Rilla, the leading speech analytics tool for field sales, needed to integrate with their customers’ CRM providers to help customers add contextual insights on appointment recordings in Rilla. This includes everything from the account associated with that appointment to whether a product was sold during the meeting. 

The team at Rilla initially started building integrations with their customers’ CRM providers in-house. And even though the builds were relatively shallow (i.e., accessed a limited set of objects and fields), each would take their team several weeks to complete. 

They knew that if they wanted to build deeper integrations that could be customized for each customer, quickly, they would need to outsource their integration development.

After researching the product integration space, they knew they found the right fit in Merge. According to Christopher Martin, Rilla’s Co-Founder and CTO, “Merge offers a comprehensive set of CRM integrations, which made us confident that they’d be a good long-term partner for us.”

Once the team at Rilla built to Merge’s CRM Unified API, they were able to take several CRM integrations live. They started with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho CRM, but later added Pipedrive, Microsoft Dynamics, and NetSuite.

These integrations serve a few key use cases:

• Any time an appointment field is modified in the customer’s CRM (e.g., appointment date gets changed), a webhook, configured through Merge, sends a real-time notification to Rilla with information on the change.

• Every time an appointment recording gets added in Rilla, relevant details from the customer’s CRM get added and associated with that recording. This includes the prospect that was sold to, the product that was involved, whether the sale occurred, and order details (if the sale occurred). This allows sales reps, their managers, and other leaders to quickly find call recordings and learn what happened.

The process of initially building to Merge’s Unified API only took their team a week, and adding new CRM integrations through Merge now takes their team just a couple of hours. Christopher explains that “this has allowed our engineers to save hundreds of hours, which will likely stretch to the thousands soon.”

They also allow customers to use Merge’s Field Mapping feature to add and map additional fields to Merge’s normalized Common Models. “Our customers have highly-customized CRMs. As a result, customers will want to sync varying fields to Rilla. Through Merge’s Field Mapping feature, we can accommodate whatever our customers’ syncing requirements are,” adds Christopher.

Finally, they’ve been able to integrate with more enterprise-grade CRM systems through Merge—Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite—which has allowed their sales reps to close larger accounts at a higher average contract value (ACV). 

“Using our Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite integrations, our sales reps have been able to close hundreds of thousands of dollars in new business within the last few months. And they’re now going back to deals they previously lost because we couldn’t offer these integrations. I believe that our CRM integrations will soon help us close millions of dollars in sales.” 

Now that the team at Rilla has seen success with the current CRM integrations they offer via Merge, they’ll continue to use Merge to release new integrations whenever a customer asks for it. 

We can’t wait to hear how this approach will benefit their business in the years to come.