Top 15 Integrations for Growing Businesses

Your business is developing rapidly, yet you're all too familiar with problems like:

• Sales managers spend hours manually transferring new client data from HubSpot to QuickBooks, making mistakes from time to time;
• The marketing department runs a newsletter but doesn't have up-to-date information on customers’ invoices, which leads to inaccurate proposals;
• You use five disparate systems, and none of them provides a unified dashboard with up-to-date revenue and operating expenses.

The fact is, no business, especially one that's constantly growing, can afford to transfer data manually – that's why system integration is so essential. So, what is software integration?

What Are Business Integrations?

Business integrations are bridges that enable seamless automated data exchange and consolidate functionality from various services and apps into a single ecosystem. It's important to note that this data exchange and consolidation is based on unique business logic rules specific to a particular company.

From a business perspective, integrations help automate complex workflows where data is collected across multiple departments. For example, instead of your manager manually creating an invoice in an accounting program after closing a deal in a CRM, the appropriate integration will automatically trigger this process when the deal status is changed to "Closed," eliminating human error and enabling your employees to make decisions faster and with full consideration of all relevant company data.

Why Growing Businesses Need Integrations Early

Today, integrations are an extremely beneficial investment for businesses, stimulating growth without losing control over scalable processes. Specifically, you:

• Prevent data silos. Timely integration with a single source of truth for each data type prevents the creation of disparate databases that are difficult and extremely expensive to consolidate later.
• Reduce operating costs. Automating the tasks your employees perform day after day frees up their time and allows them to spend their resources on more interesting, strategic tasks.
• Minimize human error. Eliminating manual data entry significantly reduces the likelihood of human error, meaning neither your customers, nor your employees, nor your partners will be exposed to false information.
• Optimize decision-making. Integrated systems allow businesses to collect and analyze data in real time by presenting it on a single dashboard, which aids in strategic decision-making.

Ultimately, through integrations, you adapt your IT infrastructure for subsequent scaling, making it resilient to exponential growth in data volumes and the number of customers in the future.

Top 15 Integrations Every Growing Business Needs

Now, let's look at fifteen integrations that every business should have to level up its productivity and efficiency.

CRM Integration (Salesforce, HubSpot)

CRM integration makes this system the central hub for managing the entire sales funnel, providing a single customer view. For example, CRM-ERP integration enables two-way synchronization: after a deal is closed in the CRM, the CRM API sends data to the ERP, where an invoice is automatically generated. The ERP, in turn, returns the payment status to the CRM, so managers don't have to call clients with already paid invoices.

Marketing Automation Integration (Mailchimp, Marketo)

If a marketing system isn't integrated with CRM and e-Commerce systems, emails become untargeted. The appropriate integration enables audience segmentation based on actual purchasing power and customer history. It works like this: the automation system receives lead scoring data from the CRM, and, if a customer demonstrates high activity, the system automatically upgrades them from Mailchimp to the CRM as a "sales-qualified lead."

Payment Gateway Integration (Stripe, PayPal)

This is necessary to expedite transaction processing and minimize errors in financial accounting. Specifically, after a successful payment via Stripe, the API gateway sends a webhook notification to the e-Commerce platform backend, which instantly updates the order status.

Accounting & Finance Integration (QuickBooks, Xero)

This eliminates the need for manual export and import of data on your expenses and income and is implemented through integration between the ERP/CRM and the financial system, when data on issued and paid invoices is automatically transferred to QuickBooks for reporting.

Inventory Management Integration

This integration helps businesses avoid overselling out-of-stock products. Every time a sale occurs on the e-Commerce platform, the WMS receives a corresponding alert, instantly reducing the available quantity. This information is transmitted back to the e-Commerce platform via the API to prevent further orders.

E-commerce Platform Integration (Shopify, WooCommerce)

E-Commerce integration provides seamless management of the catalog, prices, and order statuses, but implies bidirectional synchronization, that is, when the ERP/PIM transfers current prices and descriptions to Shopify, and Shopify transfers new orders, customer data, and payment status to the ERP/WMS for processing.

