Seven years of sales history. A few hundred thousand records. And the field that ended up mattering most was a checkbox.
A manufacturer came to us with a phrase I hear constantly: the sales team is flying blind. Reps couldn't see who was a customer, what they'd bought, or whether anyone had ever quoted them. All of that lived in the ERP, and the ERP might as well have been on the moon. The instinctive ask, and the one we hear in nearly every ERP conversation, was: sync everything.
We didn't. Here's what we did instead, and why I think it's the right default for most mid-sized manufacturers.
A rep preparing for a call needs answers to roughly three questions. Is this a customer? When did they last buy, and roughly what? Have we quoted them before? That's it. That's the whole enablement case. So the build was a one-way historical load of contacts, companies, and sales history into HubSpot, automation that links sales orders to contacts, and, for quoting, a single boolean on the contact: Has Been Quoted.
We deliberately left the quotes themselves out of the sync. The rep doesn't need forty quote line items in the CRM. They need to know a quote exists so they ask the right first question, then they open the ERP if they need the detail. One checkbox replaced what could have been a months-long quote-object integration.
Real-time, bidirectional, everything-everywhere sync isn't a strawman. Sometimes it's right, and I've argued for it when quoting is the core sales motion and reps live in both systems all day. But every field you sync is a field that can conflict, a mapping that can break, and a failure mode someone has to monitor. When the underlying process isn't mission-critical, when nobody dies if the data is 18 hours old, a nightly one-way load with a few derived flags wins on cost, on reliability, and honestly on adoption, because reps trust simple data they understand.
There's a broader principle here that we push on clients all the time and occasionally have to relearn ourselves: the goal of ERP data in the CRM isn't completeness. It's the smallest set of fields that changes what a rep does on the next call. Start there. You can always add more later; ripping out an over-built integration is much uglier.
If your ERP integration scope is currently measured in object counts rather than rep questions, that's the smell. What are the three fields your team actually needs? I'm curious whether anyone's list is very different from the one above.