Salesforce is a leading customer relationship management platform (CRM). Many firms use it as their source of truth for storing data and tracking activity related to target contacts and companies. But the true power of Salesforce lies in the ability to customize it according to your firm or company's specific needs and deal flow processes. Let's take a look at how Salesforce's M&A integrations can level up your workflow and make it more streamlined and comprehensive than ever.
Before we dive in, it's critical to understand that choosing a CRM is one of the most important decisions your team will make as part of its digital transformation journey. Here are a few features that the best CRMs offer and your team should definitely consider:
Dealmakers can and should connect their other tools with their CRM, including their chosen data service providers, sales acceleration solutions, and marketing automation platforms. This will allow them to more easily organize, track, analyze, and activate the information needed to identify the best deals and manage their relationships with them.
For example, imagine you have a private company data source that is able to track when an opportunity plans to attend a conference. The information originates within that arm of your tech stack, but because you've opted to have the Salesforce M&A integration with that platform, the notification comes through in the CRM, alerting your team so they can take immediate action.
With the right combination of integrations, your team can make smarter investment decisions, find new opportunities, get more from your existing portfolio companies, and more.
Integrating your Salesforce instance with the proper tools will supercharge and streamline your M&A processes. Let's take a look at a few Salesforce integration partners that firms may find the most useful:
ActiveCampaign for Marketing is a marketing automation tool that assists with email marketing, social media campaigns, and more. It's designed to capture and funnel prospects through various marketing channels, including landing pages and emails. While ActiveCampaign does offer its own sales features, it also has an integration with Salesforce, where you can collect information and send automated targeted follow-ups to prospects directly from the CRM.
Crunchbase provides basic data and information about public and private companies, from funding rounds and founders to founding years. For users with a Crunchbase Pro subscription, that data can be synced to Salesforce, though it only pushes organization name, website, and the "short description" fields to the CRM. If you want more data fields to be synced, Crunchbase Enterprise may be the way to go, but you'll have to talk to their sales team to get it.
LinkedIn's Sales Navigator Salesforce integration creates a powerful prospecting experience that enables business development reps to automatically import information about the companies and contacts they're working with from LinkedIn to Salesforce. Data around existing connections to these opportunities is also available, giving teams a better chance of making contact and building relationships with top targets.
Marketo is one of the most powerful marketing automation tools currently available, and as a Salesforce integration partner, their integration allows you to fully connect your marketing and business development activities. The bidirectional sync links leads, contacts, and Salesforce campaigns across both platforms, giving your team all the information they need to see who has interacted with your firm. However, keep in mind that you'll likely need to hire someone to help with the integration process and fully realize the benefits of linking Marketo and Salesforce.
PitchBook is an independent and impartial research firm and platform that provides data, news, and analysis on companies. Like Sourcescrub, PitchBook allows users to quickly gather custom intelligence for importing into a Salesforce instance. The PitchBook Plugin for Salesforce is available as an additional module to the PitchBook Platform, though it does fully integrate and allow users to view, link, and import data.
The S&P Market Intelligence platform provides a wealth of information on business trends. Their Capital IQ Pro solution has both public and private company profiles, and collects information from various providers, including Preqin, Crunchbase, CreditSafe, Dun & Bradstreet, and UK Companies House. Their rather large database even comes with its own dashboard to help you sift through the mountains of data available. S&P's Salesforce integration is with their larger Market Intelligence platform, though it now has a click-through to Capital IQ Pro.
Salesloft is a sales engagement platform designed to help your team source deals more efficiently. Their Salesloft Connect for Salesforce integration effectively brings most of Salesloft's functionality within your Salesforce instance, keeping all opportunity data and communications in one place. It lets your team write and send emails, make calls, or view contact details via Salesloft within the CRM. It also makes it easy to pull company and contact information housed in your CRM directly into these emails for more personalized communication.
Slack is a powerful communication tool, whether your team uses Salesforce or not. But if both tools are in your tech stack, integrating them can turn Slack into an invaluable tool for working at speed, not just group chatting. Now that Salesforce acquired Slack, they're building a whole suite of Salesforce apps for Slack to better connect the two platforms. Once you have the apps setup, it's easy to search and preview Salesforce records "such as contacts, accounts, and opportunities "and send them to your co-workers, all without leaving Slack.
Sourcescrub is the only sources-first deal sourcing platform that uses expert-in-the-loop machine learning to give dealmakers the most complete, accurate, and multi-dimensional view of private markets. The platform collects and connects more than 150,000 sources and 14 million companies to create a web of insight that scales instantly from company to category to competition, informing firms' list building, market mapping, targeted outreach, and more.
The Salesforce M&A integration with Sourcescrub surfaces this information in your CRM and assures you never miss an actionable opportunity. Here are some of the things you will get:
If you're looking for one of the best M&A integrations for Salesforce, Sourcescrub is the way forward.
ZoomInfo is a B2B data enrichment platform that helps both sales and marketing teams know more about their contacts, though the tool has also expanded into offering talent acquisition- and customer service-related solutions. Their Salesforce integration effectively brings all the data that ZoomInfo offers into your Salesforce instance, providing a wealth of information on contacts, companies, and more right within your CRM.
From company information and data enrichment to marketing and sales automation, each firm's tech stack should support its unique requirements and processes. Which of the above Salesforce M&A integrations would be most beneficial to your M&A deal flow?
For more information on CRM and other tools in the modern dealmaker's tech stack, download our guide to the 3 core components you need to be successful (plus one to grow on).
