Business
Intuit, Salesforce combine forces in small-business CRM play
Application shares data between venerable accounting and CRM applications, helping small-business owners identify sales prospects, speed order processing and more closely follow sales pipeline.
The latest edition of small-business accounting favorite QuickBooks includes a close integration with the Salesforce cloud-based CRM application.
The idea is that small-business owners will only need to enter customer data once, while gaining some very real analytics capabilities that could help them grow sales. It can also help eliminate the errors that can occur when manually entering data into two places. Of course, it could also magnify an error if information is entered improperly in the first place. I digress.
The product, aptly called Salesforce for QuickBooks, lets small companies do the following:
- Compare current deals in the pipeline with historical and current financials for a customer
- Create dashboards to track leads from social media, online and offline marketing campaigns
- Eliminate duplicate data entry, which can help speed up order processing and get deals closed more quickly. (So, when a deal is closed in Salesforce, it would generate a corresponding workflow in QuickBooks.)
- Provide a complete history of what the customer owns, based on past invoices and orders
Noted Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager for the Intuit Financial Management Solutions division:
"By integrating these best-in-class products, millions of small businesses can now seamlessly connect their front office and back office, sharing relevant information across the business. The combination of QuickBooks and Salesforce data provides a powerful expanded view of business information that will help users turn leads into customers."
The integrated application comes in either a Group or Professional edition and it is compatible with QuickBooks Pro and Premier 2011 and QuickBooks 2012. The integrated application also works with QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Enterprise versions 11 and 12. Currently, the pricing for the software is $18 per user per month for the Group edition and $60 per user, per month for the Profesional edition. There is a free trial available for the application. If you already happen to use both QuickBooks and Salesforce, the two companies also have come out with something called Salesforce Integration for QuickBooks that lets you build on the existing applications. The integration software costs $20 per company per month for the Group edition and $40 per company, per month for the Professional Edition.
This is definitely one of the most logical and compelling application integrations to happen in a long time.