As the team at Telescope started to develop their sales automation solution in 2021—which uses machine learning to find the right prospect for the right product at the right time—,  it became clear that they needed to integrate with their users’ CRM systems.

The reasons were twofold: Their clients needed to record the leads that Telescope recommended, along with any activities performed on those leads inside Telescope, in their CRM; and Telescope needed to collect the data in clients’ CRM systems to support the machine learning algorithm that powers their lead recommendations. 

While the value of implementing CRM integrations was clear, the traditional approach of implementing them in-house made less sense.

They couldn’t afford to have their engineers build and maintain integrations. Dr. Reza Javan, the CEO and Founder of Telescope, explains: “We’re trying to move extremely fast and deliver innovative, cutting-edge technology. Forcing our engineers to focus on integrations instead of our core product would compromise our ability to deliver on this goal.”

After evaluating several 3rd-party providers, it quickly became clear that Merge was the right fit. 

“From talking to customers, we knew which CRMs we needed to integrate with in the foreseeable future. Merge offered integrations with all of these CRMs through their unified API,” explains Vit Patkunan, Telescope’s Chief of Staff.

Within weeks after choosing Merge, they’ve been able to take all of their desired CRM integrations live for their closed-beta users (they have over 300 companies in their closed-beta, which include HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Zoho). 

They’ve also used the integrations to build many additional, automated steps within their application. For instance, once a lead is recommended to a sales rep in Telescope, the rep can find out whether it also lives in their CRM automatically; this can prevent them from contacting a client or a prospect that's either already in their pipeline or they weren't able to close recently.

While the integrations are currently only available to their closed-beta users, the team at Telescope has already realized a variety of benefits from offering them.

Dr. Javan explains that “Using Merge Link, onboarding clients with our integrations is incredibly easy. Our clients’ sales reps could even set up the integrations, and they can do so in a matter of clicks.” In addition, their clients’ sales reps no longer have to manually check whether a recommended lead from Telescope is already in their CRM—saving them precious time that they can reallocate toward revenue-generating activities.

The integrations have also benefited Telescope’s platform directly and indirectly: Olivier Ramier, the CTO of Telescope, explains that, “Using Merge, we’ve been able to let our engineers focus on building our proprietary technology, which we consider to be the most powerful AI system in the lead generation space.” Dr. Javan adds that “By analyzing our clients' CRM data, Telescope can generate a customer blueprint in seconds, allowing us to instantly understand their ideal customer profile and recommend highly-targeted leads from their first use of our platform.”  

Finally, Telescope’s experience with Merge’s team has, according to Dr Javan, gone above and beyond their expectations. “We’ve been super impressed by how responsive and helpful everyone at Merge is. We have a Slack channel where our teams can collaborate and troubleshoot any issues. That’s been critical in helping us get issues addressed extremely quickly and receive feedback on using the platform.”

As Telescope continues to iterate on its innovative sales automation solution, we hope our integrations continue to play a role in their success.