Connecting Salesforce and Intercom in 4 Easy Steps

More than 150,000 businesses like ours use Salesforce CRM. They are the leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform and a favorite of GTM teams in product-led growth (PLG) companies, including us at Inflection.io.

Most (if not all) tech vendors in the martech space offer out-of-the-box integration with Salesforce because of its popularity. The decision to choose the right one for PLG businesses comes down to how the integration helps address the specific use cases.

Intercom is a customer communications platform, popular with both B2B and B2C businesses. This article details how to connect Salesforce with Intercom and explores some of the popular use cases a PLG business would be looking for in an automation solution.

Salesforce and Intercom Integration

Before you connect Salesforce and Intercom, make sure you have an Intercom subscription with full admin privileges; a Salesforce account with admin privileges; and a Salesforce edition that has API access.

Step 1: Find and install the Salesforce app from the Intercom app store.

If you want to test the integration between Intercom and Salesforce accounts, there is an option to test it in a sandbox environment as well. Select the option ‘Install using sandbox’ when installing the Salesforce app.

Note: Sandbox testing is NOT available in all Intercom plans.

Step 2: Authorize Intercom access from the Salesforce app when prompted. Once the connection is established, the data is synced whenever a record (user or lead) is updated.

Step 3: Configure your data mapping preferences. Note that the fields required by Salesforce to create a new record are mapped by default.

Step 4: Go to Settings, and map the qualification data that needs to sync between Salesforce and Intercom, and you are all set to go!

You can also refer to Intercom’s guide on how and when data is synced between the two platforms.

Before you Connect Salesforce and Intercom

Connecting Salesforce to Intercom is super easy and doesn’t need technical expertise. Managing SFDC leads can also be done directly from the inbox of the Salesforce app (from Intercom’s app store) after proper setup and mapping.

Though it seems like a dream combo, Intercom falls short when it comes to executing personalized communications for PLG use cases. Especially for B2B companies.

Intercom is Pivoting to a Support Product

According to their CEO’s interview with Forbes, Intercom is pivoting their focus to compete with the likes of Zendesk. This is great news for their B2C and B2B customers focused on service use cases but not so much for their customers running or committed to running a PLG motion.

Blind Eye to B2B Data Structure

Another major limitation of using SFDC and Intercom for a PLG business is that the relationship between a lead or contact (User in Intercom) and their account (Company in Intercom) does not automatically sync.

Intercom is severely limited in being able to understand Accounts, workspaces, and other B2B hierarchies typically needed to execute growth campaigns.

Intercom’s Pricing

Intercom pricing - to have an email “come from” someone, like their assigned CSM, Intercom requires that user to be in Intercom, which of course costs money.

Personalization doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg.

Inflection for Personalized PLG Communications

Inflection’s Salesforce integration takes care of pulling the owner of the record automatically. So, when you send a personalized campaign from Inflection, you can customize the ‘From’ field without having to pay extra.

Personalization is pretty much a standard requirement to run successful PLG campaigns. Your ability to stand out from the competition, engage customers, and win their loyalty depends on your personalization capabilities.

Inflection is the first growth automation platform you need to run personalized PLG campaigns at scale and comes at a PLG-friendly price.

To be able to run product activity-based campaigns enriched with firmographic intelligence, businesses need a solution to tap into product events and CRM data. And, this is exactly the idea behind Inflection.io.

Inflection is purpose-built to enable PLG teams to automate their growth strategy. We combine product activity from data warehouses and CDPs and CRM data to show you a unified customer profile.