By Gil Lantini, Co-Founder, Integrated Media Group
Salesforce is the undisputed leader in the CRM world. As a Salesforce Partner, we’ve had the benefit of working with clients with a wide variety of needs when it comes to how Salesforce will help them increase productivity, efficiency and revenue. Outside of its core functionality, Salesforce has thousands of Apps available on the App Exchange that provide additional functionality outside of the core CRM capabilities. Here are my top 5 favorite Salesforce integrations that help me stay productive, save time and maximize the use of my CRM.
Cirrus Insight
This one tops my list because it easily gets the most use. Cirrus Insight is a Google (or Outlook) plug-in that integrates your email and calendar with Salesforce. Right from within Gmail, I’m able to see existing Salesforce data on anyone that I’m emailing. Have a client that’s not in Salesforce? Not a problem! You can add leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and tasks to Salesforce without ever leaving your inbox. My other two favorite features are the ability to log all email conversations automatically, which save to Salesforce as activities and the ease of scheduling with the direct calendar integration. If you’re used to emailing back and forth to find a time that works for a meeting, you need Cirrus!
https://www.cirrusinsight.com/
PandaDoc
While Salesforce has a very functional built in quoting tool. It doesn’t provide the flexibility for non-product based businesses to be effective. As a service organization, our quotes are very custom and deliverables are very specific. Enter PandaDoc. PandaDoc is an affordable document management solution that is fully customizable and pulls merge data directly from your Salesforce contact, account and opportunity objects. PandaDoc also notifies you when your client accesses the document and has a built in e-signature capture making it easy to get those contracts signed faster!
Quip
Last month, we shared why our team loves Quip, but it’s worth mentioning here again because of its integration with Salesforce. Quip has a direct integration with the Lightning version of Salesforce, where you can easily link your clients Quip files to their Account, Contact, Lead or Opportunity record. The other useful feature is Quip’s ability to reference Salesforce records in any document and even load Salesforce reports into spreadsheets, real-time. Think of an Excel spreadsheet with Salesforce report data that’s updated in real-time. That’s what Quip can do for you!
TaskRay
For years, our team used Basecamp as a stand-alone project manager solution. As our team grew, we found the lack of integration with our everyday systems a communication challenge. TaskRay was built with the dedicated Salesforce user in mind. As a native application, TaskRay lives directly inside your Salesforce org and looks just like another tab next to your accounts, contacts and opportunities. You can easily create and assign projects and tasks related to any of your standard objects and track progress with a variety of views. Pro-tip: integrate TaskRay with Quip Live Apps for a great way to share projects with your clients or external users.
Breadwinner
If it’s important that you have the #1 accounting software (Quickbooks) integrated with the leading CRM, then Breadwinner is for you. Breadwinner seamlessly integrates with Quickbooks online and keeps your data in sync. If you need to access account balances and invoices directly from within Salesforce, Breadwinner will definitely do the trick. You can also push invoices out of Salesforce and into Quickbooks using Breadwinner making it a great two-way solution.
