Salesforce Integration

How to streamline your sales processes with popular integrations to other leading platforms

What is a Salesforce Integration?

An integration is the connection of data, applications, and tools across your organization to help your teams be more efficient, productive, and agile. 

Your organization is probably already using many different software applications, and needs to rely on data pulled from multiple sources. Salesforce integrations can help minimize the need to constantly switch back and forth between tools, or endless copying and pasting and data entry admin. Or even automate certain repetitive tasks. All without a programmer.

Rather than having to manually transfer data between different systems, integrations allow you to automatically keep all information in each system up to date and in sync with each other…in real-time. 

You can also use integrations to create workflow triggers that automatically run a particular process when a specific condition is met (such as automating a thank-you email after your sales call or automatically passing contact info from your marketers to your sales team).

What are the benefits of Salesforce Integrations?

Salesforce occupies the # 1 slot in the world of CRM and offers various benefits for your business. Once you’ve set up integrations to your other primary platforms, Salesforce can help you to understand the customer needs and acquire new customers and respond faster to issues related to customer support across various channels.

Salesforce integrations are an excellent way to streamline your organization and prepare it to scale, while also pulling all the info you need to run your business, all in one place. 

Salesforce integrations can help you…

Improve your team’s productivity, by automating manual processes

Businesses are fundamentally made up of a series of processes, some completely manual and some less so. You can dramatically increase the productivity of your teams by using Salesforce Integrations to automate many of these (formerly manual) processes. 

Any time there is a standardized process, it’s a good candidate for assessing whether you can automate it with an integration. You can trigger a process to run in many different ways, such as sending an email, making a call, updating a contact in your CRM, a purchase being made, or viewing the pricing page or slide. 

Use integrations to automatically trigger followups, thank-yous, requests for testimonials, requests for referrals, and so much more. The options are endless. 

Have the data to make better decisions, by bringing all your info into Salesforce, while eliminating data entry work

Automatically sync contact info and engagement analytics from your presentations to Salesforce. Have data from all sources in front of you when it comes to deciding how best to close a deal. Usually, your sales reps need data from multiple systems, such as previously sent followups in the CRM, and records of past transactions from the accounting software. Use integrations to pull all the important sales info into Salesforce, saving your sales team from wasting time constantly switching between tools to find the relevant info. Using integrations to streamline a process that involves time-consuming tasks or data entry work generally results in dramatic improvements in productivity and efficiency. 

Reduce human error 

Human error in sales can be quite costly. When you reduce the amount of data entry and manual repetitive work, you reduce the likelihood and frequency of mistakes, while also freeing your people up to spend their time on higher impact areas. 

Scale your business more efficiently 

Regularly reviewing your processes to see what you can streamline or automate with integrations allows you to set up your business for scale. It prevents excessive time being wasted on admin, helps ensure your operations are efficient enough to be able to scale up as you grow, reduces the number of people you need to hire as you grow, and enables your team to focus on the most essential parts of your business.

Automate and streamline client onboarding 

Once a deal is closed and a sale is made, it’s time to start onboarding them. Maybe they still need to schedule the kickoff call, sign a contract, or receive and review onboarding info from you. You can leverage integrations to streamline or even fully automate much of the onboarding process for your clients. Doing this creates a more consistently positive experience for your clients and helps ensure you don’t forget a step…or take too long to get it done.

Eliminate missed calls, missed meetings, missed opportunities

How many times has someone on your team missed an important call, either because they forget, the prospect forgot, or they had some issue joining the call? You can use integrations to automatically send reminders for upcoming sales calls, to prevent missed called and missed sales. 

The #1 Salesforce Integration for Sales Presentations…

The Salesforce-Slidecast Integration

If you are looking for a better way to deliver, track, and follow up with sales presentations to your Salesforce contacts…there is one integration that stands above the rest, called Slidecast. 

Salesforce’s integration with Slidecast is a powerful remote selling platform designed to help you streamline and scale your business presentations, pitches, and product demos. Easily and efficiently build, deliver, track, and create new touchpoints from any slide-based presentation. Sync your presentation analytics to Salesforce automatically. Share the presentation with any of your Salesforce contacts in a few clicks.

