When it comes to managing sales operations, accurate data is the cornerstone of strategic decision-making. Customer relationship management systems have got a very vital role to play in gathering sales data. However, they are not immune to discrepancies. There are a lot of errors that can arise by not maintaining CRM data needs, which can further lead to lost revenue, wasted marketing spending, inaccurate reporting, lower sales productivity, and poor customer experience.
When CRM data becomes inconsistent or outdated, businesses have to deal with duplicate records that lead to unreliable forecasting, lost sales, and degraded customer trust. All of these can directly impact business growth and profitability. 80% of organizations acknowledge their CRM data contains significant inaccuracies, which significantly impact their business operations.
Every successful company relies on one vital asset: accurate and reliable CRM data. It is the backbone of your marketing campaign, sales pipeline, and customer success operations. A lot of businesses underestimate the cost of not maintaining CRM data until it’s too late. According to a Gartner 2024 report, it was found that poor data quality may cost companies an average of 12 million USD per year. This can lead to lost sales opportunities, wasted marketing efforts, and damaged customer trust.
So, here we are going to take a look at how customer data synchronization across CRM can impact your business. CRM and ERP integration ensures that customer, sales, and financial data remain consistent across systems by synchronizing updates in real time. We will also tell you how you can automate CRM data sync to ensure streamlined operations across your business environment.
Why CRM Data Mismatches Hurt Business Operations?
CRM data does not stay accurate forever. Companies merge, people change jobs, and email addresses also expire. According to Salesforce, around 30% of CRM data becomes outdated every year. So, this means that if you are not regular about updating your data, almost one-third of your insights will be wrong. For businesses, this means lost productivity as sales reps spend their time chasing inaccurately set goals from unreliable data, wasted marketing efforts, inaccurate targeting, and much more. This is the reason why companies prefer to go for CRM data integration solution.
So, here’s how bad the CRM data can impact your business:
The sales team begins to lose momentum:
The sales teams will depend on CRM data to identify leads and forecast the revenue generation. When the data is wrong, the sales team spends around 70% of their time on non-selling tasks.
According to Salesforce, inaccurate CRM data can also lead to outreach mistakes, which can harm brand reputation.
The customer retention rates fall:
Customer success teams primarily depend on CRM data to offer personalized support. Inaccurate data can lead to unresolved tickets, delayed responses, and poor renewal management. This can directly impact revenue operations.
Marketing campaigns do not give desired results:
Marketing automation tools greatly rely on CRM data to segment audiences and personalize communications. With unreliable data, the marketing teams are unable to fetch the desired results from their marketing efforts. This can significantly harm businesses.
When systems aren’t synchronized:
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In short, CRM data mismatches disrupt revenue operations by misaligning sales, marketing, support, and finance teams around inaccurate information.
So, if you do not want to disrupt your business operations because of mismatched CRM data, then it is high time that you opt for an iPaaS solution for CRM and ERP integration that will allow you to achieve real-time bidirectional data sync across your systems.
Related Read: How to Break Down Data Silos With Data Integration
The Hidden Cost of Manual Data Syncs:
A CRM.org survey found that 23% of users face issues with manual data entry and 17% struggle with tool integration problems.
Manual data synchronization in CRM systems can cause companies to lose a lot of money. Here are some of the hidden costs associated with manual data sync in CRM:
Revenue leakage:
Your company may lose a lot of money in revenue without proper contact information. This can lead to missed follow-ups. That way, a single incorrect contact could cause you to lose millions in a deal. However, these losses hardly appear in the budget report.
Productivity loss:
The loss in productivity due to mismatched data is extensive, far beyond the person doing the data entry. When your team members are not able to trust CRM accuracy, they invest significant time verifying information and maintaining parallel spreadsheets for details.
Delayed decision-making:
The decision-making process is significantly impacted when the executives do not have access to real-time data. This causes delays in strategy implementation. The resource allocation process also becomes difficult. The competitive advantage of the company also slips away gradually.
Compliance risks:
The common risk of compliance issues increases with manual data transfer. Data privacy regulations require you to update accurate data in your system. This is nearly impossible to maintain when humans are involved.
All these hidden costs can cause your company to lose a significant amount of money, which is not even reflected in the budget reports.
Manual CRM data sync creates invisible operational costs that compound over time, reducing productivity, slowing decisions, and increasing compliance risk.
Mini Case Study: A manufacturing firm in the U.S. was losing $2 million every year because of data mismatches across its environment. By opting for bidirectional data sync, the company’s revenue generation increased significantly. It was also able to cut down on manual labor. |
Common Reasons Behind Data Inconsistency:
Here are some of the common reasons behind data inconsistencies in your business environment:
Manual entry points:
Manual entry points may create chaos. When your marketing, sales, and support teams input different data without applying proper validation rules, the records become inconsistent across the systems.
