CRM B2B Data Integration Best Practices

For B2B companies, customer relationships are of core importance. The more dexterous they are at handling their customer relationships, the more likely their longevity. The tools available out there for that very purpose — mainly CRMs — help to store and manage under one roof all available information about each company account, follow their route along the sales funnel and further, track and share among relevant employees the interactions history, along with other useful data-related benefits. However, it’s not as simple as it may sound.

There is one main issue related to using CRMs, emerging from the fact that usually the data you need in your CRM normally originates from or is stored somewhere else, be it another tool, database or platform. According to HubSpot, 27% of salespeople are spending at least an hour daily on data entry, and about 23% feel like manual data entry is the leading challenge they have to face when using their CRM. The more effective these salespeople, the more wasted time costs businesses. Moreover, manually entered data is static, so pretty soon it may become inaccurate and outdated. According to various sources, more than 30% of data decay each year.

Generally speaking, data integration may take three forms. These include manual entry, as well as automated and engineered integration. The main issues with manual data entry were described just above. Automated and engineered integrations both use webhooks and APIs. The difference is that automated ones are usually synchronizing and…