You get lots of fantastic data from Salesforce every day. By logging and collecting customer interactions — regardless of where they take place — the CRM supplies its users with powerful customer data and large-scale insights into the efficacy of their sales and marketing efforts. This kind of information can be extremely useful, helping companies improve their long-term strategies and make faster, more informed business decisions.

While this is certainly powerful, the reality is that, in today’s data-driven world, it’s usually not enough. With so many tools out there, it’s just not realistic or efficient for any business to use just one app for all of their marketing and sales. That’s why most companies use other tools as well to complement their Salesforce CRM and help manage their efforts. This is great, but it can get messy — with so much data coming in from so many places, it can be hard to stay organized and get the full picture. That’s where Integrate.io comes in.

Integrate.io’s Salesforce integration helps you get all of your important data both to and from the Salesforce CRM easily and efficiently. This means that the information from all of your sources will be up-to-date, accurate, and fully integrated at all times.

Here’s are some examples of how you can empower your data using Salesforce and Integrate.io:

How to Use the Salesforce Integration

Salesforce Source

There are many powerful functions for you to take advantage of with the Salesforce source. Use the Salesforce Source component to load data from Salesforce objects:

  1. Define the data to read from Salesforce as follows: thumbnail image
  • salesforce connection — either click the drop-down arrow and select an existing connection, or click (create new) to create a new connection.
  • object name — the name of the table to be imported.
  • object fields — add or remove fields to import for the selected object.
  • where clause — optional. You can add SOQL predicate clauses to filter the data at the source.
  • source action — use bulk query (default) to read available records or bulk query all to read available and deleted records.
  1. Column mapping — After selecting the fields to import, you can change the alias to use as a field in the data-flow.
  2. Incremental load — load data incrementally instead of your historical data all at once, which means that you will only be loading new or updated data. In order to load data incrementally (changes and additions) to objects, the object to synchronize should have the systemmodstamp column. This column is automatically updated whenever a user or an automated process updates a record. Use the following condition in the where clause field with a variable: SystemModstamp > $lastsysmod

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You can use the last successful submission timestamp for the package as you can see in the example below as a value for the variable, or use ExecuteSqlDatetime function to get the last SystemModstamp in your destination database table.

lastsysmod = CASE WHEN (COALESCE($_PACKAGE_LAST_SUCCESSFUL_JOB_SUBMISSION_TIMESTAMP,’’)==’’) THEN ‘1900–01–01T00:00:00Z’ ELSE $_PACKAGE_LAST_SUCCESSFUL_JOB_SUBMISSION_TIMESTAMP END

In the big picture, these functions simply help you move your data how you want it, where you want it when you want it so that you can really use it to your advantage.

Feed Your Data Warehouse

Say that, along with your Salesforce CRM, your company has four other main data sources that you try to gain insights from on a daily basis. You know that you have to organize this data and put it all together to really make the most of it — so you decide to store it all in a centralized data warehouse.

This is a fantastic idea: if they’re organized correctly, data warehouses can give you a comprehensive view of your company’s history so that you can understand how well your efforts are working and make powerful strategic decisions. Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy. With traditional methods, updating your data warehouse is hard work, and more often than not, companies end up messy warehouses full of:

  • Duplicate data
  • Incomplete data
  • Irrelevant data, or
  • Multiple data schemas that can’t talk to one another

The Integrate.io Salesforce integration helps you avoid these pitfalls by allowing you to continuously feed your data warehouse with Salesforce data — and data from any other relevant source. You simply set it - Integrate.io takes care of the rest.

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Salesforce Destination

You can also set Salesforce as your destination, which means that you can send data from other sources into the Salesforce CRM. Here are some key functions that you can take advantage of when you set Salesforce as your destination.

Define the parameters for connecting to your Salesforce as follows:

  1. Salesforce connection — either click the drop-down arrow and select an existing connection, or click (create new) to create a new connection.
  2. Destination object — select the target object in your Salesforce org.
  3. Salesforce fields — select fields from the target object to map data-flow fields into, or click “auto fill fields” to map fields automatically.
  4. Operation type — the method of data manipulation in Salesforce:
  • Insert — appends data into the object. Note that you can’t insert data into the id field.
  • Upsert — inserts new data into the object and updates existing data according to the selected upsert key
  1. Upsert key — when operation type is upsert, you must map a key field and select it as the upsert key. This can be either the internal id field, or an external key field. The external key should not allow duplicate values.
  2. Batch size — number of records that are inserted to Salesforce in each batch (default 1000).

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Utilizing these functions and sending your data to Salesforce will really help you organize your information and take your company to the next level. How? Well, among other things, it will allow you to expose your analytics to your sales team and enrich your Salesforce CRM with up-to-date, powerful data.

This, in turn, will help you refine your efforts and gain actionable insights that you can use to inform your team and improve your long-term business strategies.

Read more about Salesforce to Salesforce for data sharing here.

Salesforce Delivery

This is the fast track of Salesforce data integration. With Salesforce delivery, you can get all of your Salesforce data into Redshift in just two clicks. Here’s how it works:

  1. Select Salesforce in your pipeline
  2. Select the destination
  3. Run the job

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That’s it. Integrate.io will take care of the rest for you and make sure that your data gets where it needs to go on time. For more details about how we integrate with Salesforce, check out our integration page here.

SEE ALSO: Salesforce Integration: Integrate.io and Heroku Connect