Twice this week we have met prospective clients who are struggling to effectively integrate Salesforce with their website.
On both occasions, the client had gone ahead and built their website without considering their back end operational systems and other existing frameworks in use at the time.
On the surface, this makes great sense when budgeting. Prioritise the customer experience and lead generating tool that is your website, and then look at how you manage those leads within your CRM when they start overwhelming your inbox.
This is not a problem if you just want to use a simple Salesforce Web-To-Lead form for a Contact Us or Sign Up Here page. This is an elementary integration of HTML code any web developer should be able to use.
However both clients have realised that they actually want a more interactive website/CRM connection, one that is fully capable of passing more data back and forth between their website and Salesforce. Unfortunately, the web technologies they used to build their websites don’t integrate well with Salesforce, their CRM of choice. Overcoming the challenges now faced are difficult and, therefore, the project is expected to potentially be much more expensive than it originally needed to be.
Salesforce is one of the simplest platforms to integrate with a website—if you plan it right.
SMBs would reduce their risks and possibly save huge amounts of money if they spent sufficient time, before making any technology-related decisions, thinking about their end goal and developing a technology roadmap to guide their implementation efforts from day one. You don’t have to do it all at once, but you need to have a solid game plan.
To highlight the actual potential, companies should research Force.com Sites. In the past 18 months, we have built four completely custom websites inside Salesforce using Force.com Sites. These have a mixture of shopping cart, appointment booking and scheduling capabilities with 100% live data living inside Salesforce, which are easily accessible to both Sales and Service teams alike.
On each occasion, our clients were paying $10K-$30K a year for third party subscription apps, which fell somewhat short of their desired Customer and User Experience goals.
These ongoing subscription costs have since been replaced with a one-off development fee for a complete solution within Salesforce, maximising the ROI of the clients’ existing Salesforce Licenses.
One such example would be our Event and Training Management on Salesforce solutions. You can find an overview of our offerings here.
