How We Integrated Pipedrive™ with Common Sense™

Generally, when companies undertake a digital transformation, they are aiming to improve the efficiency of their business processes and also the accuracy and visibility of their critical business data. Therefore, businesses often make use of two systems to ensure that their business processes run efficiently— a Client Relationship Management (CRM) system and an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. 

Pipedrive™ is a Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM solution that helps salespeople manage their relationships with their customers and effectively schedule, complete, and track activities through visual pipelines. Common Sense™ is a complete ERP solution developed by SIA Innovations, that is specifically designed for SME customers in the following industries: manufacturing, distribution, transportation/logistics, and firms involved in project management (i.e. construction, engineering).

Is it important to integrate your CRM with your ERP?

In a word, yes. 
Pipedrive™ handles the front-end information — managing valuable customer data and enriching it through interactions with marketing and customer support, while Common Sense™ deals with back-end valuable customer data, which can include purchase history, billing, and accounting information. Therefore, it is very important to integrate and synchronize the two systems to ensure that consistent information is shared seamlessly between both systems creating a single source of truth.

What are the benefits of integrating Pipedrive™ with Common Sense™?

1- Improve efficiency

Salesmen are usually forced to spend time on manual replication of prospects and deals data from Pipedrive™ to Common Sense™, which constitutes a waste of valuable company resources. Leveraging the automated synchronization feature of the integration tool helps manage this process and improve productivity.

2- Avoid duplication

An integrated system eliminates the chance to have duplicated or inconsistent data which is caused by human mistakes working on isolated systems. This helps improve data analysis and enhance data-driven processes.

2- Gain end-to-end visibility of sales process

Pipedrive™ and Common Sense™ integration allows managers to have complete visibility over all the aggregate data of resources, prospects, and deals which will help them make the right decisions on how to improve their marketing strategy and their relationships with customers.

How did we integrate Pipedrive™ with Common Sense™?

System Design

The key success factor of a good integration is a well-prepared design of the system. To accomplish this step, we started by looking into the current or as-is sales managing process, locating the activities to be automated, and creating a to-be process. Another crucial step was to create an Entity Map, which helped us understand the relationship between the properties in Pipedrive™ and those in Common Sense™. Finally, we designed the system architecture using a C4 model. This helped to align everyone’s understanding of the system architecture in its different levels.

Technical Aspect

If we look at our system from a high-level perspective, we can divide the performance of the system into 3 major steps:

1- Webhook generation

Pipedrive™ allows users to create webhooks, which are programmatical notifications generated when a property is created or updated. This enables us to push the event information to the Integrator System rather than requiring it to check periodically for updates. Webhooks are of JSON format and contain the type of the event (creation or update), the type of the entity (Resource, Prospect, Deal), and all the data of the targeted entity.

2- Convert Pipedrive™ data

When the Integrator System receives a webhook, it checks the type of the entity and the type of the event. Next, it proceeds to convert the data included in the webhook into Common Sense™ data entities and prepares it for insertion.

3- Insert data to Common Sense™

The final step consists of inserting the data to Common Sense™. Depending on the type of event (creation or update), the Integration System creates or updates a row in the Database by creating SQL queries.

Conclusion

In this article we discussed the importance of integrating CRMs with ERPs. We also described major benefits of integrating Pipedrive™(CRM) with Common Sense™, and presented the technical aspect of this integration. While it’s a bit premature to give an accurate assessment of the Pipedrive™-Common Sense™ integration, we estimated that each of our salesmen will save 2 hours per week.

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