Salesforce integrations

In short

Integrating Salesforce means keeping accounts, contacts, opportunities and cases consistent with the ERP, marketing automation, support desk and collaboration tools around it. The common connections are order and invoice sync with the ERP, lead handover from marketing, and case escalation. What goes wrong is almost always identity and volume: duplicate accounts from name matching, restricted picklists rejecting values, and a daily API allocation that a naive full sync exhausts.

Salesforce API changelog → No breaking changes or deprecations in the last 90 days

What connects to Salesforce

Where DACH companies run Salesforce, it is where sales works: accounts, contacts, opportunities, often service cases. It is rarely the system of record for money. Prices, credit limits and invoices live in an ERP, campaigns in a marketing tool, tickets in a support desk.

So Salesforce gets connected in three directions. ERP systems exchange customers, orders and financial status with it, as in SAP to Salesforce or NetSuite to Salesforce. Marketing and support tools feed it leads, engagement and case history, for example HubSpot running alongside Salesforce. Collaboration tools such as Slack and Jira receive its events, so people outside Salesforce still see what changed. In every direction, the real design work is deciding which system owns each field.

Where Salesforce integrations break

Its record Id is not a shared key. The 15- or 18-character Salesforce Id means nothing to an ERP or a ticket system. Matching on company name or email creates duplicates, so every integration needs a stored external ID and upsert logic.
Leads turn into something else. Conversion replaces a Lead with a Contact and an Account under new IDs. A sync that ignores this leaves orphaned records or creates the same person twice.
Picklists are restricted. A value missing from the target picklist is rejected. Stages, statuses and priorities from other systems need an explicit mapping to Salesforce API values, with a defined fallback.
The daily API allocation is shared. Every connected tool draws on the same rolling 24-hour budget. Volume belongs on Bulk API 2.0 or Composite calls, driven by SystemModstamp deltas rather than full re-reads.
Validation rules fail single records. Required fields, validation rules and duplicate rules reject individual rows in the middle of a batch. Those rows have to be retried or surfaced, not dropped while the batch reports success.

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