Everything You Need to Know About Salesforce Integration

Salesforce is ‘THE’ ultimate platform that is ruling the charts across all industries to deliver better business operations.

As an effective CRM solution, it has improved sales operations of enterprises and its wide array of innovative products and services make it a complete package.

But how do you amplify the capabilities of Salesforce?

Add the power of integration to your Salesforce Org.

When you integrate it with the apps and tools that you have in your arsenal, you can ensure better business operations.

In this crisp read, we’ll decode why Salesforce integration is key to operational success, the challenges that can hinder your Salesforce integration, and how to ensure seamless Salesforce integration to beat the challenges of ‘disparate systems’ and ‘data silos’

Salesforce Integration-Why Go For It?

Your team’s productivity, especially when it comes to acing your digital transformation initiatives, depends on how well your data is integrated across the myriad of tools, platforms, and apps you use.

When you integrate Salesforce with other legacy systems on your tech stack, you can enhance how you run your business operations, support customers, and provide products & services to your audience.

Salesforce has many built-in integrations that can help you expand the capabilities of organizations effectively, and you can amplify it with 3rd party applications.

While Salesforce integration can seem straightforward in theory, it can be quite complex in real-life depending on your goals, business processes, and internal limitations.

Let’s understand the challenges and limitations faced during Salesforce integration.

4 Common Challenges

Data Mapping

Mapping data properly is a key component of ensuring the effective integration of disparate applications with Salesforce. Each application has different types of fields for storing information, which can make it difficult to understand how data flows across the organization.

To overcome this challenge, you’ll need to come up with a robust mapping mechanism that allows you to map data elements in an external application to the correct types of fields in Salesforce.

Duplicate Records

Duplicate records are another significant problem associated with integrating external applications with Salesforce.

It is common for companies, particularly after mergers and acquisitions, to experience the problem of importing duplicate records into Salesforce.

You can resolve this issue by using an external ID to identify data records imported into Salesforce.

Data Rate Limits

Salesforce is a multi-tenant system, it strictly enforces governor limits, which determine how you can access data – in a single call and in a single day.

Therefore, going beyond these limits can result in errors during Salesforce runtime. Understanding Salesforce’s restrictions is important to avoid such problems with ease.

Undefined Project Scope

For a successful Salesforce integration, you must be clear about the objectives you want to achieve.

Defining clear scope means understanding the scope of integration – whether you want to integrate Salesforce with your existing systems, or you are currently using Salesforce and want to integrate an additional tool.

To overcome these challenges is to follow the right steps for seamless Salesforce integration. Let’s decode what they are.

Steps for Seamless Salesforce Integration

Define Requirements

The scope of the project and the objectives should be clearly defined.

A proper plan and documentation are required to understand the business needs and technical requirements for your project. These steps should be included:

• Identify your business goals
• Identify the owner and the amount of data involved in the application
• Set your priorities
• Understand the integration standards

Prepare Your Data

Organizing and cleaning up your data before you integrate it into Salesforce can go a long way. Decide exactly what data you would like to transfer and what you would like to leave out, and ensure that you address all entry errors or duplicates at this stage.

In addition, taking a moment to update your contacts and other crucial customer information can help you get off to a good start.

Map the Data Flow

Lastly, map out the data flows across your organization.

In order to identify the best solutions for your organization, you’ll need to determine which applications you need and which applications you can use.

Analyze your organization’s data flow through:

• All data endpoints
• Potential applications’ data delivery performance analysis

Testing

Merely integrating tools isn’t enough, you need to validate functionalities and identify and fix any complexities.

In this process, you must:

• Test for information disclosure to the Guest user.
• Test for the Objects, Fields, and Records for the user permissions
• Scan for OWASP’s top 10 vulnerabilities using robust tools like Burp Suite
• Ensure that you enable IP restrictions to minimize the risk of unauthorized access

Today, organizations are working towards integrating Salesforce with their other systems or legacy systems to enhance productivity, decrease operational costs, and increase flexibility. But to ensure that you integrate systems with finesse, you need to connect with a Salesforce Consulting Partner with extensive experience and expertise.

Wish to Integrate Salesforce Seamlessly Into Your Existing Infrastructure? Talk to Us!