Salesforce integration: common options, types, steps & considerations

Itransition connects your Salesforce CRM with other business software using API, middleware, or connectors, helping establish a seamless data flow, eliminate manual data entry, ensure data accuracy, and foster real-time collaboration across sales, marketing, and finance teams.

Salesforce integration: common options, types, steps & considerations

Why Itransition

10+ years as a Salesforce services provider

In-house Salesforce Center of Excellence

Named among Top Salesforce Consulting Companies by Clutch

98 Salesforce certifications

Expertise in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Revenue Cloud, and other Salesforce solutions

Apps & systems we integrate with Salesforce

We leverage Salesforce’s extensive integration capabilities and other development tools to connect your CRM with cloud-based or on-premises business software you use across departments for seamless data synchronization.

Accounting

We integrate Salesforce with accounting software to enable real-time financial data syncing. This ensures sales teams see live invoice statuses and payment histories directly in the CRM, which significantly improves the accuracy of budget planning and revenue forecasting, as well as helps create more detailed customer profiles.

Common integration options
  • QuickBooks
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365
  • NetSuite
  • Sage Intacct
  • Xero

ERP

We integrate Salesforce with ERP systems to streamline data exchange between customer-facing and back-office teams. With order and shipment statuses and real-time data about inventory availability in CRM, sales representatives can easily keep existing clients up-to-date and prepare more relevant offers for potential customers. At the same time, data synced with the ERP system can help production departments respond to the demand and optimize manufacturing process and production volumes.

Common integration options
  • Oracle NetSuite
  • Acumatica
  • Infor
  • SAP
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365

Marketing automation tools

We enable integration between marketing automation software and Salesforce CRM, eliminating data silos and automating data exchange to simplify the collaboration between marketing and sales departments. Access to marketing data provides sales teams with a better visibility into customer and prospect interactions, helping them make more informed decisions to improve customer outreach, lead nurturing, and prospect engagement.

Common integration options
  • Hubspot
  • Marketo
  • Mailchimp
  • Oracle Eloqua
  • Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)

Ecommerce platforms

Our team connects Salesforce with ecommerce platforms to provide retailers with a deeper view into their customers and online sales activities. By bringing CRM and ecommerce data together, companies can identify opportunities to improve their upselling and cross-selling strategies, marketing campaigns, and customer service, creating more personalized shopping experiences and increasing customer satisfaction.

Common integration options
  • Adobe Commerce (Magento)
  • Shopify
  • WordPress
  • BigCommerce

Computer telephony

We integrate call center software with Salesforce CRM solutions to help companies increase the efficiency of their sales and service teams. Our integration allows sales agents to centralize customer interactions history, recognize and properly route incoming calls, and personalize conversations, while service teams can resolve customer inquiries more efficiently and record call details for further analysis.

Common integration options
  • Twilio
  • RingCentral
  • PhoneBurner
  • Mitel

Social media

We integrate Salesforce with social media platforms to give sales teams a seamless access to customers’ social media activity and enable them to easily capture prospects and monitor customer and lead sentiment. Based on this information, sales departments can tweak their customer engagement strategies to meet the target audience’s expectations and preferences.

Common integration options
  • Meta (Facebook)
  • Instagram
  • X (Twitter)
  • LinkedIn

Collaboration tools

By integrating Salesforce with collaboration tools like messaging apps or document management tools, we enable various business teams to conveniently collaborate and share documents. For example, Itransition has significantly streamlined our sales teams’ workflows by turning SharePoint into a document library for Salesforce.

Common integration options
  • SharePoint
  • Slack
  • Confluence
  • Google Workspace
  • DocuSign

Email & calendar applications

We synchronize contacts, emails, tasks, and calendars between Salesforce CRM and work mail and calendar apps, helping sales agents plan their workday, manage customer communication, and keep their tasks and appointments organized.

Common integration options
  • Outlook
  • Gmail
  • Google Calendar
  • Outlook Calendar

Project & IT service management software

We integrate Salesforce and IT support solutions to streamline ticket creation, task assignment, and collaboration between sales and service agents and tech teams, providing greater visibility into project statuses and priorities and ensuring more transparent and efficient handling of customer issues.

Common integration options
  • Jira
  • ClickUp
  • Asana
  • Zendesk
  • ServiceNow
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Salesforce integration options we use

Depending on your workflow automation needs, system architecture, and data exchange requirements, we select the most suitable Salesforce integration approach.

