Intuit-Salesforce Alliance To Offer Integrated CRM And Financial Apps
Linking the two companies' applications will let small businesses better manage customer relationships by providing them with a way to link customer and sales information with financial data, the companies said.
Intuit will resell the Salesforce CRM application with QuickBooks integration, offering it through its Inuit App Center. An Inuit spokesperson said the company's channel partners would be able to sell the integrated application set as well.
The companies expect to complete the integration development work this summer. Pricing will be announced when the application is made available, Inuit said.
Integrating the Intuit and Salesforce applications will make it possible for businesses to synchronize customer data in Salesforce with the on-premise QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online. That will eliminate the need for data entry in two different systems and make it possible to display aggregated customer data along financial information.
Businesses, for example, will be able to use the combined data to calculate the probability for closing a sale. "This alliance will create offerings that allow small businesses to better manage their customers and deals," said Dan Wernikoff, vice president and general manager of Intuit's Financial Management Solutions division, in a statement.
"By working with Intuit, we are bringing the industry's leading customer relationship management solution to QuickBooks customers," said George Hu, executive vice president, platform and marketing, at Salesforce, in a statement. "This alliance will accelerate the adoption of social, mobile and open cloud CRM solutions by small businesses."
The deal with Salesforce is a bit of good news for Intuit, following a rough few days last week when the vendor's QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Online Payroll and Intuit Payments Solutions were hit by a series of service outages.