More than 250,000 presentations have been delivered through the platform, with 41,000 hours spent on user presentations (that’s an average of 10 minutes of attention from each prospect on your presentations! How does your current landing page’s time-on-page compare to that?).

Using Slidecast + Salesforce gives you…

A powerful sales enablement for any slide-based pitch, presentation, or product demo

For many businesses, the pitch deck or product demo is the clincher in their sales process. Slidecast is the easiest way to create genuinely impressive audiovisual presentations. Pitch with Slidecast to keep them focused on your presentation, with you in the lead. With this integration you can create, send, and track impactful pitches, presentations, and product demos to your Salesforce contacts so you can close more deals.

Create beautiful, professional presentations in minutes, not hours

Slidecast is the easiest way to create genuinely impressive audiovisual presentations. Effortlessly create high-converting presentations, even if you’re not a graphic designer. Use built-in templates, import a PowerPoint, or use Canva’s design tools to build beautiful professional slides with Slidecast’s integration with Canva.

Deliver a pitch or presentation to their Salesforce contacts, from any device, to any device, with a single click and no software

Send presentations to your Salesforce contacts in one seamless flow, with the recipient able to follow along in real-time simply by clicking a link in their email or text message. Your presentations are mobile-responsive, interactive, trackable, and upgraded with dynamic content like GIFs, video, and fillable forms…with zero downloads or installs required. This allows users to skip many of the technical headaches that can come up in sales presentations. A powerful sales enablement tool that lets you deliver a pitch or presentation from any device, to any device, with a click.

Low-friction remote selling – deliver more pitches and close more deals with Self-Guided presentations

Slidecast has a unique feature that lets you create and deliver ‘Self-Guided’ Slidecasts, which is a presentation where audio clips guide the prospect through your pitch. This empowers sales professionals to, for example, deliver more sales presentations to prospects who missed the meeting, or those who needed to view it again because they circled back after 3 months. 

Understand your presentation’s performance with presentation analytics, synced to Salesforce

View real-time analytics on your presentations, and use powerful engagement data to send more targeted and strategic followups. Monitor presentation metrics like completion rate, time spent on each slide, when (or whether) a lead has viewed the presentation, whether they made it to your pricing slide, etc. Automatically sync contact info and engagement analytics from your presentations to Salesforce. Trigger workflows that automate time-consuming tasks related to any sales process that involves showing a slide deck. 

Create post-pitch touchpoints with text messages and voice calls 

Send and receive marketing communications through Slidecast and Salesforce. Send text messages and make phone calls. Discuss slides in real-time as your client scrolls through your presentation. Keep track of all of your communications, including calls and texts, in your Salesforce activity.

Leverage web-based presentations and skip the technical headaches

Slidecast presentations are web-based, meaning your presentations are mobile-responsive, interactive, trackable, and upgraded with dynamic content like GIFs, video, and fillable forms…with zero downloads or installs required.

How to use the Slidecast – Salesforce Integration 

First, make sure you’ve signed up for a free Slidecast account at Slidecast

Then click “Connect Salesforce + Slidecast” and use the prompts to authenticate Salesforce and Slidecast.

Pick one of the apps to use as a trigger (what you want to start your automation)

Select the specific trigger you want to use. For example Salesforce triggers could be…

Choose a resulting action from the other app (in this case is the trigger was in Salesforce, the automated action would be in Slidecast)

Configure the specific data you want to send from one app to the other, and then you are good to go, just toggle the on switch!

What are other common Salesforce integrations? (aside from Slidecast)

1. Pardot

Pardot adds B2B marketing automation to the platform, with tools for email marketing, lead management, lead tracking, and reporting. 

2. Covideo

Covideo is a tool for video email marketing. Covideo enables you to create and send a video email to prospects. Then, on Salesforce, you can track email engagement, CTA clicks, and video views. 

3. Talkdesk

Talkdesk adds a contact center to help you provide customer service from within Salesforce. The integration includes integrated voice calling, SMS messages, outbound caller ID, automated messaging and workflows, and intelligent routing of support requests to specific team members.

4. GetFeedback

GetFeedback lets you collect and manage customer feedback within Salesforce. You can easily build surveys, from scratch or from survey templates. Then, you can send and track from within Salesforce.

