Phil Montgomery

Improve Sales and Customer Success with Advantage and Salesforce.com Integration

A growing trend involves companies purchasing different software packages for discrete functions in the organization, which necessitates effective and efficient integration between systems, working together inside a common eco-system.  Advantage offers a tight integration with Salesforce.com, a widely-used cloud-based application which supports many different business activities.  A common use of Salesforce by publishers, content providers and membership organizations is for prospect relationship management, where sales teams are involved. These companies are selling into businesses, educational institutions, governmental entities, etc.--- essentially business-to-business sales efforts. Salesforce.com provides many tools to make it easier for reps to communicate with prospects, members and customers, as well as features to help manage sales activities.

An integration to Advantage provides a host of additional tools, including the capability of handling subscription-based products, membership, one-off products, and conferences and events. Advantage allows the different departments inside the organization to manage any or all of these activities in a streamlined way.

Accounts and Contacts

Accounts and Contacts in Salesforce can be automatically synchronized (in real-time) with the accounts and contacts in Advantage.  Through your configuration, you can choose to trigger the initial update manually or using criteria of your choice.  Changes in either system can flow to the other one, under your control.

Opportunities, Orders and Quotes

Similarly, when a sale is made, the rep working in Salesforce can push the sale to Advantage where the order is created (again in real-time) and all the standard order edits and rules are applied.  Advantage’s Salesforce integration allows this to happen immediately and automatically, rather than requiring manual effort in the flow of the order to payment.

Advantage orders can be generated from Salesforce Opportunities or Salesforce Orders.  Salesforce triggers can be used to automatically send data to Advantage; for example, when an “Opportunity” has been updated to a “Closed-Won” status, or this can be executed manually through a “Send to Advantage” action.

Orders sent to Advantage can be processed immediately, which is assumed by customers purchasing digital products. Alternatively, organizations may want to verify the order, or even wait until payment is received, before accepting it.  In this case, the orders are created as quotes in Advantage, and can be activated when accepted.

Customer and Order Information

In addition to synchronizing the data between systems, the integration enables you to “push” additional information back to Salesforce. For example, a new contact’s address entered in Salesforce passes to Advantage where other data is added, such as the customer number and a standardized address. That information is returned to Salesforce. Similarly, an order entered in Salesforce passes to Advantage where it is priced and taxed and assigned an order number. That data is applied to the Salesforce opportunity (or order) through the integration.

In addition to customer updates, Advantage can notify your reps working in Salesforce of other changes, such as when an order is paid, or when services are cancelled or adjusted.  Actions executed from Advantage Workflow Events can be set up to update standard or custom objects in Salesforce.

Advantage Views

Finally, you can choose from several views that display data from Advantage, giving you access to the most current information. This reduces the amount of data you actually need to load into Salesforce, as well as associated storage fees.

AdvantageCS is looking at a similar integration with MS Dynamics CRM.


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