Software integrations help companies save money and time. We see it from a Customer Success perspective day in and day out. That’s why we dedicated this Pipeline CRM Webinar to this very topic.
Yep, it’s true! Integrations could boost your bottom line, get your company even more organized, and save time and money.
That’s why we’re offering a new service product offering for Pipeline CRM customers with our software solutions partner Bridge Software.
Pipeline CRM Integrations Possibilities
For Webinar Wednesday, I was joined by Jacob Leese, Director of Business Development at Bridge Software. Together we discussed the power of integrations. In this webinar, we talked about:
- How to sync Pipeline CRM with other productivity software you use and love.
- How Pipeline CRM customers are leveraging effective ROI-building integrations.
- How you can save time and money with various integrations solutions.
Transcription of the webinar below:
Speakers Name: Mark Jones, Ashley Willhalm and Jacob Leese
Jacob Leese: [0:11]
Thanks, Ashley. Good morning, everybody, or good afternoon, depending on where you are. It’s wonderful to be here. And I’m excited to share with you share some information with you guys about API integrations and how those things work. And then, you know, also show you how we, we can help make those things simpler for you and get your businesses connected with the other systems that you’re using and making sure that everything’s working together in a seamless turnkey fashion. So before we get too deep into this, I want to give some contact information. Some of you may have products that you know, that you need to integrate now, so I wanted to make sure that you had contact information right up front with direct phone number meeting that you can schedule with us or simply sending an email.
Jacob Leese: [1:05]
Jacob Leese: [1:36]
Mark Jones: [2:01]
There we go. Hello, I’m Mark Jones. So it’s going to become increasingly clear as we go through this that I’m in neither sales nor marketing. But the objective is I want to make sure that everybody understands what’s happening with in your business with integrations and what’s possible. And then what Pipeline CRM is built so you can make some good business decisions about it.
So the agenda is we’re first just going to go over what’s an API integration as far as the context of what Pipeline CRM has put together, some common questions that always come up and then how to actually do it. So when we leave this, you’ll know you know what it is and whether you want it and how to do it if you do want an integration. So let’s get some of the common questions answered up front.
Mark Jones: [3:08]
So first of mine the right webinar. So this is going to be if you have software systems in your business or, you know, as part of your business workflow. Do you want to move information in and out of with Pipeline CRM, then yes, that’s what this is about. Information, we mean, fields data, you know, make everything part of the bigger workflow.
Mark Jones: [3:34]
Second thing is do you integrate with this system or that system dynamics epic, or, you know, those types of things? And yes, what we’re talking about today is integrating Pipeline CRM with anything, anything that, you know, has a integration capability.
Mark Jones: [3:53]
The other thing people ask us is, you know, what about custom fields. We recognize that everybody’s business is unique even in the same vertical and Pipeline CRM and Bridge have put the ability to have custom fields and custom data handling right into the product as a first line feature, it’s not an Oh, you need that? Well, you know, gee, I don’t know. You know, it’s part of the architecture of the product, and how long does it take? You know, based on the last year, it’s usually about a week once we get started and get the, you know, connected to both systems. It’s about a week of, you know, actual work on our part to deliver it to you for testing and publishing. And then the most asked question is, well, what is in an API So let’s have the door slide, Jacob.
Mark Jones: [5:09]
Mark Jones: [5:45]
But it’s, it’s like the doors in an office building. So the office building is your software system like epic core. And epic core, there’s a lot of doors, we can go in and out of bring data and information in and out those doors. Each doors secure, there’s, you know, layers of access and permissions on each one. You’re only allowed to see certain things in this door and if you want to see something else, you got to go over this other door. And once you have access to door you can go in you can create new information, you can delete stuff, you can take stuff out. And you can take stuff out and carried over to another door or to another system another building and put it in. So the API is the controls the access to compartmentalize information in your software system, like in your ERP or your marketing automation software. So what the integration does is, it’s sort of like a robot messenger, it will go into this building, it’ll go to the right door, it’ll go in there, it’ll get this particular piece of information or update something. It’ll take it out, it’ll run over to the next building, which is a different piece of software, like Pipeline CRM, it’ll go to the correct door, and it’ll put the information over there and then it’ll go back and do the same thing again. And there’s points along the way where you might, you know, need to translate some of the information. It’s, you know, first name, last name over here and over in this other building, its last name, first name. And there’s an opportunity for that transformation to happen, you know, during the delivery. So the API is basically gets access to, you know, one particular piece of information and this software, and then can take it and deliver it to this other software. So take it out of epic core put it into Pipeline CRM, take it out of Pipeline CRM, put it into epic core. So that’s what we’re doing with an API integration.
