Nobody wants a jack of all trades! If you have any sense in business, you go for the best tools available for each of the tasks you need to get done.
That’s why we concentrate on being the best business management tool and let others do the pricing, the accounting, the email marketing etc. We think this approach is so important that we’ve added Integrations to our What We Love list.
Integrations come in a variety of methods, but the one everyone is taking about, is the API. An API is simply a way for two systems to pass information to each other. We love them.
If we think of the API we have with FENSA, it allows window installers to register their installations directly from within Business Pilot. Let’s face it, you have all the information already entered into Business Pilot, so why enter it all back in for your registration? Exporting the data, logging in to another site and uploading it is a possible route, but isn’t that just about as time consuming? This is where APIs are really powerful.
Our link with Framepoint is another example of time saving. It is also an example where two systems that are each striving to be the best that they can be, for the particular task they carry out, can lean on each other to provide the best ‘integrated’ system. There is no point Tommy Trinder building a poor CRM to sit on the side of their pricing tool, or for Business Pilot to build a half-baked pricing tool to sit on the side of our business management features. We just need to integrate,
There are times though when the best way to integrate is not via an API. You only need look at the BP Mail feature and how we got around some serious issues that arise from connecting all of your email to your CRM. That is why it is important to look at the best way to integrate systems, based on the needs and wants of the users. And for us, that means installers.
Email marketing and accounting are other areas where the same data within your CRM and business management system may be duplicated. And yet, building either of these into your CRM would be the wrong thing to do. Again, our integrations allow you to avoid duplicating data and still allow you to get the best of both worlds.
Let’s take email marketing. The minute you do that from within your CRM, not only do you slow down your own system, but you also don’t have the benefit of email deliverability that is at the heart of a true email marketing platform like Mailchimp, Active Campaign or many others. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars ensuring that your marketing messages get through and don’t end up in the spam folder or worse, seeing your email address blacklisted. It is a perfect example of why integrations give you the best option.
It is probably easy to understand why we added integrations to our Why We Love list. We believe that the best way for installers to get the best range of tools is to have options as to how they put together their suite of systems. That for us means integrating. Integrating for time saving. Integrating for accuracy and integrating to leverage the best solution for each task.
Do your current systems ‘talk to each other’? Do you find your self either entering things on multiple systems or exporting and importing way too much? What would it mean for you if you could stop all of that and have the systems talk to each other rather than you having to do all the leg work? Well, because Business Pilot’s integrations do all of that for you, we had to add integrations to our Why We Love list.