5. DocuSign

DocuSign lets you send, sign, track, and save contracts, service agreements, and any other document you need to be signed, all from within Salesforce. You can use pre-built templates, or create your own, and then send and track the documents through Salesforce. Recipients then electronically sign the documents, from any device. 

6. Rollup Helper

Rollup Helper is a great integration for calculating and summarizing Salesforce data with just a few clicks. You can count, sum, max, min, average, percent, text, formula, custom object, and multi-currency roll-ups. You can also automate periodic roll-ups to automate your monthly, quarterly, or annual reporting, which would previously take tons of time to do.

7. Conga Composer

Similar to DocuSign, Conga Composer lets you generate digital documents from Salesforce. You can create quotes, proposals, invoices, contracts, work orders, reports, and more using customizable templates. Then send the document as a file from Excel, Word, PDF, PowerPoint, or an HTML email. 

8. Map Plotter

Map Plotter lets you plot your customers’ locations on Google Maps. You can plot the locations of accounts, contacts, and leads and map travel routes. Great for organizations that meet with leads and customers in-person. Map Plotter can also provide travel guides for the locations, with weather reports and more.

9. 360 SMS

With 360 SMS, you can send and receive SMS, MMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, iText, and Chatbot messages from within Salesforce. You can set up SMS, MMS, CTI, and ringless voicemail campaigns and automatically update customer responses in Salesforce. You can also set up bulk, scheduled, and trigger-automated SMS so that you always reach out to customers exactly when you want to. 

10. TargetRecruit

TargetRecruit is an excellent Salesforce integration for staffing and recruiting agencies. Use it to create a fully customizable applicant tracking system so that you can find, engage, and place applicants as quickly as possible. Scout and match candidates, onboard new hires, and create timesheets and billing.

FAQS About Salesforce Integrations

How many Salesforce integrations are there?

Salesforce has 2,500+ integrations and apps

What is REST and SOAP API in Salesforce?

SOAP API and REST API are two common APIs to expose your data from force.com platform to the other platforms (JAVA , . NET ,etc) or to allow external application to invoke Apex methods.

Does Salesforce integrate with Sage?

Salesforce is fully integrated with Sage Business Cloud, the company’s digital environment for finance and people.

Which data visualization tool is integrated with Salesforce?

Salesforce integrates with Tableau. Get real-time visualizations to go along with out-of-box Salesforce reporting templates.

Why is a contact’s Company name property not syncing with Salesforce?

In some cases when a contact’s Company name property is not syncing between Salesforce and other tools, it is because the contact is trying to sync with a Salesforce CONTACT, rather than a Salesforce LEAD. Salesforce leads have the Company Name text field, not the contacts.

How to import data from excel after Salesforce integration?

To import Salesforce data into Excel, you can use the Salesforce Excel connector.

Step 1: Open Excel and go to the Data Tab →  New query → From Other sources.

Step 2: Next, select → Salesforce objects →  choose one option from Production or Custom →  enter your Salesforce credentials, if asked for.

You will have 2 options here.

Step 3: Navigator allows users to select SF objects OR use the “Load To” option to load to a table or create a connection.

What is an external id in Salesforce?

An external ID is a custom field that has the External ID attribute, meaning that it contains unique record identifiers from a system outside of Salesforce. When you select this option, the Data Import Wizard detects existing records in Salesforce with external IDs that match those values in the import file.

What are the types of Apex triggers in Salesforce?

There are two different types of Apex triggers used within Salesforce:

‘Before’ Apex Triggers (used to update or validate the value in a record before it gets saved to the Salesforce database) and ‘After’ Apex Triggers.

How does the Salesforce integration handle duplicate companies?

Some integrations can end up creating many duplicate companies. For example, when integrated with Salesforce, HubSpot removes duplicates of companies based on the Salesforce Account ID. Meaning a new contact will be added for each form submission or contact added via the HubSpot email extension.

How frequently does the Salesforce integration poll the API in a 24 hour window?

This depends on the number of accounts that need to be imported. Salesforce uses 1 API call per batch of 5000 accounts, and polls the status of the job created by Bulk API every 5 seconds

Can I set up a sandbox instance to test the Salesforce integration?

Yes – this article has more information on the details of how to do this – how to test in a salesforce sandbox