By approach

Process integration

We connect Salesforce with other business applications to coordinate and automate cross-system processes, with an action in one system triggering one or more actions in another. For example, when a sales rep closes an opportunity in Salesforce, order creation is automatically triggered in the ERP system, inventory records get updated, and a confirmation email is sent to the customer.

We use various integration mechanisms to implement process integration, including Salesforce Flow, platform events, APIs, Apex Web Services for inbound requests, and Apex callouts or Salesforce outbound messaging for outbound interactions.

User interface integration

We create a unified user interface for business processes spanning multiple systems, enabling users to access the Salesforce tools and data they need and perform different tasks without switching between applications.

Data integration

We set up data synchronization between Salesforce and other business data sources to help companies maintain consistent information across applications, reducing data silos and duplicate data entry.

By integration architecture

Point-to-point integration

We set up direct connections between Salesforce and external business applications without an intermediary integration software, configuring each integration separately. Since all point-to-point connections operate independently, this approach is suitable for simple integration scenarios involving only a small number of applications.

Hub-and-spoke integration

Our team creates a central integration hub to connect Salesforce and multiple business applications at once. Data from Salesforce and other apps is first sent to the hub, which then transforms and routes it to the target app. Since only integrations from the apps to the hub need to be configured and maintained, this approach simplifies connecting new applications with Salesforce.

Enterprise service bus (ESB)

We implement an enterprise service bus (ESB) as a middleware layer between Salesforce and other enterprise applications to centralize message routing, data transformation, protocol conversion, and system communication. This approach is suitable for large, complex integration environments with diverse systems and complex data exchange requirements.

By method of implementation

App-based integration

We help companies integrate Salesforce with other applications using ready-to-install integration platforms, such as MuleSoft Composer, Zapier, Jitterbit, and Workato. Our developers use the platforms’ prebuilt templates and point-and-click tools to accelerate the integration development process and customize them if necessary to meet specific business requirements.

Code-based integration

Our team develops custom Salesforce integrations from scratch, writing code using Apex, Salesforce’s proprietary programming language. We create these integration solutions to enable complex, high-volume, or highly specific business logic that off-the-shelf integration apps or standard connectors can’t cover.

By pattern

Fire & forget

We implement asynchronous Salesforce integrations that send requests to external systems without requiring Salesforce to wait for their completion, helping improve system responsiveness to users’ actions and reduce processing delays. For example, we use mechanisms such as Apex triggers and asynchronous Apex callouts to enable Salesforce to call on an email server for sending order shipment notifications but without waiting for confirmation that the email was delivered.

Remote call-in

We enable external systems to access and manipulate data stored in Salesforce through API requests, allowing them to retrieve, create, update, or delete records as needed. This integration approach is well-suited for automating information retrieval and record updates, such as order status changes.

Request & reply

We implement synchronous integrations that enable Salesforce to send requests to external systems, wait for their responses, and then update data accordingly. For example, when integrating Salesforce with an external payment system, we configure the integration to send payment processing requests, receive confirmation details, and automatically update the payment status in Salesforce.

Batch data synchronization

We implement batch data synchronization between Salesforce and external data sources to enable scheduled transfer of large data volumes. Our team sets up ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes to extract data from one system, transform it into the required format, and load it into another, allowing Salesforce and other systems (e.g. on-premises ERP) to periodically synchronize customer, order, and other business data.

Data virtualization

We connect multiple data sources through a single virtual layer, enabling users to access real-time data and external objects directly in Salesforce without permanently storing the data in the platform. By enabling data virtualization, we help reduce data duplication and enable users to make decisions based on heterogeneous data faster.

UI update based on data changes

We implement integrations that allow for automatic real-time updates of the Salesforce user interface when relevant data changes, enabling users to see the latest information without manually refreshing the page.

Salesforce integration roadmap

Here’s how Itransition’s experts approach and carry out a typical integration project to seamlessly connect Salesforce with any kind of business or third-party software.

1

Business analysis

We begin with a comprehensive analysis of your business needs and objectives as well as the existing IT infrastructure and determine your Salesforce integration requirements.

2

Planning

Next, we choose the integration approach, selecting the business apps to integrate with, patterns, and methods of implementation. We also decide on the project’s responsibilities, timeline, and integration tools needed.

3

Development

If we’ve decided upon a custom Salesforce integration solution, our integration experts design and develop a custom API or Salesforce connector app in line with your needs.

