CRM integration

Most people who get in touch about CRM integration are in one of two situations. Either your sales team already uses a CRM and you want data in it that currently lives somewhere else. Or you’ve picked a new CRM and it needs to talk to the systems you already have. The connection itself is rarely the hard part, and the right approach depends on the systems.

Data into the CRM you already have

The data might come from your website, a webshop, one of your own systems or a spreadsheet. Wherever it comes from, a few things need deciding before anything is sent in:

• How a new record is matched to a customer who already exists, so the same person doesn’t become a new contact every time.
• Which system wins when the data doesn’t agree.
• Where the record stays if the CRM doesn’t respond.

We run a connection like this ourselves. The contact form on our website goes through our own API into HighLevel, and each enquiry is saved in our own database before it’s sent on. If the CRM is down, the enquiry is still with us.

How do you connect a new CRM to the systems you already have?

This is the same question from the other direction. The CRM is new, and the systems around it have been there for years. They might be systems built for your business, or ones from a vendor, such as Fortnox or Visma. How much work it takes depends largely on what APIs those systems have, if any.

We’ve connected Salesforce to a client’s internal invoicing system and to an older internal CRM that was still in use alongside it, with data flowing both ways. An old CRM can stay on for a while, but only if it’s decided where each piece of data may be changed.

Salesforce, HubSpot and other CRMs

We’ve built against Salesforce, and we run HighLevel in our own business. HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Lime, SuperOffice and Upsales all have APIs, but they differ in permissions, in how much you’re allowed to fetch and in how their data models look. We look at that before we promise anything.

For the ERP side, see ERP integration. If more of your own systems need to talk to each other, that’s API integration.