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Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM (customer relationship management) software, with a 20 percent market share. The Salesforce CRM software is chock-full of features for business intelligence (BI) and analytics so that you can capture hidden insights and make smarter, data-driven decisions.

The traditional ETL (extract, transform, load) process extracts data from one or more sources and then deposits it into a centralized data repository. But in certain cases, you might want to reverse this process and move data from the centralized repository to a third-party system. In this article, we’ll discuss why and how to migrate data into Salesforce.

Why Move Data from Your Data Warehouse to Salesforce?

Migrating data from your data warehouse to Salesforce (or from another repository, like a data lake) is one example of what’s known as “reverse ETL.” In reverse ETL, the positions of source and target are opposite: The process extracts the information from the data warehouse or data lake and then loads into the target third-party system.

So why would you want to move data to Salesforce in the first place? SaaS (software as a service) applications like Salesforce possess their own data analytics capabilities that can help supplement the BI and analytics workloads inside your data warehouse. Giving Salesforce access to the full suite of your enterprise data can facilitate the discovery of hidden trends, insights, and connections that it wouldn’t have been able to identify with the CRM data alone. For example, you can use this additional information to construct a customer 360 view of your clients and prospects, augmenting each customer profile and making the picture as complete as possible.

Related Reading: Why You Should ETL Your Salesforce Data

How to Migrate Data from Your Data Warehouse to Salesforce

We’ve discussed why you might want to move data to Salesforce. Now we'll cover how you can actually accomplish this task.

The easiest way to get data out of your data warehouse and move it into Salesforce is with the help of a feature-rich ETL platform. Modern ETL and data integration solutions come packed with connectors and integrations to help automatically ingest your data sources, transform the data as appropriate and load it into a target destination. The right ETL tool can also reverse these connectors, enabling reverse ETL out of the data warehouse and into your third-party systems of choice.

Here are the two most important criteria of what to look for when choosing an ETL tool that can migrate data into Salesforce:

Vigorous support for Salesforce: Selecting an ETL tool with a robust Salesforce integration is a must. Some features to look for are support for Salesforce Connect, support for REST APIs like the Salesforce Bulk API, and support for Salesforce to Salesforce connections (i.e. connections between multiple Salesforce org).

Low-code or no-code functionality: Salesforce is popular with sales, marketing, and customer service professionals who lack extensive technical knowledge. In order to support these team members, you should strongly consider an ETL tool with low-code or no-code capabilities, such as a simple drag-and-drop interface that lets you define pipelines with just a few clicks.

Related Reading: Create a Salesforce ETL Pipeline in 30 Minutes

How Integrate.io Can Help Move Data to Salesforce

We’ve shown why and how to migrate data from your data warehouse to Salesforce. The only question left is: How can you find the right ETL tool for the job?

Integrate.io is a powerful ETL and data integration tool for automating your pipelines from data sources to your cloud data warehouse or data lake — and it’s capable of performing reverse ETL as well. Thanks to 100+ connectors (including Salesforce and Salesforce Pardot) and the low-code and no-code functionality, it’s never been easier to migrate data both ways between your Salesforce CRM software and your data warehouse in the Cloud.

Ready to learn how Integrate.io can help move your data to Salesforce? Contact our team of data experts today to discuss your business plans and to take advantage of Integrate.io’s 7-day pilot program.