CRMs help businesses to easily communicate with their existing and potential customers. And, this is the reason why many business owners prefer integrating the CRM software with their websites. Fortunately, the seamless third-party integration opportunities in Drupal 8 help you integrate your CMS with any third-party systems of your choice, which is one of the significant benefits of Drupal website development. The main focus of this blog is specifically on Drupal and Salesforce integration.
As a leading Drupal development company, we have extensive experience in integrating Drupal websites with various CRMs, so you can reach us with your requirements at any time.
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce is an industry-leading cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that brings businesses and customers together. The term ‘Sales’ in its name clearly signifies its main objective, that is, to help businesses effectively manage their sales, customer service, marketing automation, collaboration, and analytics. The software gives the sales, marketing, commerce, and other in-house teams a common view of every customer.
Integrating Salesforce with Drupal CMS is an effective way to streamline workflows of various departments in your organization and establish a long-term relationship with your current and prospective customers.
Key Benefits of Drupal and Salesforce Integration
If you’ve indulged in Drupal website development, your sales and marketing team can leverage the power of Salesforce through seamless integration between the two systems. Below are some of the benefits that you’ll enjoy with Drupal and Salesforce integration
- Increased efficiency in the workflows of sales and marketing
- Time and cost-saving due to a fully integrated system
- Grab and retain prospective customers with the help of instant email notifications
- Opportunity to track your competitors
- Both uni/bi-directional data sharing between Drupal and Salesforce is possible
- Smooth synchronization that helps in creating and updating the data easily
- Enhanced data protection thanks to the authorization features
So, if you’re planning for Drupal-Salesforce integration, you may hire Drupal developers from us and they will help you with seamless Drupal integration with Salesforce without disrupting your live sales or overall website. We have a pool of experienced and highly-skilled Drupal specialists who have successfully integrated a wide range of third-party applications and systems with Drupal CMS-based websites.
How Drupal and Salesforce Integration Works?
The common objective of any integration is a perfect data exchange. Drupal websites need to pull from as well as push the data to Salesforce. Thanks to Drupal 8’s API-first approach, any integration has become a breeze. Additionally, Drupal boats a wealth of pre-built contributed modules that facilitate any sort of integration. So, of course, there is a useful Salesforce module for Drupal 8, called the Salesforce Suite that ensures a seamless integration.
The Salesforce Suite includes a bunch of submodules, so let’s take a look at these modules one by one.
Modules for Integrating Drupal with Salesforce
The Drupal 8 Salesforce Suite Module
The Salesforce Suite is the main module for Drupal integration. The module synchronizes Drupal website’s entities like users, content nodes, etc. with Salesforce objects such as contacts, organizations, etc. The exact relationship between these two is provided by field mapping. Salesforce Suite helps in importing and exporting data in real-time or asynchronously, based on the Cron runs. The Drupal 8 Salesforce Suite module version has been updated in 2020.
As a professional Drupal development company, we follow the best Drupal and Salesforce integration practices that help us save time and effort consumed in the integration process.
The Salesforce Suite Submodules
Here’s how the specific tasks are carried out by the powerful group of the submodules available suite’s Drupal 8.4 version:
- Salesforce Integration – This submodule takes care of the smooth Drupal and Salesforce integration.
- Salesforce Mapping – Field mapping is used to effectively synchronize the exchanged data. This submodule in the suite maps Drupal entities to Salesforce objects.
- Salesforce Mapping UI – The handy user interface of this submodule allows you to efficiently manage the mapping settings.
- Salesforce JWT Auth Provider – This module is responsible for the key-based Salesforce authentication.
- Salesforce Logger – This tool provides for the consolidated logging of the Salesforce Log events.
- Salesforce Webform – This submodule in the suite provides support for webforms fields in the mapping process to provide seamless Drupal Salesforce webform integration.
- Salesforce Push – This member of the suite particularly manages the pushing of the Drupal data to Salesforce when any changes or updates are made on Drupal.
- Salesforce Pull – It’s the opposite of the previous module. It is responsible for importing the Salesforce objects based on the mapping.
- Salesforce Soap – This tool exposes a SoapClient service to connect with the Salesforce SOAP API.
Different Architectural Approaches
There are several architectural approaches when it comes to data flow that caters to different requirements and gratifies different needs. Let’s take a tour of the different architectures:
Real-Time Push
Real-time integration facilitates the export of Drupal objects to Salesforce immediately. You get the feedbacks that indicate whether the item failed to export and the data is available in Salesforce or not.
- Strength – Fast, limited, update lag, avoids UX, can avoid race conditions
- Weakness – Less durable and reliable
The Drupal 8 salesforce Cron based push service was introduced to construct database queues, normalizing queue items, augmenting queue operations, and implementing error handling. The Cron based sync facilitates Drupal’s core API schedule synchronization from Salesforce to Drupal.
- Strength – Handles large volumes well, can be stopped and started when needed
- Weakness – Slow, lags and risk the update conflicts
Work Queues
The queue-based batching system running in the background allows for the sending of many objects to the Salesforce as early as possible. In this architecture, instead of the objects being sent to the Salesforce at a given time, as soon as it is created, edited, deleted it goes into the queue where it waits to be exported to other items.
The queue items are then selected based on the configurable schedule and then exported to the Salesforce in batches. Batching the data enables synchronization and increases the performance by using fewer API calls.
- Strength – Reliable, high-performing, and has a shorter time lag
- Weakness – Large changes create backlogs, the potential risk of update conflicts
The Future of Drupal Integration with Salesforce
Drupal integration with Salesforce brings immense opportunities for improving sales and marketing. Integrating Salesforce and Drupal is a cost-effective solution to increase sales. If you’re able to get Drupal and Salesforce integration deployed to your operation and organization, you’ll definitely enjoy streamlined and optimized business processes, both in the short and long term. This will ultimately boost your sales and make the entire process simpler and effective.
Wrapping Up
All Drupal CMS installations are unique because of the different modules and customizations that they use. Therefore, the integration has to be set up differently by an expert. Hire Drupal developers from us and they will get the job done in a matter of minutes. If you already have a Salesforce instance set up, we’ll be happy to explore the suitable integration options. If you’re new to or have less knowledge about Salesforce, we can work with your Salesforce developers to make sure your data is organized in a way that reduces the integration effort and costs.
As a leading Drupal development company, we offer a complete suite of Drupal website development services and solutions that drive better results for our global clientele. If you’re looking for other Drupal website development services, you may hire Drupal developers at Drupal India for the required services.
FAQs
What other third-party systems and applications can you integrate with Drupal CMS-based website?
Being a top-notch Drupal development company, we have the required expertise in carrying out Drupal integration with a wide variety of third-party applications and systems seamlessly. Our wide spectrum of the Drupal integration service includes:
- Drupal and ERP systems – SAP, SharePoint, NetSuite, etc.
- Drupal and CRM systems – SugarCRM, Zendesk, Salesforce, Hubspot, Adobe Test and Target, ExactTarget, Janrain, etc.
How to integrate Drupal with Salesforce CRM?
Drupal integration with Salesforce can be a daunting task. If you’re new to this, you may hire Drupal developers at Drupal India and they will help you set up Salesforce on your Drupal website.
How do I contact you for Drupal integration with Salesforce service?
You may contact us for the required service through emails, phone calls, Skype, or WhatsApp.
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