As a CIO (Chief Information Officer), you know the pain of data silos all too well. Customer, sales, inventory, and other critical business data often live in disconnected systems like CRM (Customer Relationship Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), and more. To gain insights that fuel growth, you need to break these silos.
In this article, you’ll learn how to integrate these disparate systems to create unified 360-degree sales dashboards. With a comprehensive view of customer behavior, market trends, and sales performance, you can drive data-backed strategy and optimize operations.
We’ll explore best practices for system integration and dashboard creation to help you transform siloed data into unified visibility and enhanced decision-making.
The Problem of Data Silos
Data silos are a widespread problem for many manufacturers and organizations. Different departments use their systems to track data, like CRM software for sales, ERP platforms for operations, and separate marketing and customer service tools. These systems are disconnected, containing data in isolated “silos” that can’t be accessed across the organization.Limited visibility into customer relationships: With data trapped in silos, you have an incomplete view of the customer experience and relationships. Sales reps can’t see the full history of a customer’s interactions with your company or gain insights from marketing and service data. They go into calls with limited context and risk appearing uninformed or disorganized to the customer.
Inefficiencies and redundancies: Data silos also introduce inefficiencies as departments collect and manage the same data separately. This can lead to inconsistencies and require time-consuming manual work to synchronize data across systems. Valuable insights may be missed when data can’t be aggregated and analyzed holistically.
Barriers to improved decision-making: Most importantly, data silos obstruct visibility into key metrics and trends that could drive better decisions. Executives and managers need an integrated, high-level perspective of sales performance, customer satisfaction, and market changes to make strategic choices and gain a competitive advantage. Isolated data fragments provide an incomplete, distorted view of business health and growth opportunities.
Breaking down data silos through integration and unification is critical to overcoming these challenges. By connecting data across CRM, ERP, and other systems into 360-degree sales dashboards, manufacturers can gain the comprehensive insights needed to optimize sales, marketing, and customer experiences.
Integrating CRM, ERP, and Other Systems
A CRM contains valuable information on your customers, sales pipeline, and marketing campaigns. An ERP holds critical data on finance, inventory, and operations. By integrating these systems, along with others like marketing automation or e-commerce platforms, you gain a comprehensive view of your business in a single sales dashboard.Streamline data and processes: Combining data from multiple systems eliminates duplication of information and the need to enter the same data into different platforms. Your teams now work from a sole source of truth, enabling tighter collaboration and improved decision-making.
Gain valuable insights: A unified dashboard provides end-to-end visibility into your sales cycle and business performance. You can see how marketing campaigns drive sales pipeline and revenue, understand how long it takes deals to close, identify roadblocks, and improve metrics. You gain insights to optimize sales, marketing, and operational strategies.
Improve the customer experience: With a cohesive view of each customer’s interactions across touchpoints, you can personalize communications and interactions. See the entire history of a customer relationship and anticipate the need to strengthen loyalty.
Select an integration platform: Choose a platform that can connect to all your systems through open APIs and pre-built connectors. Assess its data mapping, transformation, and automation capabilities to streamline integration. Consider a solution with AI that can detect relationships between data points and provide predictive analytics. With the right platform unifying your systems, you gain the visibility and insights needed to optimize your sales, marketing, and business strategies.
Building 360-Degree Customer Profiles
To gain a complete view of your customers and their behaviors, you need to integrate data from various systems into unified customer profiles. By combining information from your CRM, ERP, e-commerce, and marketing platforms, you can gain insights into your customers’ interactions across channels to better understand their needs, preferences, and lifetime value.Merge customer data from disparate systems
The first step is consolidating customer data that currently resides in separate systems. Match records by email address, name, address, or other identifiers to link profiles and capture a comprehensive view of each customer. Resolve any inconsistencies in data fields across systems to ensure you have an accurate, single version of the truth for each customer.Capture cross-channel interactions and behaviors
A 360-degree customer view should include interactions and behaviors across all channels where your customers engage with your brand. For example, pull data from your CRM to see customer service requests and from your e-commerce platform to analyze purchase history and shopping cart activity. Also draw in web analytics to capture website visits, traffic sources, and on-site actions. Combining data from multiple digital and offline channels provides context into the customer’s journey and helps identify opportunities to improve experiences.Identify high-value customer segments
With a holistic view of your customers, you can gain insights to define and target your highest-value segments. Analyze attributes like customer lifetime value, purchase frequency, products purchased, and channel preferences to identify your loyal and potentially high-value customers. You may also uncover additional customer segments you were previously unaware of. These insights allow you to tailor marketing, sales, and product strategies to align with the needs and behaviors of your most valuable customers.Unifying your customer data into 360-degree profiles enables a level of understanding not possible with fragmented systems and data silos. By capturing interactions across channels and applying analytics, you gain a true understanding of your customers and the ability to provide experiences tailored to their needs and values.