We use 14 sales and marketing tools at Outfunnel. The average is even higher at 20 according to Airtable. And the number of sales and marketing tools each company uses is forecasted to increase rapidly as the number of available tools and amount of customer data grows.
At the same time, according to Mulesoft, only 28% of tools a company uses are integrated with other tools.
More tools, more data, but limited integration—can you spot the issue here?
At the same time, nearly half of sales and marketing leaders claim that the tools would be more useful if they could be easily integrated, according to our recent research. Ease of integration is the key thing holding back usefulness of sales and marketing tech.
The inconvenient truth: most first-party integrations are suboptimal, and that’s putting it mildly
Having worked with various sales and marketing integrations for nearly 10 years on both sides, I’ve come to know that first-party integrations are limited by design. Not purposefully made to disappoint, of course, but limited by the way companies operate.
At best, integrations are approached with the Pareto rule: what’s the 20% of functionality that covers 80% of the use cases. And what gets built is a tool that “ticks boxes” and covers:
- 80% of needs of light users
- 50% of needs of normal users
- 20% of needs of heavy users
I’m not saying that all first-party integrations are useless. Many integrations between major platforms work really well. But the reality is, there’s plenty of room for improvement.
Another inconvenient truth: “digital duct tape” is not good enough for truly aligning sales and marketing teams and data
I’m not entirely unbiased in my views, but the best way for most companies to get their sales and marketing data to sync up is using purpose-built third-party integrations.
But you’ll find big differences between the different options.
Universal app connectors like Zapier and Automate.io are great for setting up light connections quickly. For example sending a contact to the CRM after a form fill. “Digital duct tape” works great there.
PieSync used to be a great platform for syncing contact data bi-directionally, but it got acquired by HubSpot and turned into “Data Sync” as a part of HubSpot’s Operations Hub offering. As a result, its usage is now limited to HubSpot users, pushing people to search for a PieSync alternative.
But even with a contact sync tool like PieSync, you’d be missing out on connecting engagement data (e.g. someone visiting your website or clicking an email), and so many of the most useful lead nurturing / ABM use cases wouldn’t be available.
You’d also miss a lot of the insights of pulling sales and marketing data together e.g. seeing which traffic sources or triggered emails lead to creating opportunities. And you’ll probably end up paying substantial amounts of money for connecting your data and tools.
Our App connector connects your sales and marketing tools deeply and easily
Enter our App connector that you can use to connect your sales and marketing stack deeply and easily.
Get the benefits and insights of an integrated all-in-one suite while using any combination of tools, for example ActiveCampaign for email marketing, Copper for your CRM and a WordPress site with Elementor forms for your website.
Alternatively, you could use one of the major all-in-one suites like HubSpot and integrate 3rd party tools more deeply and easily than most native integrations allow.
With our app connector you can:
- Sync your contacts and segments from your CRM to the email marketing tool along with all the relevant tags, statuses and custom fields (so that campaigns can start or stop automatically).
- Record email engagement back to the CRM so your sales team has full context.
- Sync contacts from web forms and landing pages to the CRM along with all the necessary data and metadata (eg. traffic source).
- Automatically sync segments from your CRM to your advertising target lists (coming soon)
- Use events from all these tools to calculate customizable lead scores.
- Use our website tracking feature to understand what leads do on your website after clicking on an email or before filling a form.
| Supported Sales/CRM tools | Supported marketing tools |
| Copper | Mailchimp |
| Pipedrive | ActiveCampaign |
| HubSpot CRM | Elementor Forms |
| Wix Forms | |
| Contact Form 7 | |
| More CRMs coming soon: Airtable | More forms coming soon: Gravity Forms, WP Forms |
| Ads coming soon: LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads |
We’ll be adding new connections soon—if you don’t see your favourite tool listed please fill this form.
Ready to connect your sales and marketing tools deeply and easily? Start your free 14-day trial now.
