Typical Stages of Salesforce Integration

The full version was originally published at Twistellar

Delivering a seamless customer experience is a key element fuelling your business growth. Providing this kind of experience wouldn't be possible without an optimized IT landscape.

These are the signs indicating that your business may need to integrate automation processes:

Lack of unified information on customers as data is distributed among a variety of silos (systems);

Uncoordinated departments that use different automation systems leading to intermittent customer service;

There is no complete understanding of customer relations with the company, which impedes reaching the full potential of cooperation.

Integrating the Salesforce Platform into the existing IT ecosystem is one of the best-fit solutions to the above-mentioned challenges. Here are the most typical stages of Salesforce integration projects to help you make the right decisions based on best practices.

Stage 1 - Analyse

Enlist the functional components of your IT ecosystem to get a full picture of the flows of data processing and exchange between them. The diagram below shows a medium-scale IT landscape with all the main components (Sales, Marketing, Billing & Resources, BI, Data Warehousing, Event Management & Data Sync) represented with their connections and dependencies:

Basic Landscape

Don't forget to check out: Getting started with Salesforce integration patterns using MuleSoft

Stage 2 - Localize & Replace

Reveal the bottlenecks and disconnections in business processes by answering the following questions:

Where does the company have to adjust its processes to the limitations of IT systems?

Has the pace of any IT component become the blocker for organizational evolution?

Are there any scaling or performance issues faced already or expected in the foreseen future?

Such components are replaced with automation configured on existing Salesforce modules or built on the Force.com platform.

Stage 3 - Connect

The goal of this stage is to leverage the powerful integration capabilities of Salesforce and connect the remaining systems in one centrally orchestrated IT domain. The main questions to resolve are:

Define the source of truth for all corporate data;

Outline the data flows on the operational and managerial levels, build the needed metrics, reports, and dashboards for corporate management;

Connect the business processes to achieve seamless internal and customer cooperation flows.

It will allow the transformation of the existing system into a less distributed and more independent set of components, presented in the following diagram.

Salesforce Landscape

Check out an amazing Salesforce Infographic here: 9 Ways Salesforce Brings Companies and Customers Together

Stage 4 - Explore

There's a set of solutions in the Salesforce domain that have become a powerful trend in the modern cloud landscape. The leverage of these clouds assists in unifying and scaling the organizational IT ecosystem.

To sum up, it's too easy to overcomplicate the IT infrastructure by using disconnected systems with narrow specialization instead of powerful versatile platforms. However, before choosing the best tools, any organization requires a strategic vision of its IT ecosystem.

For more guidance on the matter download our free pdf guide with expert recommendations on technological aspects of Salesforce integration capabilities as well as the checklist for IT landscape optimization.

Download a free PDF-GUIDE on twistellar.com