2020 will go down in history as one of the most unfavorable years for businesses around the world.
The ongoing global health crisis did not spare either established businesses or startups as the measures put in place to curb the spread of the dreaded pandemic caused revenues to plummet at ridiculous rates.
By March 2020, signs that the pandemic was going to adversely affect business operations and subsequently profits would eventually dip had begun to show. Over the same period, over 150 publicly traded companies had warned investors of the threat COVID-19 poses.
An unprecedented global economic slowdown was now imminent, which meant that businesses had to put in place contingency measures to enable them to weather the storm. A couple of months into the pandemic and 59 percent of financial leaders were seriously concerned about business recoveries.
According to the PwC US CFO Pulse Survey, the financial impacts of COVID-19, including on liquidity and capital resources, remained a top concern for 42 percent of CFOs.
Image Source: PwC
But despite the revenue plunge, most CFOs have been quick to develop and deploy technology-driven recovery strategies that not only put their operations back on track but also safeguarded their bottom lines.
Apart from staff layoffs, energy expenditure savings, office space expenses, remote working, and travel budgets, CFOs also adopted integration software solutions to help them sustain their mission-critical operations but at a fraction of the cost.
Integration solutions are now helping businesses get the most out of their data by eliminating data silos and subsequently enabling teams and departments to be more productive and efficient.
CFOs across industries have now realized that data duplication and redundancy have been denying them an opportunity to streamline their operations to substantially grow their revenue. This is done by allowing applications within an enterprise to interact with each other thus enabling work procedures to be performed more efficiently.
CFOs are also increasingly leveraging the benefits of integration solutions through the improvement of workflows and data across the various software applications that they have deployed.
To shore up their revenues, smart CFOs use integration solutions to strengthen various business processes such as sales and marketing, operation planning, human resources, and inventory monitoring among others.
As mentioned earlier, data silos are particularly notorious for hoarding crucial data that can be used effectively to enhance your businesses’ competitiveness.
When you eliminate data silos, you allow stand-alone applications to talk to each other, speeding up business operations.
Integration solutions enable you to get a clear picture of your business operations in real-time. This, in turn, enables you to remain agile in a competitive business environment because you are able to make quick decisions that are data-driven.
Systems that operate in isolation will always affect your team’s productivity. The manual transfer of data from one system to another can result in expensive errors that ultimately end up hurting your revenues.
Integration solutions, therefore, increase your businesses’ agility as it frees your team to focus on other tasks.
Customers now value experience more than the quality of your product or services. This makes customer experience a big part of your customer retention strategy.
With integration solutions, you will ensure that your customers access relevant data as well as get their problems solved without unnecessary delays.
It’s become obvious over time that integration is increasingly playing a pivotal role in helping CFOs to streamline and grow their revenue at a phenomenal rate.
Thanks to tried-and-tested integration solutions, CFOs are now in a much better position to effectively manage their teams’ and operations’ overall performance. This is because, unlike siloed systems that prevent them from seeing their sales, expenses, and payroll in one convenient location, integration solutions provide unrestricted, real-time data visibility.
Business transactions such as payroll, accounting, and human resources can overwhelm your employees, especially with disjointed systems in place. There’s also a lot of repetitive work that ends up bogging down your employees as they try and figure out what other departments are up to.
Siloed systems are also a pain to maintain, especially if they are old and are no longer supported by their respective vendors, not to mention super costly making them unsustainable in the long run. This means that some of your campaigns will be delayed hence costing your business a loss of revenue.
Integration solutions provide you with combined insights, giving you a clearer picture of what works and what doesn’t since your sales, marketing, HR, and accounting departments can seamlessly share critical information with zero delays and errors.
The only way you can sell more is when you have accurate information about your customers and prospects. Without an integration solution in place, it becomes difficult to piece together relevant information from different applications.
And if by chance you do manage to gather the data you need, you will most likely have lost the opportunity to sell because of the time it took you to figure out what the customer wanted at that particular time.
But with integrations like NetSuite for Constant Contact or for Mailchimp or for ActiveCampaign, you can quickly and seamlessly combine your financial and marketing data to help you close that all-important sale. These integrations will also help you to identify which email(s) triggered the most sales and which ones brought the most customers and so on.
Omtis Fine Wines uses NetSuite and Mailchimp for the segmentation and the creation of campaigns. However, they needed to grow their wine business using targeted campaigns, something that was not possible without the right integration partner.
With SyncApps, Omtis Fine Wines was finally able to eliminate repetitive manual data entry, seamlessly sync key customer, vendor, e-commerce data automatically and track the flow of wine production from picking, processing to final shipment of bottles 24/7.
Every time you miss an opportunity to sell, you also miss a big chance to grow your revenue – a costly mistake that can ultimately affect your profitability. As you navigate harsh economic times, you simply can’t afford to lose a sale. The more you sell, the faster you will bring your business back to profitability. It’s that simple.
To achieve this, integration solutions such as Salesforce and Constant Contact or with Mailchimp or to ActiveCampaign will provide your team with a clear view of every customer at almost every stage of their purchase journey. These popular integrations make it super easy to know when a lead is ready to convert into a customer – a critical stage in the sales funnel that can significantly boost your revenue stream.
Absolute Advisory, a US-based consulting business whose mission is to empower future leaders with the right IT solutions, had been using Salesforce and Constant contact in-house for quite some time.
Having exhausted their individual capabilities, Absolute Advisory now needed to take their sales and marketing to the next level and integration was the only way to achieve this objective.
The SyncApps Salesforce to Constant Contact integration exposed their sales and marketing team to a range of result-oriented features that enable them to, among other things, see insights from both platforms at a glance, which meant no more switching between Salesforce and Constant Contact. They were also able to align their marketing with their sales strategy and business goals as well as quickly identify crucial leads that were ready to be converted.
Absolute Advisory was also now able to eliminate manual data imports and migration – work that consumed many hours each month.
Businesses that constantly keep their customers and prospects engaged will sell more than those that engage their customers only when they want to sell something. If you do not have a strategy to help you guide your customers and prospects through the sales funnel then your chances of selling will be slim.
Keeping your prospects and customers constantly engaged will help you to build a positive brand experience. It also helps to boost customer loyalty as well as collect useful customer information.
With integration solutions such as Constant Contact for Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign, your sales and marketing teams can build better and stronger relationships with prospects and customers.
Constant engagement will also help your sales team meet customer expectations. These integrations will also lead your prospects to find your products or services more valuable while providing you with valuable customer insights that will, in turn, inform your marketing decisions such as content creation and retargeting.
TopLine Results, a CRM consulting firm based in Wisconsin, uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 as one of their preferred tools of the trade to power mission-critical CRM and marketing automation workflows.
To ensure that their growth was consistent Topline Results needed an all-encompassing solution that allowed them to connect all the solutions they are using for themselves and for their clients.
They also needed an integration solution that can support A LOT of profiles with different configurations for different clients. With SyncApps Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Constant Contact integration, Topline Results was able to create customized integrations that can be molded to meet any goal they or their clients might need to meet.
They were also able to grow the agency for 8+ years thanks to various customized features that helped them to open up new cashflow sources for their customers. Manual data migration was also reduced to zero, giving them more time to focus on strategy and growth.
It goes without saying that integration solutions are key growth drivers for CFOs, especially at a time when businesses across almost all sectors are struggling to stay competitive. A sales growth strategy that doesn’t include integration is outright bound to fail or at the very least, deliver unfavorable results at the end.
So, to ensure that your revenues grow at a consistent pace it’s about time you let your ERP system and CRM software talk to each other using a solid and secure integration solution.
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