Duplicate records:
Duplicity in records arises when the team members are unable to find existing contacts and end up creating new ones. These duplicate records can fragment the data and cause several discrepancies.
Lack of validation rules:
Without validation rules, free-form data entry is allowed. This can lead to inconsistencies in format. Sometimes, the required fields also get skipped, leading to data discrepancies.
Integration failure:
Lack of proper integration between CRM and other tools may lead to synchronization gaps. When the email platform, marketing automation system, and accounting software do not communicate properly, data flow becomes disrupted.
Human error:
Manual data entry gives rise to human errors. This can further disrupt your business operations and cause loss in efforts as well as revenue, which can be avoided with CRM integration features. Most CRM data inconsistencies originate from fragmented systems and manual touchpoints rather than the CRM platform itself.
Wondering how to avoid data inconsistency? Well, the best option is to go for CRM integration platform for business and put all your data in order.
The Need for Real-Time, Two-Way Synchronization:
Setting up real-time, two-way data synchronization means that the data is transferred and kept updated in all your systems simultaneously. If any kind of insertion, deletion, or update is done in the fields, it is instantly reflected in all your connected systems.
Unlike batch or one-way synchronization, real-time bidirectional sync ensures updates flow instantly in both directions, preventing data conflicts and overwrite issues.
With real-time, two-way CRM data integration solutions, you will be able to keep your workflow intact and yet receive the data you require within your platform without even having to refresh your screen multiple times. Now let us take a look at some of the major benefits associated with real-time, two-way data synchronization:
Key Benefits of Real-Time Sync:
- Removes stale data and nearly eliminates manual intervention.
- Ensures sales, support, finance, and operations teams are always aligned.
- Enables faster, smarter decision-making based on current data.
Related Read: Data Integration Best Practices: Tips, Trends, And Mistakes To Avoid
How Does APPSeCONNECT Fix CRM Data Sync Challenges?
There are various challenges associated with syncing data in real time:
Scalability:
As your business grows, your data volumes also grow. So, your real-time data synchronization strategy must scale without compromising on speed and reliability.
Latency:
Any kind of latency may lead to monetary loss or disrupted operations. This is especially true in time-sensitive industries like finance, where staying aligned with financial trends is very important.
Security:
Syncing sensitive data in real-time requires highly advanced security mechanisms, encryption, and compliance with regulatory standards like GDPR, CCPA, etc.
System downtimes:
As you know, system downtimes are inevitable. This remains a primary challenge for real-time data sync across the various systems in your business environment.
Hybrid systems:
Syncing data between legacy systems, cloud apps, and on-prem applications can once again turn out to be a challenging affair.
So, how do you get rid of all these challenges?
APPSeCONNECT addresses scalability, latency, security, and system reliability challenges through a governed iPaaS architecture designed for enterprise data synchronization. Well, you can opt for APPSeCONNECT’s iPaaS services to smoothly enhance data synchronization across various systems.
APPSeCONNECT’s iPaaS solution comes with an extraordinary set of features for CRM and ERP integration, which makes it ideal for companies to sync data and ensure consistency:
Automated data flow:
APPSeCONNECT’s iPaaS platform can cut down the need for manual data entry. It automatically syncs data between CRM and other platforms. This helps save time and reduce manual error.
Real-time data synchronization:
With APPSeCONNECT, the changes made in one of your systems are automatically reflected across the entire business platform. This ensures a consistent flow of data across the various systems.
Data mapping and transformation:
APPSeCONNECT comes with enhanced data mapping and transformation capabilities. It performs accurate mapping of data in different fields. It also transforms data to match the fields in different platforms.
Prebuilt connectors:
APPSeCONNECT comes with the readymade pre-built connectors for popular CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, etc. This helps accelerate the implementation process.
Error handling:
APPSeCONNECT comes with advanced error-handling capability. This ensures that alerts are triggered whenever there is an error. This further helps ensure that the data is consistent across the various systems.
A Strong Focus on Security and Compliance:
When it comes to ensuring security and compliance, nothing can beat APPSeCONNECT.
APPSeCONNECT’s adherence to compliance regulations:
- ISO 27001 certified
- SOC 2 (Type II) certified
- GDPR Compliance
- Encryption at Rest and in transit (256-bit AES)
- Robust corporate governance
Enhanced security measures:
- SSO (SAML)
- RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
- SCIM provisioning
- 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication)
- Domain capture
- IP allow listing
- Audit logs
And what’s more, APPSeCONNECT has already addressed the data integration needs of multiple companies around you. This makes it the perfect integration partner for your company.
Leatt achieved simplified day to day processing and saves huge amount of time and resources with data integration. Click here to read the full case study!
Key Benefits of Real-Time Data Sync Across Systems:
Here are some of the reasons why companies always prefer to automate CRM data sync:
Improved data accuracy and consistency:
Real-time data synchronization ensures that all the systems in your environment reflect the most recent data changes. This can significantly reduce the risk of discrepancies.