Mark Jones: [8:06]
It’s, that’s a huge simplification, doing a custom integration, writing all the software, you’d be taken, you know, weeks, if not months to program all of this stuff. And you have to know the exact names of all these things, and where to put them and how to encode them and how to structure it. So Bridge and Pipeline CRM have already done all of that and that’s what this product is. It’s, it’s a ready to go API integration. We just need to know what you want to connect it to and we’ll get into the details of what you know what that means to you later.
Mark Jones: [8:47]
Jacob Leese: [8:54]
Mark Jones: [8:58]
So what’s, what gives concrete example of a recent Pipeline CRM [Yeah] API integration.
Jacob Leese: [9:07]
Yeah. So you know, we, we like to, as you’ll be able to tell throughout this presentation, we call Integration Bridges. And so a great example of a bridge we just built for a large transportation management company that is a client of Pipeline CRM. So they have leads flowing into their marketing automation tool, HubSpot, as well as hand entered leads into Pipeline CRM. So first, the obstacle is we need to make sure that we coming into HubSpot from web forms AdWords and other online lead captures are getting into Pipeline CRM, right, we want to make sure that the sales team who’s working through Pipeline CRM is able to manage the lead and get in contact with them record activities. So we need to make sure that the information is transferred, or the contact information coming in from the lead forms or other lead captures, is getting into Pipeline CRM. So in that same vein, we they have information coming into Pipeline CRM, hand entered, whether it’s somebody contacting them by phone, or they’re out of the conference, and they collect some, some information for people interested in working with them. So they enter that information into Pipeline CRM. And we need to make sure that that information is synced into HubSpot, so that the marketing team can set up the campaigns and get them get them into marketing campaigns, to either keep them on board or get them to come on board with the company. Now we add an additional layer to this bridge so that when the sales team updates the lead status or changes any information about the lead, it will also be pushed over to HubSpot, so it can update the marketing campaign or have them stop marketing altogether. If unfortunately, they’ve lost that lead. Now, the largest variable about that this and sort of the complexity behind these is that we needed to make sure that there was business logic in place that only synced information from Pipeline CRM and HubSpot when the lead entered into a certain status. Now, the reason behind that is that they only wanted to market to folks who were in a certain status, they didn’t want to market the same way to everybody. But once they were in HubSpot, and only once they’d been transferred to HubSpot, we needed to make sure that all the information updates. So on the surface, this seems like a relatively complex, you know, synchronization of data. But with, you know, utilizing the bridges that we’ve built, we were able to make this really, really simple for the client. All they needed to do was tell us what their business problem was and we went to work and got all the rest of the work figured out. Any questions about any of that? I know, it’s kind of like we said, it’s an open forum question. So if anybody has any questions about how that works, or anything like that, feel free to drop them in. But if not, I’ll hand it back to Mark so you can kind of take it to the next step.
Mark Jones: [12:12]
Mark Jones: [12:43]
Mark Jones: [13:48]
You don’t have to keep track of spreadsheets and you know go you know, run around looking for something on SharePoint or, you know, have two screens, open one ERP one Pipeline CRM, you can get all of the information you need for your Pipeline CRM activity, brought into Pipeline CRM. And then if you also need to feed other parts of the business with, you know, information from sales, you can send stuff out of Pipeline CRM to any of those other systems. So it’s, a lot of times people think it’s about, you know, reducing headcount and saving time. But the ROI is really on the reduction and errors, and the lack of, you know, the training and the supervision and error checking that you have to do with manual processes, to make sure that they’re consistent. So if anybody wants to share an anecdote, I’m sure we’ve all trained somebody on how to do this relatively simple business process, go get this out of here every morning, and update this over here, you come back a week later. And they did that for two or three days, and then thought that well, gee, it would be better if you know, I entered the data this way. Or if I did it after this time period, or whatever. And, you know, now it’s, you’re not getting the information you needed when you need it. And then the person that you talk, you know, doesn’t come in today. So you have to go do it, or somebody else has to go do it. So that’s those are, you know, sales, productivity is a really fast paced, information centric business. And there’s a lot of information that affect your customer status and so keeping all of that in one place, so it’s always accurate, and it’s updated in a timely manner is sort of why people were interested in the integrations.