4

Integration

Our Salesforce developers set up the integration process between Salesforce and the target business software using an off-the-shelf or custom-built solution.

5

Testing

We perform a range of QA activities to validate the integration and locate any errors and security vulnerabilities and make sure it sustains the expected data exchange load.

6

Launch

Having validated the established integration, we launch it to the production environment for business users to access.

7

User training & support

We offer hands-on training sessions for employees and Salesforce admins to show them Salesforce integration’s capabilities. We also provide long-term maintenance services to finetune the existing integrations and introduce enhancements upon request.

Benefits of Salesforce integration

Overall, Salesforce integration with other software can help get better returns on CRM investment. Here are its key benefits:

Processes automation

Integrating Salesforce with other apps can streamline business operations and data management tasks and eliminate the need for manual data entry.

Improved data accuracy

Salesforce integration can eliminate data duplicates, inconsistencies, and human errors, thus improving data accuracy and consistency across systems.

Personalized customer experiences

Integrated with other data sources, Salesforce can deliver a 360-degree view of customer data and help companies deliver more personalized services and customer experiences.

Better decisions

Seamless data flow between Salesforce and other systems can provide a comprehensive and real-time view of business data, enabling better decision-making through improved data accuracy, timeliness, and accessibility.

Increased employee productivity

By integrating Salesforce with different business systems, companies can eliminate manual data entry and create a single source of truth for all business data, helping sales and customer support agents work more efficiently.

Streamlined collaboration

Salesforce integration with other business apps simplifies data sharing and improves cross-team and cross-department communication and collaboration.

Our Salesforce integration best practices

When integrating Salesforce with other systems, we follow several best practices to ensure integration security and data exchange reliability.

Our Salesforce integration best practices

1  
Data mapping

Before implementing the integration, we map the data, including standard and custom objects, properly to ensure it’s accurately and consistently exchanged between systems.

2  
Security

Since Salesforce is often integrated with systems containing sensitive information, we ensure that the data is protected in transit and at rest. We implement end-to-end data encryption, robust OAuth authentication, and role-based access controls to prevent unauthorized data exposure.

3  
Integration architecture

Our team designs an appropriate integration architecture based on the number of connected systems, data volumes, and data exchange requirements to enable efficient and secure data sharing while minimizing the risk of errors or data loss.

4  
Ongoing maintenance & support

On demand, we monitor and maintain Salesforce integrations to resolve any arising issues and align it with your organization’s evolving needs.

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Common Salesforce integration challenges

While Salesforce integration can provide many benefits, there are also some common challenges that organizations should overcome themselves or with the help of Salesforce consulting to see positive results.

Challenge

Solution
Poor data quality
Inconsistent data between Salesforce and external systems can lead to failed syncs and low user trust.

Implement strict data governance policies and data quality tools to clean and standardize data prior to integration, as well as enforce data validation rules to verify the quality of exchanged data. This will ensure only high-quality, standardized information is saved in your CRM system.

Data rate limits
Salesforce limits the amount of data that can be transferred in and out of the system within a certain period for the sake of the system’s stability and performance. These restrictions can pose a challenge for companies dealing with large volumes of data or performing frequent transfers.

One way to overcome this problem is to optimize data transfer by reducing the amount of data, compressing it, or using incremental updates instead of full data transfers. Another option is to apply third-party integration tools or middleware to help manage data transfer and ensure compliance with Salesforce's limits.
Additionally, an experienced Salesforce integration partner can help optimize data transfer in line with the platform's restrictions.

Prioritizing real-time integration
Companies can quickly opt for a real-time Salesforce integration as the best solution for their needs but fail to realize it is way more complex to set up and manage.

Not every business scenario requires real-time integrations and instant syncing. To choose between real-time and batch integration, carefully evaluate your business goals and integration needs based on data volume and update frequency. Often, batch processing is sufficient, as it is more cost-effective and easier to maintain, though it can cause some delay in data updates. Real-time data synchronization, on the other hand, is most relevant for critical tasks like live inventory or payment status updates, yet is more complex to implement and maintain.

Different tech stacks
If the technology stacks of Salesforce and integrated apps are not compatible, this can lead to data mapping, code migration, or testing difficulties, as well as increase the integration project’s timeline and cost.

The best solution is to use middleware or integration platforms that support different technology stacks and provide a layer of abstraction between the integrated systems. Companies are also advised to hire an integration provider to help navigate the challenges of different technology stacks throughout the integration project, like correct data mapping or satisfactory data quality.