Aligning the efforts of your Sales and Finance teams with Sage Intacct & Salesforce CRM
What happens when your customers have questions about an invoice or the timing of a renewal? They typically ask their main point of contact: the sales person they have been speaking to since the beginning. However, when your financial system and your Customer Resource Management (CRM) solution are separate, your sales person has to pass the request onto your accounting team, cross reference the information they have with the details they have access to in the CRM and eventually get back to the customer with an answer. When your departments are working with segregated solutions that don’t integrate data or give the other department access, it means that customer requests take time to answer, and we all know that a happy customer is a customer that doesn’t have to wait.
Sage Intacct is considered to be the leading cloud financial management solution on the market, and one of the significant benefits it offers is a seamless integration with Salesforce, the leading cloud CRM on the market. We all know the challenges that you’re likely to encounter when your accounting software isn’t integrated with your CRM, but let’s discuss the benefits that you experience when they are integrated.
Sage Intacct and Salesforce – making your life easy
EFFORTLESS INTEGRATION
Just because two solutions can integrate, doesn’t mean that integration will be easy to execute. However in the case of Sage Intacct and Salesforce it’s as simple as a few clicks of your mouse, since the connector that integrates the two solutions was pre-built on the Salesforce1 platform. That means that the integration doesn’t require any customization or third-party assistance, and has the added benefit of also making it easy to keep both solutions up-to-date.
PREVENT YOUR ACCOUNTING TEAM FROM GETTING DELAYED BY SALES REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION
As a business, your reputation has a huge impact on your success and one of the quickest ways to damage that reputation is unhappy customers. What makes customers unhappy? To name just a few examples: inaccurate information, lack of transparency, and having to wait a long time for answers to seemingly simple questions. Simple questions can be hard to answer though, when you have incomplete data scattered across multiple systems.
The Sage Intacct & Salesforce integration gives your sales team access to the financial information they need to properly address customer requests, such as the timing and financial impact of revenues, renewals and upgrades, or even simple requests such as when they can expect their next invoice. It also gives your sales team access to order history, and real-time visibility of inventory and fulfillment, to ensure they’re keeping customers satisfied with accurate and realistic lead times.
PREVENT REQUESTS FROM BEING LOST IN EMAIL
As beneficial as integrating your solutions is, it still won’t replace the power of departments working together to tap into each other’s knowledge and insight – but it’s easy for a quick request or question sent via email to get lost in the shuffle of a full inbox. Salesforce Chatter is an instant messaging system embedded directly into Sage Intacct, providing an easy way for your Sales and Accounting departments to communicate so they can maximize productivity by getting the answers they need quickly, while simultaneously reducing email backlog.
AUTOMATED & EFFICIENT SALES PROCESS
The Sage Intacct and Salesforce integration also helps improve employee productivity and data accuracy by enabling you to enter information into your system once, and move it through the sales cycle without having to manually re-create or enter customer & order information again. Once the information has been added it only takes one-click to turn the Salesforce quote into a Sage Intacct order. Similarly, it’s one click to create projects and tasks from a Salesforce opportunity. We’ll say that again – you enter the data ONE TIME and it takes ONE click to make a quote, order, or project.
Chances are your sales team is always busy balancing multiple clients and prospects, and while this can lead to exciting wins, it can also lead to missed opportunities. Visibility is essential and the robust integration of Sage Intacct and Salesforce ensures that your sales team can view projects from start to finish, and track status & timelines all within Salesforce. To make things easy they can also set up Salesforce to automatically create opportunities for renewal sales based on original contract terms. This makes your customers happy with better service, and you (and your sales team) happy with better sales numbers.
ACCOUNTING BENEFITS TOO
We’ve been talking a lot about the benefits to the sales team, but your Accounting department will benefit too. Your Accounting team will have visibility into customer account details from Salesforce, directly within Sage Intacct . Salesforce will also automatically be updated with order, billing and payment information to minimize requests from Sales, and you can set up Sage Intacct to automatically trigger invoicing and revenue recognition when a Salesforce order is recorded.
When deciding which business management software is the right fit for your business, your focus should be on integrating the different systems your departments need, with the aim of centralizing data to optimize processes & communication. The tight-knit integration of Sage Intacct and Salesforce does exactly that, and will empower your teams with the information they need to be productive and effective in their roles.