Intuit, Salesforce combine forces in small-business CRM play

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

"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."