Best Practices For Salesforce Integration with Third Party Applications

Integrating Salesforce with third-party applications will surely expand the horizon of opportunities for CRM users. The third-party application present in AppExchange holds a great value in the demand-supply phenomenon. They are designed to meet the unique requirements of the Salesforce users and help them elevate the quality of their business. However, Salesforce Integration with third-party applications has to be a supervised process with utmost precision and throughout quality checks.

To attain high-quality results through the integration process, businesses require to follow certain practices. In this blog, we will discuss the integration best practices in Salesforce. Before that, let’s have a look at what Salesforce integration is and what are the challenges you’ll face while integrating Salesforce with third-party applications.

What is Salesforce Integration?

Salesforce integration is the software that is designed to establish and manage the communication between Salesforce CRM and other systems like ERP. It utilizes APIs to interpret the messages that the system exchanges.

Salesforce integration offers a unified view of an organization’s various departments like supply chain, HR, ERP, and in-house software like ORACLE, SAP, and Microsoft. It brings the data of these systems together and helps enterprises to monitor and control the business processes effectively.

Challenges In Salesforce Third-Party Integrations

There are many factors affecting the integration process in Salesforce. Since we are talking about third-party applications, challenges will be both external and internal. So, let’s start with the challenges you’ll face during Salesforce Integration with third-party applications.

1. Excessive use of APIs

When you build integration applications using SOAP API or REST API, creating codes efficiently is extremely important. APIs can handle large record sets hence organizations must ensure best practices are followed to maintain code efficiency. When codes are inefficient, it results in excessive API calls. This led to poor performances and issues with Salesforce limits. You need to call process records in batches rather than one at a time to bulkify the API codes.

2. Large-scale coding and application installation

To ensure the successful implementation of the Salesforce integration process, you need to have extensive coding and multiple installations. To incorporate these codings and installments, organizations are required to update their software and infrastructure. When organizations do these frequent updates, they must track the distribution of regular updates.

3. Keeping obsolete data

Another critical challenge that people face in Salesforce integration is to propagate the old data. It affects the smooth and efficient integration process. To ensure a successful Salesforce integration process, enterprises need to remove the obsolete data and clean up the entire system before they start integrating. It is important as moving any non-useful information or records to other applications only results in duplicates. It also affects data integrity. Thus, for a seamless Salesforce integration, Organizations must ensure they flush out old insufficient data.

4. Lack of Data Management strategy

In salesforce integration projects, fixing data validation and quality issues is extremely essential. Some critical issues that we face in salesforce integration are rejecting or merging duplicate records, mapping data fields for type conflicts or custom fields, etc. To counter these complex issues, enterprises are required to plan and prepare a clear data management strategy to handle all the data management issues.

Types of Salesforce integration suitable for businesses

1. Batch Integration

People mostly look to extract and transform accounts, contacts, and opportunities from the current CRM system and load the data into Salesforce from a remote system every week. Batch Data synchronization is the most common and highly used method for data integration. It is the easiest solution to import and export a large amount of data.

2. Real-time Integration

Real-time Salesforce integration helps you in replicating the data in the other system immediately. It is one of the best types for aligning sales and marketing activities. Real-time integration is less challenging and more adequate when you want to handle errors and control queues.

3. AppExchange

Salesforce AppExchange is one of the best enterprise cloud marketplaces offering a wide range of in-built applications. In AppExchange, you get several applications that are based on several types which can be installed within the Salesforce environment. It is an excellent solution when you want to save time and money.

4. Real-time Mashups

We generally use real-time mashups to reduce the amount of data to store large files in several applications. These files can be available whenever required. They are limited to short interactions and are highly favorable for customized UIs.

Best Practices For Salesforce Integration With Third-Party Applications

After witnessing the huge block of challenges standing in the way, it’s time to remove those obstacles and ensure smooth integration. Here are best practices to entertain CRM users with Salesforce 3rd party apps.

• Prioritize Your Business Needs

Entering the Salesforce App Exchange platform to choose an application can be confusing with more than 4000 options. You might find many applications worthy of Salesforce third-party integrations. However, what you need to keep in mind are the core requirements of your company. Your business aspirations and goals should remain your priority and stop you from an unthoughtful integration.
The third-party integrations you choose should be forward-looking and benefit your business in one way or the other. This practice should be followed even before starting the search for your desired application.

• Involve Your Team

Your team would be the ones using the Salesforce 3rd party applications, so their involvement is a necessity. You should decide on the team involved in the integration process and the ones using it for your business. The particular team should be informed about the integration process, and their feedback should be entertained at the same time. Remember, there is no point in integrating the application if the ones using it remain unsatisfied. Having said this, a single person should make a unanimous decision with the support of team members.

• Competitor Research

No one can deny that competition research is the most informative process to grow your own business. And, the fact remains the same with the integration best practices Salesforce offers. You should look out for the applications integrated by your competitors. If they carry a positive impact on your competitor, so will they for yours! However, it’s not the case every time, the applications might work completely against your business needs.

What you need to do is compare the research analysis with the business needs and reach a certain conclusion based on that.

• Focus On Product Details

Before planning and integrating the third-party applications in your Salesforce CRM, product details should be read and understood. As we discussed earlier, software providers design the applications to meet certain business requirements that might completely differ from yours. Apart from that, the terms and conditions of the product including legal conditions can enhance the challenges discussed above.
The terms and conditions should align with the company usage and integration process. Remember, any leniency in this process can cause legal issues with heavy setbacks.

• Recognize The Data Type

Last but not the least, data type should be recognized as a necessary practice before Salesforce Integration with third-party applications takes place. Expected data volume, the flow of integration, the behavior of API, and the number of object fields should be recognized beforehand. It will help you make a better and more effective plan of action for the integration.
The process will also help your teamwork as a cohesive unit and collaborate to bring maximum results.

Embed Tableau in Salesforce

Salesforce Tableau integration has been the talk of the industry. Tableau software is the world-leading analytics software. Integrating Tableau CRM with Salesforce analytics helps in-

• Offers advantages of performance optimization and security.
• Making data ready for analytics
• Reduces time
• Make better business decisions

In The End!

These were the integration best practices Salesforce users must follow. The challenges we discussed earlier might sound huge and unhinged, but these practices can effectively remove the hurdles from your path. You don’t need to worry about the Salesforce 3rd party applications, as they will find their way into your CRM atmosphere with these practices. However, you would require a suitable and capable team to carry out the integration process! Ksolves with their vast experience guarantees seamless Salesforce integration with third-party applications. Ksolves will help you in Salesforce integration with third-party apps and also with Salesforce Tableau integration. We will help you with every single detail in Salesforce Tableau slack and help you through the entire integration process. Contact them now!

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