💡 Salesforce is an enterprise feature. Contact your Rally Sales Rep to enable!
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, enhancing efficiency and productivity.
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.
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 managing your Salesforce integration.
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
🚨 Before configuring your Salesforce Integration with Rally, ensure you have the correct user permissions in both accounts.
Rally User Permissions
In Rally, you’ll need to be an Ops Manager, Developer, or Admin role type.
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.
Set Up the Salesforce Integration
After you have the correct User Permissions, you can set up your Salesforce integration with Rally.
1. Connect Salesforce to Rally
In the top right corner of Rally, select your user icon and select 'Settings'.
From the sidebar, select 'Connected Apps'.
To the right of Salesforce, select 'Connect' to log into your Salesforce account.
After signing in, you’ll need to approve the requested permissions, listed below.
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
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
Determine how Rally handles creating new people or deleting people during syncs.
Create new people in Rally during sync.
When selected, all Salesforce contacts that don't exist in Rally will be created in Rally. Rally uses the record's email to check if a contact exists.
Delete people in Rally if deleted in Salesforce.
When selected, any contacts deleted in Salesforce will automatically be deleted in Rally during the next daily sync.
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.
💡 The Identifier Field is a unique string field used to map a Salesforce contact to a person in Rally. Only Unique Properties in Rally (such as email or username) can be used as an identifier field.
Property Mapping
Rally currently supports mapping the following field types from Salesforce to Rally:
Salesforce Field Type | Rally Field Type |
picklist, reference | single-select* |
multipicklist | multi-select* |
boolean | boolean |
double/int | number |
string, textarea | text |
data, datetime | date |
We only map up to 100 unique Property options per multi-select Property.
💡 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.
💡 Optionally 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 interviewed date”, “Opt out status”, or “Incentives Sent".
Salesforce to Rally
This will sync data from Salesforce to Rally using the Contact or Lead’s email address to find people in Rally. The sync will use the value from Salesforce to set the value in Rally. If a value for this Property already exists in Rally, it will be overwritten by the value in Salesforce. If a value was deleted or removed in Salesforce, it will be removed in Rally.
Rally to Salesforce
This will sync data from Rally to Salesforce using the Contact or Lead’s email address to sync with people in Rally. The sync will use the value from Rally to set the value in Salesforce. If a value for this Property already exists in Salesforce, it will be overwritten by the value in Rally. If a value was deleted or removed in Rally, it will be removed in Salesforce.
Two-Way
This will sync data between both Salesforce and Rally using the Contact or Lead’s email address to find people in Rally. This will update data in both Salesforce and Rally depending on the most recently updated Property. For example: if Two-Way sync was set on the First Name Property, when a First Name is updated in Rally, it will be updated in Salesforce on the next sync. Then, if that First Name was later updated within Salesforce, it will be updated in Rally on the next sync. If a value for this Property already exists in Rally or Salesforce, it will be overwritten by the most recently updated value for that Property. If a value was deleted or removed in Rally or Salesforce, it will be removed in Rally or Salesforce.
💡 Depending on certain Property types in Salesforce and Rally, it’s possible only one of these options is available. The restrictions are based on what data can be written to in Salesforce and Rally. For example: in Salesforce, Account data cannot be overwritten from Rally. Meaning "Rally to Salesforce" and "Two Way" are not available for this field, only the "Salesforce to Rally" sync direction is.
Manage the Salesforce Integration
In the top right corner of Rally, select your user icon and select 'Settings'.
From the sidebar, select 'Connected Apps'.
To the right of Salesforce, select 'Manage'.
Update your sync configurations at any time, and view a table of all previous syncs with a link to which people had data updated during the sync. You can also take the following actions:
Start Manual Sync
This will kick off a sync immediately, rather than waiting for the next sync interval.
Pause/Resume
This will pause your data from syncing between Rally and Salesforce until you select 'Resume'.
Disconnect
This will disconnect Rally and Salesforce and prevent any more syncs from occurring.