marketers do more with less. They automate email marketing campaigns, create landing pages, segment email address lists, score and grade leads, and much more.They also reduce the administrative tasks for marketers, allowing them to focus on more important tasks like marketing strategies aimed at potential customers. Think of the marketing automation platform as where your prospects live. Once they take steps to becoming a customer, you move them and all of the data associated with the lead into your CRM to be worked. Should that lead become a customer, they have a record in the CRM for good. Should that lead not become a customer, the record can stay in the CRM or be pushed back to the marketing automation platform to be further nurtured. 

Customers can also be targeted for your marketing automation campaigns for upsell/cross sell with data from your CRM feeding in. What have they purchased, what would make sense next and what maintenance do they need? This information can help drive upsell/cross-sell campaign com=nversion rates to current customers. 

The CRM gets updated when a lead opens emails, visits webpages or downloads content that is being tracked in the marketing automation platform. This ensures that sales reps on your sales teams  are working the hottest leads that are most ready to buy. 

If your CRM and marketing automation platform are from the same provider (like Insightly), this is one integration you won’t have to worry about. The apps are built on the same platform and therefore already integrate.

Integrating CRM + social media platforms

The stats on social media usage continue to impress and, in business, LinkedIn reigns supreme in terms of use by business leaders. According to 2024 data from HootSuite, 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn and 80% of the B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn. As such, connecting the core of your business (CRM) with a big lead driver (social media) makes sense. 

Today’s businesses leverage social media to engage with their audiences daily, solicit feedback, run ad campaigns, and deal with customer service issues that can spill over.  

Integrating your CRM with social media platforms is a must. When your CRM is integrated with social media platforms, it makes tracking, analyzing, and responding to customer queries across various channels much more coordinated and strategic.

For example, you can have fields that automatically populate in your CRM when a customer engages with your corporate social media accounts. When a user mentions a brand on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) or comments on a LinkedIn corporate post, these interactions can be sent to the CRM. Positive interactions and mentions can be considered for customer case studies or testimonials, while negative comments can trigger a task for follow-up by a customer success manager. 

The importance of social media is only going to continue to grow, so don’t miss out on collecting and acting on data from this important channel.

Integrating CRM + eCommerce software

B2C business? You need your CRM to be tightly integrated with your eCommerce platform of choice. (Psst…Insightly integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and more.) While these platforms are powerful on their own, they become more so when integrated with a CRM. It helps you create a system where transaction data from the e-commerce platform feeds into the CRM for greater customer insights and therefore improved customer experiences. 

Things like upsell and cross-sell strategies, add-ons, repeat purchases and more can be identified and acted upon with ease, creating a personalized shopping experience. Purchases are sent to the CRM and recorded so that all teams can see purchase history, recommended add-ons, maintenance requirements, and more. 

Integrating CRM and HR platforms

Firms that are competing for employees know that HR functions like a marketing team. These HR teams must target the right audiences with recruiting messages and move candidates through stages of the hiring process. An integration between your HR tool and Insightly lets you execute report fetches and retrieve all the data from the reports directly in Insightly. Use this data to update CRM records for candidates in real-time and to streamline workflows. Set up automations that trigger email sends and list adds based in the CRM based on candidate status.

Integrating CRM and ERP

Some people ask, do I need a CRM and an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) platform? The answer is yes! While they both have three letters, they are vastly different. Think of it this way: your ERP is focused on running your business internally, while your CRM is about your customers and prospects, who are external to your organization. Your ERP keeps your operation running smoothly, while your CRM keeps your customer experience at its best.

This may be the most popular integration combination in business today. Your CRM and ERP should be integrated to ensure data integrity. This means when customer data is updated in one system, it is reflected in both. For example, your customer success reps may be the first to hear about an address change of an important client. They can make the change in the CRM and be assured that the ERP will be updated and therefore the next invoice will go to the right place. 

Setting up CRM integrations

If you ask CRM consulting firms, setting up integrations is likely the #1 more important and complex task they perform. Quite frankly, integrating your CRM is pivotal to its success. 

(Note: Insightly makes this very easy with AppConnect, a middleware product that makes for low-code/no-code integrations. More on that below.)

Integration option #1 – API

API stands for Application Programming Interface. When an application has an open API, it allows other applications to communicate with it. Once the integration is set up via the API, apps can pass data back and forth seamlessly. This will require extensive coding from both organizations who wish to integrate, so expect long development cycles and a hyper-involved testing process.

Integration option #2 – P2P

P2P stands for point to point integration. According to SnapLogic, “P2P integration is ideal when you want to embed pre-built, third-party features in your application. A P2P integration may or may not involve an API. For example, if you want to add a map to your app, you can use the Google Maps API. Or, if you want to add pre-built email features to your app, you can use the Nylas API.” 

These have limits, however, so enabling multiple P2P integrations from one application is not recommended. 

Integration option #3 – Middleware

Middleware solutions are quickly becoming the preferred method of integrating systems. This is because they do much of the coding behind the scenes allowing for third-party applications that act as an intermediary, ensuring data compatibility and handling system transfer. This is often used when integrating complex systems or multiple platforms like CRM connecting to ERP systems, marketing platforms, and customer service software. An example of middleware is Zapier, Workato, and Insightly AppConnect. 

How do you set up a CRM integration?

There are four main steps in setting up your CRM integration. These must be done in order and must be checked for accuracy. 

Step 1: Map the fields that you want to integrate between the two systems.

This process, known simply as data mapping, is about determining the connection between the two data models. Essentially, you select the data field in one system that you want to work with and choose the data field in the other system that you want it to correspond with in the integration. For example, if you’d like the contact first name in one system (contact_name) to send data to the contact first name field in the other system (contact_first_name), you would map those two fields to each other. This mapping is the roadmap for how the data will be passed between the two systems. 

Step 2: Modifying data as needed

Data format modification means that you may have to change the data’s structure or format to ensure it works with the destination system. This is similar to mapping, but it goes one step further to ensure the data is compatible with the system it is moving to. For example, one system may use Zip+4 while the other may not. You need to account for this in data modification. 

Step 3: Sync your data

Data synchronization keeps two sets of data consistent with each other using continuously running syncing processes. The data is checked in the first system, and then changes are detected and mirrored in the second system. You can set up a time schedule for syncs or do them in real time as changes occur using webhooks. 

Step 4: Continuous operation

Your data is syncing – great. But what happens if that sync fails? Once your sync is set up, you’ll want to ensure it’s running smoothly every day. Should an issue arise, you’ll want to detect it instantly, alert the proper team members, report the issue thoroughly, and then resolve it immediately. 

Ready to integrate your CRM?

Insightly CRM is easy to integrate using AppConnect, a middleware tool that facilitates drag and drop integrations. Choose Insightly CRM for your sales team, then add on Insightly Marketing for your marketing team and Insightly Service for your customer support team. Start today with a free demo, or watch a demo on demand of all four products.