For all you Salesforce users out there, you probably already know about Cloudforce – the annual conference held for Salesforce users in London. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Salesforce is a sophisticated cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system. It’s the best tool I’ve ever used and it’s free to charities and social enterprises through the Salesforce Foundation. Every year they have two massive events, Dreamforce in San Francisco and Cloudforce in London.
This year Matt and I joined the other 14,000 registered users, developers and ‘not-yet-converted’ potential customers to find out the latest news from Salesforce. Boy, were we excited! Cloudforce is like a West End show with lots of whooping and clapping and dancing! I’m not kidding, they had people in costume dancing on stage while we waited for the speakers to be clapped and cheered on stage.
I think if we didn’t already know how brilliant Salesforce was, we may have thought they were all a bunch of lunatics and run to the wine conference being held next door instead, but Salesforce really is an amazing tool, and any charity would be a fool to pass up the offer of 10 free licenses from The Salesforce Foundation. Frankly it makes us feel like dancing too.
We’ve successfully integrated it with many of our client’s websites to do amazing time saving things. Examples include:
A good example of how to integrate your CRM with your website is the work we’ve been doing with Bond. As a membership organisation, Bond use Beekeeper to manage the static content on the website and Salesforce to manage their contacts and events, along with other information not made publicly available via the website.
Rather than duplicating the data that was already stored in Salesforce for the website, we were able to connect securely to the Salesforce database and populate the website content.
For example, by recognising a member based on their login credentials the website can provide a customised interface, provide information about their organisation or allow access restricted content. The website also recognises users on an individual basis allowing them to specify preferences about their email communication, subscriptions to special interest groups and edit contact information.
Many parts of the site are designed to provide maximum benefit to members with minimal interaction from administrative staff. This takes away the need for manual data entry which reduces the margin for error and cuts administrative time.
If you want to learn more about how to integrate your website with your crm system, get in touch for a free review meeting.