Salesforce and Mulesoft – Scripting the Winning B2B Duet

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered the B2B landscape. As increasing numbers of business buyers use multiple channels to connect with companies, the need to deliver first-rate omnichannel customer experiences has acquired greater significance than ever.

But, how can B2B companies delight their customers, irrespective of the channel used? What does it take to deliver highly personalized services that perfectly meet their needs? They need to make the best use of customer and marketing data, and this is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms become critical. Modern CRM systems receive data from multiple sources, and it is very important companies get a 360o view of all data that flows into these systems to achieve business success.

Today, we’ll examine how users of Salesforce, the most-widely used CRM solution in the world, can leverage the immense potential of data in their systems by integrating them with Mulesoft. Mulesoft is the world’s leading data integration platform and helps enhance the Salesforce users’ ability to get valuable data-driven insights by:

Facilitating Seamless Consolidation of Data Collected from Multiple Sources

One of the key challenges faced by most Salesforce users (or for that matter, users of any CRM system) is consolidating their customer and marketing data collected from disparate data sources such as customer transactions, social media interactions and so on. This often results in poor utilization of the data. In fact, a study by Salesforce revealed only 1% of a company’s data is used by its CRM system, leaving vast amounts of customer insights left untapped.

The integration of Salesforce with Mulesoft can help B2B companies fully leverage this data; the integration helps the organizations bring structured and unstructured data sources together, enabling them to get invaluable insights from massive amounts of data in the Salesforce systems. This, in turn, enables the businesses to come up with the right strategies to target their customers and meet their needs.

Enabling Hassle-free Integration of Data Generated by Various Tools with Salesforce

The B2B business of the 21st century uses a myriad of IT tools; a study by Mulesoft showed 900 applications exist, on an average, in a B2B organization. These applications generate vast amounts of data, but most of it remain unused by marketing and sales teams as a vast majority of the applications are not integrated with CRM systems. The report reveals only about 28% of applications used in an organization are integrated with the CRM systems.

Salesforce users can effectively overcome this problem by integrating their systems with Mulesoft. Mulesoft can help the users get a big picture of their entire organizational data, by allowing them to consolidate data in diverse applications ranging from complex Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to mobile apps used to facilitate payments by customers.

Eliminating Data Silos that Prevent a Single View of the Customer

Data silos are one of the biggest challenges in understanding customer needs clearly. Many companies often find themselves disconnected from what’s happening with their customers because they don’t have access to comprehensive, real-time data. To overcome this problem, most organizations rely on data integration tools developed using custom code and/or complex web services. This often results in increased expenditure and puts stress on the organizations’ IT infrastructure.

Salesforce-using companies can overcome this problem by integrating their CRM platforms with Mulesoft. The integration helps the business organizations eliminate the need for complex data handling methods and use the treasure-trove of information in their data repositories very effectively. Mulesoft also enables Salesforce users to integrate data easily, without writing a single line of code.

Empowering users to unlock data using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

Many companies are using APIs to make the best use of their CRM data; the report by Mulesoft revealed nearly 60% of IT leaders feel integration of data using APIs is critical to their digital strategies. APIs enable businesses connect various systems and processes to provide a unified data view. Another key advantage of APIs is they can be reused across multiple projects. This enables organizations to multiply value with each proj