Improved customer satisfaction:
Modern customers always expect immediacy for order tracking, financial account updates, etc. Real-time data sync ensures that the customers have updated information. This enhances their trust and satisfaction rate.
Better decision-making:
Businesses mostly survive on accurate and timely data. Real-time data updates ensure that the business leaders are able to make well-informed decisions based on relevant metrics like market trends or customer feedback.
Enhanced operational efficiency:
Manual data transfer is not always the best option. It is error-prone and can take significant time from your resources. Automated real-time data sync can help increase operational efficiency. It also saves time and reduces the cost of manual labor.
Competitive advantage:
Real-time data synchronization allows companies to quickly react to changing data. Together, these benefits enable organizations to operate with higher accuracy, faster execution, and improved customer trust. This gives them an edge over those companies that rely on outdated information for decision-making.
Each of these benefits can be availed by opting for APPSeCONNECT’s data integration solution to integrate the systems in your environment.
Choosing the Right Integration Approach for Data Synchronization:
Here are some of the integration approaches:
Custom solutions:
There are a lot of companies that wish to implement real-time data sync by building their own integration from scratch. While this option may sound tempting at the beginning, it is often riddled with maintenance headaches, cost overhead, and wastage of resources. It is also not scalable. You also have to build the security policies all by yourself, which can be time-consuming and costly. You will always have to rely on in-house resources in order to maintain the integration.
Native data sync option:
This is yet another way in which you can ensure real-time data sync between your CRM systems and other applications. Modern CRM applications often support native integration with popular tools. However, these options are limited in scope and might not support the application that you want to integrate with. They may work for simple use cases, but they do not work that well for advanced scenarios.
Third-party data synchronization tools:
These tools can be a really good choice if you know exactly what you are looking for. There are a lot of options to choose from, including modern iPaaS solutions. These no-code template solutions ensure that all your integration needs are fulfilled.
Modern iPaaS platforms like APPSeCONNECT combine the flexibility of custom integrations with the scalability, security, and governance required for enterprise data synchronization.
Here is a checklist that you can follow to pick the right integration solution for your business:
- Security: Always go for tools that are secure. Look for RBAC, encryption, and other security measures. Security becomes really important when it comes to ensuring data sync with your CRM system.
- Distributed sync: It is important that you keep the real-time synchronization distributed. This reduces the risk of unwanted data access. That way, you can also have complete control over the data that you need to sync. Your data flow is also consistent.
- Flexibility: Always go for tools that give you a gamut of use cases to implement. This will help you to ensure that business continuity is maintained. You will also be able to fulfill all your integration needs easily.
- Scalability: Your integration solution should be able to handle bulk data. This will help you in meeting complex business requirements. Your enhanced needs will also be fulfilled.
To end with…
So, as you can see, CRM data mismatches can turn out to be really expensive for your organization. It can cause loss in revenue, disrupted business operations, and increased compliance risks. Along with that, there are a lot of hidden costs involved as well. So, if you are willing to mitigate these challenges, then it is high time that you opt for APPSeCONNECT’s iPaaS solution and achieve real-time data sync across your environment. This will not only help you address various challenges associated with CRM data mismatch but will also ensure that there is a consistent flow of data across your entire business environment.
Organizations evaluating CRM and ERP integration can consult APPSeCONNECT experts to assess data flow requirements and integration readiness.
Frequently Asked Questions
CRM data mismatches are typically caused by delayed batch syncs, manual data entry, disconnected CRM and ERP systems, duplicate records, and inconsistent data validation rules across platforms.
Real-time CRM and ERP integration ensures that any data update, such as a new lead, customer update, or transaction, is instantly synchronized across connected systems without delays.
Bidirectional synchronization ensures data flows both ways between CRM and ERP systems, preventing conflicts, overwrites, and inconsistencies that occur with one-way or batch-based sync.
Manual CRM data sync leads to productivity loss, delayed decision-making, revenue leakage, compliance risks, and reduced trust in reporting due to outdated or inaccurate data.
Yes. Real-time CRM integration ensures sales and marketing teams work from the same up-to-date customer data, improving lead follow-ups, campaign targeting, and revenue forecasting.
An iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) automates data movement between CRM, ERP, and other systems using governed workflows, reducing manual intervention and improving data consistency.
Yes. APPSeCONNECT is designed to support enterprise-grade CRM and ERP integration with scalability, security controls, monitoring, and compliance-ready architecture.
APPSeCONNECT supports integration with popular CRM platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, and Zoho CRM, along with ERP, accounting, and marketing systems.
Real-time CRM integration through governed platforms includes encryption, access controls, audit logs, and compliance measures to help meet regulations such as GDPR and SOC standards.
Businesses should evaluate CRM integration platforms based on scalability, security, real-time sync capability, bidirectional data support, error handling, and long-term maintenance requirements.