Customer Support Integration (Zendesk, Intercom)

This integration gives support agents full customer context directly in the Zendesk dashboard. It uses the Service Desk API for request history and the CRM API for customer data. This eliminates the need for agents to navigate multiple systems at once.

Analytics & BI Integration (Google Analytics, Power BI)

This is necessary for combining sales and inventory data with external analytics (such as traffic and user behavior). Specifically, you'll need to create a data warehouse to aggregate data from all integrated systems so that it can be processed and visualized in Power BI or Tableau.

ERP Integration

Integration with an ERP system ensures that all processes, such as production, logistics, and finance, rely on a single source of truth, meaning that the ERP acts as a data master, while any other system must request the necessary data from it to avoid conflicts.

HR & Payroll Integration

Automating hiring, timekeeping, and payroll processes is what the integration is all about. It also reduces compliance risks and calculation errors. Specifically, through integration between the HRIS and project management system, data on actual hours worked can be instantly transferred to the payroll system.

Project Management Integration (Asana, Trello)

This integration is needed to optimize collaboration between sales teams and other employees. Specifically, after a deal is closed in the CRM, the integration can automatically create a new project in Asana and enrich it with data from the CRM.

Communication Tools Integration (Slack, Microsoft Teams)

This is necessary to increase the speed of response to critical events. From a practical standpoint, this integration is implemented by setting up automatic alerts: for example, if a critical request is received in Service Desk, or a large payment is reversed in Stripe, the system sends an instant notification to the appropriate Slack channel.

Document Management Integration (Google Workspace, Dropbox)

This integration provides centralized storage and access to important documents associated with a specific CRM or ERP record. It typically uses an API to connect a Google Drive file link to a customer record in the CRM.

Shipping & Logistics Integration

This is necessary for the automated generation of waybills and tracking numbers to speed up shipments, and, ultimately, enusre the customer experience optimization. In practice, this is implemented using the following logic: after the WMS confirms the order has been collected, the integration service exchanges data with the carrier's API, receives the tracking number, and automatically sends it to both the customer and the e-Commerce system.

Cybersecurity & Identity Access Integration (SSO, MFA)

This type of integration is aimed at strengthening data security, maintaining compliance, and simplifying employee login to multiple systems. Technically, this is implemented through the implementation of SSO and MFA, while access management is handled by a centralized provider such as Azure AD or Okta.

How to Prioritize Integrations for Your Business

A well-thought-out software integration process will maximize ROI and help you avoid chaotic actions. As a seasoned business integration team, we recommend following this plan:

Start with the biggest operational bottlenecks

Identify areas where your employees spend the most time on manual operations and make critical errors as a result – usually these are manual order transfers from the e-Commerce system to WMS or invoice synchronization from CRM to QuickBooks – and these are where integrations are most needed.

Align integrations with business goals

Each integration should achieve an alignment with a specific business goal, such as accelerating time-to-market (in which case, integrating a project management system with CRM and HR systems would be a priority) or reducing customer churn (in which case, integrating a Service Desk with a CRM would be paramount).

Prioritize integrations that consolidate data

The most valuable integrations are those that help create a single customer view and/or consolidate financial data. In particular, integrating CRM with ERP or BI analytics should always be one of the first, as it creates a single source of truth for the entire company.

Choose integrations that benefit multiple departments simultaneously

Integration that enables the automation of processes across multiple departments is ideal. For example, integrating an e-Commerce system with a WMS and financial system will simultaneously benefit the logistics, finance, and sales departments.

Evaluate the complexity and cost of implementation

Start with high value and low complexity. Complex, high-risk integrations – for example, full synchronization of a legacy ERP system – make sense to postpone until you've got the benefits of simpler projects, i.e., those that can rely on low- or no-code best integration platforms instead of API-first or custom approaches.

Consider integrations that eliminate data silos

Data silos arise when departments work with different, conflicting information. For example, if the sales department uses outdated pricing, while the warehouse relies on up-to-date data, this leads to financial losses. This explains why businesses should prioritize integrations that address these types of issues.

