In the past 17 years, we’ve had the opportunity to work with many companies that engineer products for their customers, ranging from elevators to specialty chemicals to beverage containers.
A consistent friction point we’ve observed is how much manual data entry and coordination work is required just to get project information from the sales team to the engineering team.
The sales team usually has all kinds of costing and feature data in their CRM system, but then has to export, email, print or otherwise type that information into some other form when passing along the information to engineers, who need to use that information as they are creating and designing what the customer actually wants.
Even worse, as the engineers work with the client, they often encounter needs that are out of scope with the original sale price. This means they have to go BACK to the sales team, do all sorts of back and forth and chasing of cats, to get a new price quote in the customer’s hands and the additional cost approved.
Instead of focusing on the work that really matters (closing sales and engineering great products), your sales people and engineering team are often tasked with data entry and coordination efforts, which takes up a huge portion of their time, makes them less valuable to the organization, and frustrates them as it’s not the type of work they actually want to be doing.
In many companies, new job roles have been created for people to translate, transmit and juggle all this competing information between order creation (sales) and order design (engineering), and often a third group, order fulfillment (manufacturing).
The CRM to CAD Disconnect
What makes this problem particularly acute is the fundamental disconnect between how sales teams work and how engineers work. Sales teams live in CRMs like Salesforce or HubSpot, tracking customer requirements, specifications, and pricing in structured database fields. Engineers, on the other hand, work primarily in CAD systems like AutoCAD, SolidWorks, or Inventor, where they need those same specifications translated into technical drawings and 3D models.
The gap between these two worlds creates a massive bottleneck. A salesperson might have captured that the customer needs a custom bracket with specific load requirements and mounting dimensions in their CRM, but when that information reaches the engineer, it often comes as a printed email or a hastily scribbled note. The engineer then has to manually interpret this information and re-enter the specifications into their CAD system, often having to call or email the salesperson for clarification on details that got lost in translation.
We’ve seen engineers spend hours recreating customer contact information, project specifications, and technical requirements in their CAD title blocks and drawing properties, even though all of this information already exists in the company’s CRM system. Meanwhile, when the engineer makes design changes or discovers additional requirements, they have to manually communicate these back to sales through yet another disconnected process.
So What Can We Do?
There are a couple of key approaches that I think can improve this situation.
The first step is to reduce and ideally eliminate the amount of double entry that occurs throughout the process. Often, multiple individuals are entering the same information in multiple places, instead of having it pulled from a single source. A simple example of such data might be customer name and contact information. This info is going to be in your CRM, but also in a lot of spreadsheets, emails, and probably any CAD drawings you have. The approach should be that one person in the organization enters that information, and all the other systems consuming that information should pull it from that single source of truth.
The second step is to try to make sure that the one individual who is entering that information is the best person to do so. Meaning, don’t require your sales people to enter information in their CRM that is of a highly technical nature, and should really be up to the engineer to enter, unless you have very specific logical controls that guide the salespeople as to the rules for what to enter.
Building the Bridge Between CRM and CAD
The third critical step is creating automated data flow between your CRM and CAD systems. This is where custom software development becomes essential. While both your CRM and CAD software are powerful tools in their own right, they weren’t designed to talk to each other seamlessly.
We’ve helped companies build custom integrations that automatically populate CAD drawing title blocks with customer information from the CRM. When a salesperson creates a new project in Salesforce, the system can automatically generate a corresponding project folder in the CAD system with all the relevant customer data, specifications, and requirements already populated.
For example, we worked with an elevator manufacturer where sales would capture customer building specifications, load requirements, and installation constraints in their CRM. Our custom integration would then automatically create the initial CAD assembly with the correct parameters, saving engineers hours of setup time and eliminating transcription errors.
Real-Time Synchronization
The integration should flow in both directions. When engineers make design changes or discover scope modifications, this information needs to flow back to the sales team automatically. We’ve built systems where CAD changes trigger notifications in the CRM, complete with technical details and cost implications.
This creates a living connection between sales and engineering data. When an engineer updates a drawing with a design change, the CRM automatically flags the project for sales review. When sales approves a change order, the updated specifications flow directly into the CAD system without manual intervention.
The Manufacturing Connection
The benefits extend beyond just sales and engineering. When your CAD system is properly integrated with your CRM, it becomes much easier to connect manufacturing systems as well. Bill of materials, work instructions, and production schedules can all be generated automatically from the same integrated data source.
We’ve seen companies reduce their project lead times by 30% or more simply by eliminating the manual handoffs between CRM, CAD, and manufacturing systems. Engineers spend more time engineering, salespeople spend more time selling, and everyone spends less time chasing down information that should have been available at their fingertips.
Starting Your Integration Journey
The key is to start with your most painful integration point. Maybe it’s the initial handoff from sales to engineering, or perhaps it’s managing change orders between CAD and CRM. Build a custom solution for that specific workflow, prove its value, then expand to other integration points.
The technology exists today to make your CRM and CAD systems work together seamlessly. The question is whether you’re ready to invest in the custom development that will eliminate the manual coordination overhead and let your teams focus on the high-value work they were hired to do.
