Have you ever dived into fulfilling an urgent reference request only to spend the next precious minutes hopping back and forth between your CRM and reference management systems, verifying that you’re using the most up-to-date customer data to identify the best-matching reference? Having easy, seamless access to current, real-time data – like account ownership, product usage, customer location and contact titles – can make a world of difference in how efficiently you can hone in on an ideal match for a reference request.

If you’re using a standalone reference management system (RMS) that hasn’t yet been integrated with your CRM system, there’s a good chance that you’ve encountered the dreaded conundrum of out-of-date, out-of-sync data. There are many strategies for maintaining the accuracy of advocacy program data in an RMS, but integrating with a CRM system can be an efficient, rigorous method for ensuring the basic customer information loaded in your RMS is up to date and ready to use.

RO Innovation – the RMS offered by Upland Software –  is one of a couple of incredibly powerful platforms for managing customer advocacy programs, and it offers users a choice of whether to integrate with a CRM system or not.

While there are many benefits to integration, there also are important considerations to keep in mind when linking the two databases. In a recent ‘Stay Relevant’ session, our team of consultants discussed best practices for integrating RO Innovation with a CRM such as Salesforce, and how to maintain accurate data once the systems have been joined together.

Should I integrate RO Innovation with Salesforce?

It may be tempting to assume that integrating RO Innovation with Salesforce is a standard best practice that every advocacy program should use, but integration may not always be the best strategy for maintaining updated records. The decision truly depends on how clean and accurate your CRM data is – importing bad, inaccurate data is of little use to your program. RO Innovation fields that are synced with Salesforce cannot be edited within the RMS, so if you’re pulling over Salesforce data, you want to be confident that it is accurate and won’t require updating.

Some best practices our team recommended for navigating this nuance included:

• Request Salesforce write permissions – Or become good friends with a colleague that already has them. This will give you the ability to edit Salesforce fields and therefore correct the data that appears in RO Innovation.

• Be strategic and selective with the fields you integrate – You can pick and choose the RO Innovation fields that are synced with Salesforce, and where these fields will reside in your RMS. If there are certain fields that are consistently incorrect in your Salesforce instance, avoid importing that data into your RMS. A good example here is pulling over account team assignments. Since CRM databases are usually updated in real-time with this information, you can be confident you’re integrating the most accurate data available into your RMS. Sales teams can have high turnover or frequent reassignment, so having the current rep name auto-populated is a huge help!

• Use freeform fields to clarify incorrect data that has been imported from Salesforce – If you are pulling over inaccurate data from Salesforce and don’t have the ability to edit those fields in Salesforce, create an accompanying freeform field in RO Innovation where you can manually enter the correct information. For example, you may want to assign different industry types to customers than those set in Salesforce; Creating a custom “Sub-Industry” field in RO Innovation gives you the option to manually assign industry types to customer advocates, which can help you be more strategic when identifying the best-matching advocate for an incoming reference request.

• If your Salesforce is notorious for having duplicated customer accounts, import data from the most accurate account record – When reviewing duplicated customer accounts and deciding which one to integrate with your RMS, one key criterion to look for is which account record in the CRM contains the most accurate and up-to-date product information for the customer. These product details are essential when identifying a customer for an advocacy activity, so you’ll want to ensure RO Innovation is using the most relevant information.

Integrating RO Innovation with Salesforce can be an efficient, impactful method for maintaining the accuracy of your reference database but as mentioned, may not always be the best option for your advocacy program. We’ve helped clients through integration, but we’ve also supported clients as they unlinked RO Innovation from Salesforce because data from the CRM system wasn’t reliable.

If your company has recently experienced an acquisition (or multiple), make a serious evaluation of your Salesforce instance and if its data is reliable enough to sync with RO Innovation. If your organization has recently implemented Salesforce, consider waiting a couple of months to allow time for details of the configuration to be finalized and for your Salesforce administrators to have more bandwidth to support integration with RO Innovation.

And, in case you’ve determined that integration is not the best option for your program at this time but would still like to pull specific information from Salesforce into RO Innovation, you can opt to have the Data Uploader tool installed to mass import select information into your RMS. For specific fields that are important to regularly update, such as account ownership, create a custom free-form field in RO Innovation and use the Data Uploader tool to do a monthly import of this information from Salesforce. Just remember to stay mindful of these fields, which should be checked on a regular basis to ensure you’re using the most accurate, up-to-date data.

Have questions about which Salesforce fields to integrate with RO Innovation? Considering alternative strategies than integration to update your reference database? Comment below or contact us!