Analyze dependencies between tools

Integrations are often built in chains, meaning it's impossible to integrate a project management system with a finance platform without first integrating a CRM system with the project management system. Therefore, you need to discuss the implementation sequence with your IT contractor or internal team so that each new step is facilitated by the stable operation of previous integrations.

Rely on the Impact vs. Effort framework

This framework will help you visualize your priorities. It divides potential integrations into the following quadrants:

• High Impact/Low Effort. This is where you should start, as this type of integration will bring you the fastest ROI.
• High Impact/High Effort. These are strategic integrations that are implemented secondarily.
• Low Impact/High Effort. These are integrations that you’re better off avoiding.
• Low Impact/Low Effort. These integrations make sense if you have sufficient resources.

If you'd like to entrust your integration plan and its implementation to a reliable IT partner, call or email us.

Common Mistakes When Implementing Integrations

The technical implementation of integrations is associated with a number of challenges, the most typical of which we’ll discuss below.

Lack of data mapping

Software engineers often begin writing code before business analysts have agreed on field mappings between different systems, which leads to data loss or incorrect records. To prevent this, you'll need to create a data mapping table before development, which you must coordinate with department managers. This table will then become the single source of truth for developers and should also include transformation and error-handling rules.

No documentation

Your integration may work as intended, but no one but one developer knows why or how it happens, and if they quit, the entire system becomes a black box. To avoid this, you should agree from the outset to document not only the code but also the integration's business logic – that is, its triggers, step sequences, and error handling mechanisms.

Overcomplicating the tech stack

Using too many tools and architectural patterns for simple tasks – for example, implementing an enterprise service bus where a simple iPaaS cloud data integration software would suffice – can also lead to problems. That's why you should follow the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" principle, starting with the simplest systems that can be interconnected via no-code or low-code system integration software, and ending with custom development where such software integration tools can't handle the logic complexity and/or colossal data volumes.

Ignoring scalability

Creating an integration that works smoothly with 100-500 transactions per day but fails during peak loads is another common problem. That's why it's so important to design integrations with the potential for increased request volume in mind. To achieve this, it makes sense to implement asynchronous data processing for critical data flows – this will ensure the system won't freeze at a critical moment.

Security and compliance oversights

Transferring sensitive customer data (typically financial information and PII) through unencrypted connectors is a direct violation of GDPR and/or CCPA. You can avoid this by practicing a "Security by Design" approach, using only secure protocols like OAuth/MFA/HTTPS, limiting access to external system APIs to only necessary permissions, and conducting regular security audits.

How to Choose Integration-Friendly Software

The choice of a tool that should become part of an integrated system has to be based on aspects that we will analyze in more detail below.

API availability

You shouldn't just check with the software vendor whether it has an API at all – it's also important to learn how it works. For example, modern software that's predisposed for third-party integration should provide a RESTful API with detailed documentation and support for standard protocols. However, the absence of a public API or the presence of an outdated one like SOAP or XML-RPC inevitably increases the cost and complexity of integration.

Compatibility

Next, you'll need to check how effectively the chosen software interacts with your tech stack and industry standards. For example, if your primary database is PostgreSQL, then new software that only supports MS SQL will immediately make integration unnecessarily complex. You'll also need to find out whether there are ready-made connectors for your SaaS platforms (if you use them), as it’s always cheaper than custom development.

Scalability

A growing business requires software that can boast the same scalability – that's why you need to find out how the chosen solution's API handles peak loads and batch processing. The solution should also have clear rate limits and provide mechanisms for asynchronous data processing – these characteristics will help you avoid system overload at the most inopportune moment.

Vendor support

Integration with an external SaaS service inevitably leads to vendor lock-in, so before choosing, you'll also need to evaluate the quality and speed of technical support, especially in the context of APIs – that is, how quickly a particular vendor responds to API error messages and how often breaking changes are announced (they may require rewriting the code of your custom connectors).

Cost

When calculating the integration budget, you must consider both the software subscription price and hidden expenses, such as the cost of writing custom integration code, the cost of API tokens, the cost of iPaaS (essentially, it’s the middleware needed for orchestrating integrated systems), and the cost of support, including monitoring and bug fixing after launch.

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