INNOVATION PROJECT

Connectors Integrating DAM and CRM

An Innovative Product targeted to establish a seamless, native integration that closed a critical gap between sales / marketing activity and corporate content governance.

Core Objective:

The primary objective was to deliver a seamless, native integration that closed a critical gap between sales activity and corporate content governance.

The target users were Sales and Marketing Professionals operating within Salesforce (Target Users). The product's core value proposition was to eliminate the risk of sharing outdated or non-compliant branded content with prospects by providing direct, real-time access to the Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform (OpenText) from within their Salesforce records.

The measurable outcome was to reduce business impact risks (e.g., dropped orders, compliance issues) associated with content errors and significantly improve sales and marketing team efficiency during the prospecting and follow-up stages.

Success Metrics:

Sales Efficiency: Sales teams reduced the time spent on content-related follow-up tasks during the prospecting stage by over 60%.
Marketing Efficiency: Marketing teams reduced the time spent curating mailers and content for campaigns by approximately 50% by directly accessing and inserting the latest branded assets.

Execution Summary:

We initiated the project by conducting market research and ethnographic studies among large enterprise Salesforce users to understand their content-sharing pain points. We discovered a highly inefficient and risky workflow: users downloaded assets locally from the DAM and manually attached them to follow-up emails in Salesforce. This process frequently resulted in the sharing of outdated versions, leading to significant business consequences and missed opportunities.

Based on these insights, we detailed the requirements and rapidly built a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) to validate the technical approach—creating a live, two-way connection between Salesforce records and the DAM.

The requirements were refined through demonstrations and feedback from prospects and existing customers, leading us to enhance the feature set to include contextual content fetching. This allowed the application to display DAM assets relevant to the specific Salesforce record the user was viewing, removing the need for manual searching.

We developed robust connectors for both Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud applications. A critical phase involved successfully navigating the testing and certification processes for both the OpenText and Salesforce AppExchange teams, resulting in our connectors being officially listed on their respective marketplaces.

Key Aspects:

Ecosystem Product Development: Successfully conceptualized, developed, and certified an application for two major platform ecosystems (OpenText and Salesforce AppExchange), validating the product's quality, security, and scalability.
Contextual Content Delivery: Implemented a unique feature that dynamically fetches content based on the open Salesforce record, maximizing user experience and ensuring content relevance without leaving the CRM environment.
Risk Mitigation as Value: The primary value was framed around eliminating the risk of sharing stale content, a high-impact outcome often overlooked in standard efficiency improvements.

Key Learnings: Data Discontinuity

The execution confirmed that even in mature enterprise environments, the absence of native, governed data storage within transactional systems (like Salesforce for content) creates massive workflow and compliance risks. The integration not only saved time but fundamentally resolved the business risk associated with content discontinuity.