Mark Jones: [16:00]
So does anybody have, want to share an anecdote or, you know, ask a question about how that’s appropriate. Go ahead and put that in the, in the box. So now we’re going to talk about how to connect other systems in your business with Pipeline CRM. So the, like we said in the, you know, the common questions, the, yeah, we’ve got one side of the bridge, connected to Pipeline CRM. And the product that bridge software makes, will allow us to connect that data to any other, you know, we call it an API enabled software. And that’s just basically any modern software that has a way to input and extract data from it. So you’re not limited by the out of the box integrations that you have with Pipeline CRM, and you’re not limited to the integrations that epic core supports or whatever you can really go and pick the best software that beats your business needs and we can, you know, get that connected to Pipeline CRM and get the data in and out. So if, if everybody in the meeting could, you know, your everybody’s here for integration. So if you could just type in the types of information or the actual software that you want to integrate with, I’d like to refer back to that later on in the presentation, where we start getting really specific about connecting to stuff. And if any of you have participated in custom integrations between you know, systems integrations and your company, we’d like to, you know, be able to talk about that as well. So, the product that Pipeline CRM is built with bridge is its cloud based. So like we have, what is it? What is it actually, it’s an application that runs in the cloud, you don’t need a server, there’s no IT team to manage anything. The capacity is, you know, it’s all the benefits of cloud stuff. It’s, it’s, it’s scalable, it’s always available, you can connect to it any place, but you don’t really need to do anything. So once its installed and running, there’s, there’s no training that’s required for your staff, nobody needs to know how to maintain it, they don’t need to know how to install it, how to back it up. It’s bridging Pipeline CRM are doing all of that for you, it’s just going to be there working day in and day out. That was pretty clear to me, if anybody still wants to know more about how it works, I’m the guy to ask, so just, you know, bring that up in the chat.
Mark Jones: [19:13]
So how do you know whether an integration is worth it? You know, are you going to get a return on that investment? Is it actually going to improve things in your business? So there’s a lot of words here. But this this slide is really just about business math. So when calculate the ROI, the all of the integrations that we’ve done, these are the things that the people went through, to try and answer that question for themselves. So what’s the cost of manually moving information in and out of ERP or you’re a marketing automation? So who makes the list? Who keeps up with the reports? Who actually does the thing? You know? Are they doing it once a day? Do they do it on demand, or the sales people doing it on the phone? They got somebody on the phone and they go looking through two or three systems, trying to get the picture of whatever it is that they need? You know, they may not be prima donnas. But are they really? Are they adding any value to the bottom line by doing that work instead of, you know, making one more call or, you know, managing, spending more time managing the account? And the other thing people wonder is, well, what’s the cost of me not doing that? What if I don’t have all of the information available to the sales people? Is that, you know, what’s the impact of not doing an integration, whether it’s manually or automatically and the cost is, time, it’s opportunity cost, it’s the training, the you know, the redundancy that you need, when people take time off or not available. And then any of those manual processes, you’re going to introduce human error. So if your business process, somebody either forgets or puts in the wrong data, what’s the cost of that to you and your business and dollars, either in lost productivity? Or maybe even a lost sale? How much does it cost for you to try and prevent those errors? Do you have two people doing the data entry? Do you have somebody that reviews and approves the information before it’s sent over to finance or before it goes into a contract? You know, what does that cost?
