With over 150,000 customers, Salesforce remains the world's No.1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform. No other CRM comes close.
However, there are some things Salesforce can't do.
If you want to align customer data with your marketing objectives, you might integrate Salesforce with a platform like HubSpot, Marketo, or Zoho.
Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.
Below, learn the challenges of syncing Salesforce data with marketing platforms and how ETL provides a solution.
Integrate.io is the data management platform that integrates Salesforce data with marketing platforms. Book a demo now.
Read more: 4 Common Ways Enterprises Leverage Salesforce.
Problems When Integrating Salesforce With Marketing Platforms
Salesforce only syncs leads and contacts to Marketo bidirectionally. (You can both send and receive this data.) All other syncs are unidirectional, which means you can send data such as accounts, users, opportunities, custom objects, and activities but not receive it. These restrictions pose various problems for businesses that want to analyze Marketo data other than leads and contacts in Salesforce. Unidirectional data flows make it difficult to segment audiences, for example, or create targeted sales campaigns within Salesforce.
The same goes for HubSpot. You can't sync all Salesforce data to Hubspot in both directions, which can prevent your business from generating the intelligence it needs for sales and marketing.
You can manually update Salesforce with insights gleaned from Marketo, HubSpot, and other marketing platforms, but this is a long and laborious process. As a result, your team might miss deadlines and sales reps might struggle to analyze customer data in real-time.
There's a reason for these restrictions. Salesforce is a CRM system, not a data warehouse. That means it can't manage huge data loads from disparate sources like a Snowflake, Redshift, or BigQuery. Handling resource-intensive data queries is a significant technical challenge and Salesforce doesn't have the capabilities to do it. Plus, Salesforce limits resource access via governor limits, which restricts the number of queries you can run on the platform.
There is a solution to these problems.
Read more: 4 Salesforce Best Practices for Data Migration.
Using ETL to Integrate Salesforce Data
You can use a data engineering technique called Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) to sync Salesforce data to the marketing platform of your choice. It involves extracting data from Salesforce, transforming it to the correct format, and loading it to a marketing tool like HubSpot. Alternatively, you can extract Salesforce data, transform it and load it into a data warehouse where you can run that data through business intelligence (BI) platforms like Looker or Tableau.
Either of the above methods requires data engineers to build data 'pipelines' that migrate Salesforce data from its source to another location. This pipeline-building process can take weeks and involves lots of coding and engineering experience — something small- or medium-sized businesses often lack.
The right software can automate the ETL process. Programs like Integrate.io automatically extract Salesforce data and move it to a marketing platform or a warehouse for analytics. Integrate.io uses a drag-and-drop interface and requires no code, making data engineering accessible for even small teams.
Read more: Why You Should ETL Your Salesforce Data.
How Integrate.io Helps
Integrate.io syncs Salesforce data to the most popular marketing platforms such as Marketo and HubSpot. This ETL tool natively supports the Salesforce Bulk API and extracts data using as few resources as possible. Plus, Integrate.io is one of the only ETL tools on the market that extracts Salesforce data, moves it to a second location, and transfers it back to Salesforce again. That means businesses can access valuable customer insights from within the Salesforce platform in real-time. As a result, Salesforce becomes a single source of truth. Integrate.io can even maintain your integrations if you are busy with other business tasks.
Other Integrate.io features include:
-
Over 100 native connectors for CRMs, relational databases, transactional databases, SaaS applications, data warehouses, and data lakes. Check out a list of Integrate.io data integrations here.
- A simple pricing structure that charges users for the number of connectors they use and not the amount of data they process.
- Excellent customer service, including tutorials and telephone support.
- A powerful REST API.
Integrate.io is the no-code ETL solution that makes syncing Salesforce data to popular marketing platforms simple. Schedule a demo now.