SYSTEMS & DATA FLOW
CRM & Marketing Integrations
Your CRM and your marketing platform both work. Getting them to agree with each other is the hard part.
Sound familiar?
Sales can’t see what marketing sent
A rep calls someone who opened four emails last week and has no idea. Or calls someone who unsubscribed on Tuesday and is pretty annoyed about it.
The same person exists three times
Once in the CRM, once in the email platform, once in a list somebody imported after a conference. Slightly different in each.
Unsubscribes don’t travel
Somebody opts out in one system and carries on hearing from the other. This is the one that turns into a compliance conversation, and it's usually found late.
Someone exports a CSV every Monday
There’s a person on your team who spends two hours a week moving data between two systems by hand, and it works fine right up until the week they’re on vacation.
What we do
Field mapping between CRM and marketing platform, agreed before anything gets built
Syncs that don’t quietly create duplicates
Deduplication and merge rules
Unsubscribe and consent status moving in both directions
Automations that keep lists clean and worth mailing
Embedding marketing tools inside the CRM, so your team works in one place
Lead handoff: what triggers it, who owns it, what happens when nobody acts
Reporting that connects campaign activity to pipeline
To be clear about where we stop: we build and maintain the plumbing. We don’t run your email marketing, write your campaigns or manage your sends. We make sure the systems underneath tell each other the truth.
Case study
Quick and Simple Imports
Quick and Simple Imports wanted more from two things at once. Their Salesforce setup, and email marketing that connected to it properly.
We started with Salesforce. Custom homepages and dashboards for tracking outreach and pipeline, new fields, and page layouts arranged so the sales team can find what they need and log activity in a few seconds.
Then we implemented ActiveCampaign and handled the integration end to end: data syncs, field mapping, and automations that keep the lists clean. We embedded ActiveCampaign inside Salesforce too, so the team sends email and manages automation without leaving the system they already live in.
Their first campaign had a 48% open rate.
What Ryan said about it
We recently partnered with ForgeSight Analytics to optimize our Salesforce setup and implement ActiveCampaign, and we couldn’t be more impressed. They completely revamped our Salesforce experience, customizing homepages and dashboards that make it easy for our sales team to track performance across outreach efforts and our opportunity pipeline. They also added new fields and cleaned up our page layouts, making it much easier to find the information we need and log activities without hassle.
The ActiveCampaign setup was just as seamless and our first campaign had a 48% open rate! ForgeSight handled the entire integration with Salesforce — from configuring data syncs and field mapping to building automations that keep our lists clean and actionable. They even embedded ActiveCampaign tools directly into Salesforce so our team can send emails and manage automations without ever leaving the platform.
What really stood out was the level of service. ForgeSight was incredibly responsive, thoughtful, and easy to work with from start to finish. The project was delivered exactly as quoted, and they even went above and beyond, helping us set up a shared email group in Google so replies from campaigns would reach the right people without overwhelming any one team member. Don also came on site several times to learn about our needs and implement training on all elements mentioned above. I loved the personal touch that included sweet treats :-)
If you’re a small business looking for smart, approachable help with Salesforce, email marketing, or analytics, ForgeSight Analytics is the real deal and I couldn’t recommend them more!
Ryan Bator, President & Co-founder, Quick and Simple Imports
How a project works
Free working session
You show us what you have and where it's falling short, and we talk through how we'd handle it. No obligation.
Proposal
If it makes sense to keep going, we send a proposal with the scope and timeline. You can choose a fixed price for a defined project, or hourly if you'd rather have us as a fractional part of your team. Most integrations take two to four weeks. Agreeing on what each field means usually takes longer than the build.
Build and handoff
We check in with you along the way, so there are no surprises at the end. Then we document everything and train your team, so you can run it without us. Plenty of clients call us back for the next project, but they don't have to.
Questions we get asked
Can’t we just use the native integration?
Sometimes, and if that's the answer, we'll tell you for free. We prefer native integrations when they fit, because they're easier to support long term. When Salesforce moved to Lightning, a lot of custom-built integrations broke and were hard to repair, while the native ones kept working. Native connectors fall short on custom fields, on deciding which system wins when both records were edited, and on unsubscribe status. That's usually when somebody calls us.
Which platforms do you work with?
Mostly ActiveCampaign, Salesforce and HubSpot, in whatever combination you’ve ended up with. If there’s an app on the AppExchange we can generally work with it. Ask about anything unusual and we'll tell you whether we're the right fit.
How long does an integration take?
Two to four weeks for most. The build is rarely what takes the time. Agreeing what each field means, and which system wins when they disagree, is the slow part, and it’s worth doing properly.
Can our team send email without leaving Salesforce?
Yes. We’ve done exactly that with ActiveCampaign, so reps send campaigns and manage automation from inside the CRM. It removes the main excuse people have for not logging things.
What happens when it breaks?
Platforms update their APIs, someone adds a required field, things drift. We document what we built so your team can work out most of it. If you’d rather we kept an eye on it, we can do that too.
Do you do email marketing?
No. We connect the systems and keep the data clean, and we're happy to point you to someone who writes and sends campaigns. If someone says they'll do both really well, we'd be a little skeptical.
Two systems that need to talk to each other?
Maybe they've never been connected, or maybe the connection stopped being reliable. Book a session and we'll take a look.