Procedures and tools for information systems integration are a crucial step in Apparound’s business strategy, allowing companies to reduce time-to-market and address the competitive landscape while gaining flexibility and security in the usage of information and applications.
Just a few days after the news about the connector between Apparound CPQ and Salesforce CRM, we interviewed Federico Bonarrigo, our company’s CTO, in order to learn more about the development of this project.
Hello Federico, thank you for dedicating us your time. Let's talk about the recently released Salesforce connector. What exactly is it about?
We have designed and published on Salesforce AppExchange marketplace a package called Apparound CPQ Connector.
With this initiative, we were able to support customers and system integrators dealing with SF implementation and management with a connector that allows to hook Salesforce to our CPQ in a native way and with minimum effort.
Can you give us some more information about it? How does the connector work?
The package contemplates an administration interface on a Lightning platform inside Salesforce. This dashboard allows a user with limited technical knowledge to configure the coupling of fields between Apparound’s and Salesforce’s entities.
Both platforms are characterized by extreme flexibility and it is possibile to customize data structures in order to meet customer needs. It is possible to create custom entities or add fields in already existing entities. The administration interface of the connector serves as a trait d’union between the two systems. And that’s it: fast and efficient!
What led to the creation of the connector?
Apparound is an open to integrations platform. Our mission is to simplify and rationalize the sales process. When the configurator is being used by a customer inside an ecosystem where there are other tools such as a CRM or an ERP, it goes without saying that the best path is to integrate it with these other systems.
One of our customers who is currently using Salesforce CRM has chosen Apparound as their sales tool. In deploying our solution, it occured to them that it would have been useful to connect it to the CRM, in order both to recover an existing lead or account for making an offer, and for creating the quote (an opportunity), successfully managing the closing of the order as well.
This necessity led us to create the integration and make it available to anyone on the Salesforce official store. We strongly believe that the combination of these two systems is a winning one.
How does this project add value to Apparound?
This initiative has to be framed in a wider strategic context that we call partner enablement. To summarize, we aim to make it possible for Apparound to be enriched with more tools for allowing our technological partners – that are professional system integrators – to be autonomous in the combination of Apparound with other systems, in order to customize the sales cycle and the user experience.
A strategy aimed at growing product capabilities and putting our partners in ideal sales conditions, with a platform that can adapt to any market context, whether in standalone or integrated mode.
What are the next steps?
This connector is the first in a long series. It will be followed by one for Dynamics365 and HubSpot. Other connectors for CRM and ERP are expected to be released during 2023.
We also aim to include within our holistic sales journey low-code capabilities that allow a partner to personalize the user experience.