Mark Jones: [21:52]
Mark Jones: [22:36]
If you could put that in, we’ll be talking about you know, how to use the calculations and make those decisions. So let’s look at what the actual product is. So there’s, the pricing is really straightforward. There’s one price, it’s up front, there’s no monthly fees, it’s not based on usage, it’s, you know, what it what it costs to actually create the bridge between Pipeline CRM and epic or Pipeline CRM and dynamics or whatever it is your business. And we’ve broken it up into the two most requested pieces of Pipeline CRM you got the person, and you can move all of the data that’s in the person Pipeline CRM person area, last name, you know, email address, phone number, all that stuff in and out of Pipeline CRM into something else. And then if you are also needing to exchange information about deals, that’s, you know, an add on, that’s a second, not everybody needs that. So we we’ve broken it up into two pieces. So this is pretty easy to budget, this is how much it costs to get the two systems connected. So we don’t, we don’t want a percentage of your if you’re wildly successful, and you’ve got a million contacts, we’re not going to the price is the same. And once this is paid, and it’s set up and it’s running, it’s done, where I get to come back for more, you don’t have to do any reporting.
Mark Jones: [24:30]
So the way to execute this is, you know, call Jacob. And, you know, if you can’t get him, you know, schedule a meeting with him, there’s a, we need a little bit of information to get connected to your other system and you tell us the data that you want to exchange. And we go and configure the Bridge software in the Pipeline CRM software to exchange that, and, you know, three or four days or a week later, your information flows working. So, Jacob, did you have any questions?
Jacob Leese: [25:32]
Yeah, give me a second here. Let me go through these and find some God. So we did have a number of people mentioned, you know, epic core as a system and looking to integrate with pro core came up DocuSign, HubSpot, it’s surprising number of folks looking at a great the marketing aspect of that with Pipeline CRM So, you know, those, as we said before, those are all systems that not only ever worked with in the past, but are fully capable of being utilized with these products. So the kind of a to, to reiterate even further, the wonderful thing about this is if you have a software that needs to be connected with Pipeline CRM there is a very, very good chance that we can build it. And not only that, we can build it, but that we can build it specific to your business, make sure that all the custom business logic that you have that you need to make sure you know when a contact hits in this way, or when to create an opportunity based on something that happens in the ERP orders that are coming in it, it truly is limitless as to what the capabilities are. And we, you know, we’ve really hit the gambit, as far as integrations go to making sure that we, even the most robust of them, the most unusual integrations have sort of been able to, we’ve been able to make them sort of run of the mill, they’re there, there’s nothing that that we haven’t seen at this point. So we didn’t get a ton of questions, we got a lot of, you know, people spouting off what they were looking for, you know, telling us what kind of products they were looking at. So we understand that, you know, integrations are kind of a complicated thing. And we’ve done our best to make it as simple as easy to understand as possible. But, in fact,
Mark Jones: [27:41]
So let’s, let’s talk about the ERP’s specifically, those are, you know, I’m sure everybody that that’s got one is going to know what I’m where I’m going with this, but they’re just notoriously difficult to move data in and out of, you’ve got your SAP consultant or your dynamic consultant, and you got to get finance involved and everybody’s got their little silos of data.
The business aspect of that is, you know, it’s unchanging, and the, you know, the, the number of people that have to be involved to, you know, on the business side to talk about what the information is, and which parts of it are we going to move and all that stuff, that doesn’t change. But the technology of getting the data into Pipeline CRM is really sort of become a commodity. So the ERP is are a lot less scary. Instead of trying to program or develop what you need the screens that you need the reports you need in SAP, they’re already in Pipeline CRM you just need to get the correct information out of your ERP and in the pipeline deals were all that’s I mean, that’s why everybody bought Pipeline CRM So that’s if your businesses in that spot where you’ve got information you need locked up in your ERP this is a good way to get that onto one screen for your sales productivity. Don’t you know Sage, SAP Oracle, especially the older Sage products or the older dynamics products are usually difficult. But that’s a problem that, you know, Bridge Software Pipeline CRM have already solved for you because that’s the, you know, sort of the major integration platform that people been asking for.
Mark Jones: [29:45]
Ashley Willhalm: [30:30]
Jacob Leese: [31:00]
