5 Essential Salesforce-ERP Integration Best Practices
1. Manage all of your products in your ERP
You’ll want to see all of your products in Salesforce (more on that in a bit), but they should live in your ERP. By that, I mean that your master list of SKUs should be available and updateable in your ERP. Any time you add a new product or change the pricing information of an existing one? Make that change in your ERP. That way, it remains the source of truth for all essential product data, financials and inventory.2. Automatically sync your product information to Salesforce, but keep it uneditable there
From there, you’ll want to bring all of your product information into Salesforce so that your reps and sales managers can access pricing data and tie products to their deals (stay tuned for more on this point). This also allows real-time pricing changes in the ERP to sync over to Salesforce, making sure that your reps have the latest info and aren’t selling based on last month’s prices. But you don’t want your core product information to be editable in Salesforce. It lives in your ERP, so if you also let people edit it in Salesforce, it’ll create a confusing system where changes bounce back and forth between the two platforms. Instead, keep it visible in Salesforce, but locked from any changes. That reinforces the idea that your ERP is the master of all pricing-related information. {{cta('42ee0679-756e-4fb2-a9b3-19b3a78f429c')}}3. Manage your Opportunity-to-Quote process in Salesforce
The general rule of thumb you’ll see here is that all of the financial information relating to the sales process needs to be in your ERP, but anything your sales reps need to view or report on should be in Salesforce. So, you’ll want to run your entire sales process in Salesforce: from lead to opportunity to quote to sale. That will give your sales reps a complete view of their whole book of business to understand their next steps with each customer, no matter where they are in the deal cycle. It also provides your sales managers and executives with reporting on the entire pipeline and your sales forecast, enabling them to respond to fluctuations in either. Some companies already have quoting functionality built into their ERP; they may be tempted to keep this legacy quoting tool. We advise against it, though. In Salesforce, Quotes and Opportunities sync back and forth to each other. Add in ERP quoting, and that means you’re building a confusing two-way integration involving three different records at a critical stage in the sales process. That kind of setup will lead to a whole bunch of tech and data headaches later on. Better to have your sales data sync back to your ERP at one well-defined point, after the sale is complete (read on).4. Track all products used in Salesforce Opportunities and Quotes
Here’s where points 1 through 3 all tie together: While you’re tracking those deals in Salesforce, we strongly recommend associating the right products to each quote and opportunity as you go. If you’re using Salesforce CPQ for more advancing quoting, bundling and pricing, then using products is a must — they’re the basic building blocks of any CPQ quote. But even if your team is just using standard Sales Cloud in Salesforce, pulling products into quotes and opportunities offers the following benefits:- Automatic pricing calculation - Using products on an opportunity or quote lets Salesforce calculate the total price of that deal for you, based on the summed total of every product within it. This automatic calculation takes a lot of the guesswork and mental math out of quoting, saving your reps time and energy.
- Better sales reporting - Even without product tracking in Salesforce, you get pipeline and forecast reporting. With it though, your sales reps can also see product sales by segment, region, customer industry, you name it. This sort of reporting can make it much easier for your teams to understand which products to allocate and push where.
- Cross- and upselling opportunities - When your sales team has a complete database at their fingertips that helps them remember exactly which products each customer has bought most recently and further back in the past, that opens the door to countless selling chances. Your reps can identify the best cross-selling opportunities for each customer and approach them more seamlessly about upselling possibilities.
This information can empower your marketing team, too, to run tailored campaigns to customers who have Product A but not Product B. With all of these teams looking at the same customer data in Salesforce, they can stay consistent in their messaging to customers, driving higher conversion rates all along the pipeline.
- More responsive customer service - If your service team has Service Cloud, then product tracking in Salesforce leads to much better customer service. As soon as a rep picks up the phone, they can see exactly which products the customer already has. This lets the conversation get past fact finding and on to problem solving quicker, to the delight of the customer.