Using Rally's Salesforce integration can provide significant value to your team and broader organization by seamlessly connecting, syncing, and updating data between Salesforce and Rally. Automatic data syncing every 24 hours reduces manual efforts and ensures data consistency between both platforms.

By configuring sync settings and property mappings, you can tailor the integration to meet your specific needs, syncing data bidirectionally or in one direction based on your preferences. Additionally, the ability to manage the integration settings, start manual syncs, pause/resume syncing, and disconnect the integration provides flexibility and control over the data flow between Salesforce and Rally.

This integration can be setup to give access to Salesforce data directly in Rally for each Participant e.g. company name, ARR, renewal date, customer health score, and can be set up as a two-way sync to share research insights in Salesforce automatically.

• Benefits for researchers

  • Salesforce data (especially combined with Snowflake) allows researchers to further enrich each participant's profile data with Salesforce related data e.g. ARR, account type, customer health score, etc.

  • Researchers can also create custom governance rules in Rally based on the preferences of Sales/CS teams

    • e.g. Add customers to a 'Do Not Contact' list in Rally if they are within 90 days of renewal, customer health score is low, etc.

• Benefits for Sales/CS team

  • This integration allows researchers to share valuable research insights — e.g. expansion/upsell signs or churn risk — directly into Salesforce, to help support + collaborate sales and CS reps.

Leverage custom governance rules with Salesforce data synced daily to streamline recruitment & remove CS roadblocks.

How does the Salesforce integration work?

Rally connects to your Salesforce instance through a standard OAuth connection to an individual user account (see below for permissions needed).

After setting up a connection with Salesforce, you can set configuration settings and create property mappings between Salesforce properties and Rally properties. Each of these properties can be configured per property to either sync data from Rally → Salesforce, from Salesforce → Rally, or use a two-way sync (see below for more details).

Once your Salesforce account has been connected and the integration has been configured, Rally will automatically sync data between Salesforce and Rally every 24 hours. You can pause the automatic syncs, delete the connection, or start a manual sync at any time by going to Integrations within your workspace settings and clicking Manage.

When syncing, Rally uses the email address of the Salesforce Contact or Lead to map data between Salesforce and Rally. If an email address from Salesforce is not detected in Rally, Rally will either ignore or create a new person in Rally depending on the settings configured during the integration setup or management.

Required user permissions

Rally user permissions

You'll need to be an Ops Manager, Developer/IT, or Admin role type in Rally.

Salesforce user permissions

Rally connects to your Salesforce instance through a standard OAuth connection to an individual user account. We recommend using a stand-alone account specifically for Rally (often called a Service Account) so you can see Rally updates in your audit history.

The Rally Service Account will need at least these permissions in order to connect successfully:

• "API Enabled" must be checked

• "Session Security Level Required at Login" must be "None"

The objects and fields accessible to Rally are all determined by the user account you use when connecting Rally to your Salesforce instance. Rally will have the same access as the user, so if fields are read-only or hidden for that user, they will be to Rally. In general, you should give Rally "Read", "Create", "Edit", and "Delete" access to all the objects you'd like to manage via Rally.

Setting up the Salesforce integration

After you have the correct User Permissions, you can set up your Salesforce integration with Rally.

Step 1. Connect Salesforce to Rally

1. In the top left corner of Rally, select your workspace name and select Settings.

2. From the sidebar, select Integrations.

3. To the right of Salesforce, select Connect to log into your Salesforce account.

4. After signing in, you’ll need to approve the requested permissions, listed below.

5. Select Allow to continue.

Grant Rally the following required permissions by selecting Allow:

• Access to identity URL service

• Manage user data via APIs

• Perform requests at any time

Step 2. Configure the sync

After Salesforce is connected to Rally, carefully configure the following sync settings.

Record types to sync

You can configure Rally to either sync people to Contacts or Leads. By default, Contacts will be used. You sync data with the Account associated with the Contact. You can select Account properties during the property mapping step that follows (see below).

Alternative custom objects: The recommended way to get fields from other objects in Salesforce is to use a "Calculated Field". Calculated fields let you set fields on Contacts and Accounts from other objects that are related to either a Contact or an Account.

• For example, if there was another object called Deal in Salesforce that was related to the Account object, you could use a calculated field to show the Deal Size as a field on the Account, based on the ARR field on a Deal object.

See documentation on calculated fields in Salesforce: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.customize_formuladef.htm&type=5

Select list to sync

After selecting which record type, you can select which Salesforce list of Contacts or Leads Rally will sync with. By default, All Contacts are selected. If you have a specific list you want to sync to Rally (i.e. Opted In Participants List), select that list from the dropdown.

Sync preferences

Carefully configure sync preferences to determine how Rally handles records during sync.

Create new people in Rally during sync

• When enabled, Salesforce contacts that don't exist in Rally will be created in Rally. Rally uses the record's email or unique identifier field to check for existing records.

• If enabled, select which Population new participants should be added to.

What should Rally do if a record exists in Rally but is missing in Salesforce?

• Do nothing — Rally takes no action on the missing record.

• Opt out missing people in Rally — People missing from Salesforce will be marked as Opted Out in Rally and cannot be contacted.

• Delete missing people in Rally — People missing from Salesforce will be completely deleted from Rally, and all their historical data from Rally removed.

Trigger sync whenever a CSV is uploaded to Rally

• When enabled, Rally will automatically trigger a sync any time a .csv file is uploaded to auto-fill missing data from Salesforce, so a researcher uploading a list of participants can be sure they get the latest, most complete participant records without the extra work.

• Contact Rally to get this feature, which can be enabled later.

Step 3. Map fields between Rally and Salesforce

Next, map Salesforce fields to properties in Rally and select the sync direction.

Note: When adding new fields to be synced, we will immediately kick off a sync.

Property mapping

Rally currently supports mapping the following field types from Salesforce:

Notes about property mapping

• Rally only pulls and maps up to 100 unique property options per each multi-select or single-select property from Salesforce.

• Rally does not support mapping compound fields (like Billing Address). Instead, map the component fields directly to Rally properties.

• Rally supports syncing with Account fields. If a Contact is associated with an Account, you can select any Account field in Salesforce to be mapped to a property in Rally.

Property level sync direction

Rally supports three different sync directions: Salesforce to Rally, Rally to Salesforce, and Two-Way. These sync directions are configured per field/property.

Enabling Rally to sync specific data back to Salesforce allows for research activities conducted in Rally to update your Salesforce database, keeping your organization aligned and ensuring data stays fresh. For example, we suggest syncing properties such as “Last Contact Date”, “Last Interview Date”, “Opted Out” status, or “Incentives Sent".

Manage the Salesforce integration

1. In the top left corner of Rally, select your workspace name and select Settings.

2. From the sidebar, select Integrations.

3. To the right of Salesforce, select Manage.

4. Update your sync configuration settings at any time to better fit your needs.

5. Add, update, or remove property mappings, and configure their sync directions and conflict resolution setting as needed. Select + Add property mapping to add a new field mapping, and select the trash icon if you need to delete a property mapping.

Sync history

View a table of all prior syncs to see how many people had data updated during each sync.

• The # updated refers only to rows that have changed

• We update when data in Salesforce is different than what is stored in Rally

  

Check the status column to see if daily syncs are successful or not. If syncs are failed or canceled, contact Rally to learn more about why and how to resolve it.

Start or pause syncs

You can click Run manual sync to kick off a new sync immediately, rather than waiting for the next 24hr interval.

Click Pause to pause data from syncing between Rally and Salesforce until you select Resume.

Delete connection