The sales department is looking to change its CRM, and I can see from watching the demos that the platforms available would enhance the way they work. My main worry is what happens to the processes and departments connected to the CRM. At the moment customer data goes through finance, customer service, marketing, data warehouse and some internal systems. I have a bad feeling that we are going to repeat the mistakes of the past once again.

To those who have recently implemented sales management systems, what integrations were essential for you? I can guess the features are going to include identity, email/calendar, accounting/billing, marketing technology and BI, but I am also interested to know about unexpected dependencies that occurred during implementation process. Moreover, did you make the CRM system the system of record for the customer data, or do you store it somewhere else?