About Lumin.ai CRM Integrations

Lumin.ai integrates with CRM systems of many varieties, ranging from general-purpose to highly optimized for a particular industry.

What Matters

To fully support your sales team's needs, a CRM integration needs to be real time, bidirectional, and customizable.

The real-time requirement is at the core of why you need automation: time kills deals. Of the appointments scheduled by Lumin.ai, more than 60% are made within the first four minutes. A CRM integration that waits for a batch to be processed every 10, 30, or 60 minutes is at a disadvantage from the word "go" because competitors have already secured appointments.

The bidirectional requirement hearkens to your omnichannel strategy: your sales funnel is valuable enough that you are very likely contacting your prospects via multiple channels, including text, voice calls, and email "drips" that contain calendar links. If any one of your channels succeeds at driving or identifying a change in the lead's status, then your CRM system needs to find out immediately, and modify the behavior of all channels accordingly.

The customizable requirement is because every sales process varies. Your team needs to be free to set up your CRM system to optimally drive your sales process and report on the metrics to which you manage. Every system that integrates with your CRM must be able to adapt to those differences. Any departure from that seamless coordination will cause you to spend valuable human talent on the administrative overhead of babysitting your automations.

A Broad Variety of Integrations

Learn how our strategic partnership with FranConnect makes Lumin.ai a key part of the FranConnect Sales Accelerator.

In addition, Lumin.ai integrates in real time, bidirectionally, and customizably with CRM systems designed for several industries:

• ActiveCampaign
• Bitrix24‍
• Citrix Podio, now a part of Progress‍
• FRM Solutions‍
• HubSpot‍
• improveit360 by EverPro‍
• Oracle NetSuite CRM‍
• Salesforce‍
• ServiceTitan‍
• SharpSpring from Constant Contact‍
• Zoho CRM

Don't See Yours Listed?

Let's talk! Schedule a chat with one of our team members. We'd love to understand what you'd like to accomplish.

About Lumin.ai Calendar Integrations

Lumin.ai integrates with many simple calendars, such as Google Calendar and Outlook 365, as well as very sophisticated scheduling systems that take skill sets and drive times into account!

What Matters

A robust calendar integration does so much more than sync events. Here's why.

First, your sales funnel is valuable enough that you are very likely contacting your prospects via multiple channels, including text, voice calls, and email "drips" that contain calendar links. That's called an omnichannel strategy. It's vital that these multiple processes coordinate with each other. For example, if a voice call results in successfully making an appointment—or even completing the meeting that the appointment would have represented—the email and text scheduling efforts should stop. Better yet, the text communication should acknowledge the appointment and provide an easy way to cancel or reschedule. Lumin.ai does all of that.

Second, your prospects expect that no matter how they contact you, they'll get an accurate picture of availability. For example, if a prospect schedules for Tuesday at 10am via text, then reschedules for Wednesday at 3pm via voice, then all other prospects should see that the Tuesday 10am slot is now free, no matter how they contact you. Many products that integrate with calendars, even some quite popular ones, do not accomplish this. Lumin.ai always treats your calendar system as the source of truth: it has real-time awareness of everything that other systems do to events on the calendar.

From Simple To Sophisticated

Lumin.ai integrates with many different products, including many that may not come to mind at first as calendars.

• Basic calendars such as Google Calendar and Outlook 365.
• Schedulers such as Calendly, which do sync with Google Calendar and Outlook 365 but need extra hand-holding to keep up to date.
• Skill-based, geo-sensitive resource allocation tools built into CRM systems such as Salesforce, ServiceTitan, and improveit360.
• Virtual meeting platforms such as GoToWebinar, which handle meeting registrations as part of their offering.

In each of these cases, Lumin.ai honors the logic provided by the calendar to ensure optimal selection of personnel and routes.

Don't See Yours Listed?

Let's talk! Schedule a chat with one of our team members. We'd love to understand what you'd like to accomplish.

Communicating Clearly about Time Zones

The Lumin.ai platform is built to be aware that your company, your individual sales representatives, and each of your prospects may be in different time zones. It's capable of communicating with each individual in their own time zone.

It's also very sophisticated about Daylight Savings Time (DST), including geographic regions that do not use DST at all (e.g., Arizona is always in Mountain Standard Time). It knows about exceptions to the usual rules of thumb (e.g., the Texas panhandle is in Mountain Time though the rest of the state is in Central Time), and even parts of the world that are aligned on half- or quarter-hour boundaries.

The remainder of this article describes these principles in slightly greater detail, and touches on issues that can arise with older software systems.

Global Standards

Modern software systems are designed so that "scheduling in the wrong time zone" isn't really a possibility. That's because they use a pair of international standards, together with shared software code that enjoys scrutiny and testing by thousands of companies. In case you are interested, the standards are:

• ISO 8601, which lets software from multiple vendors easily agree on the physical moment in time at which you and your prospect need to join a Zoom or make the phone ring.
• IANA Time Zone Database, which knows every nook and cranny of the planet's quilt of political boundaries, and how each has decided to deal with time zones. See also "Arizona and Other Exceptions", below.

By "modern", we mean anytime in this millennium. The ISO 8601 standard was first created in 1991; and the IANA Time Zones, in 1986. By around the Year 2000, spurred in part by the Y2K crisis, both of these standards were in widespread use. Software written prior to that time sometimes doesn't follow this global standard; and, surprisingly, some more recent software doesn't comply.

The Lumin.ai platform is 100% compliant with these global standards.

Harmonizing Users Across the World

The standards described above are unambiguous even when users interact with each other across multiple time zones. Why, then, do people sometimes get confused about when a meeting is scheduled to start? The weak link is nearly always in how the time is displayed to a human user by a calendar program or CRM system.

Ideally, each user sees times displayed in her or his own time zone. Reality departs from this ideal when:

• The end user has set the wrong time zone in, say, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook.
• The calendar or CRM system has an odd design for using that setting. For example, Outlook displays time in the user's own setting in most places—but when an event is opened to a detail screen, it can show the time in a different time zone. It's clear about which time zone it's using for the display, but not everyone notices.
• The software or CRM system uses an older standard. One dead giveaway is when the user interface equates a time zone with a number of hours away from London.

Lumin.ai achieves this ideal by communicating independently to each user in their own time zone.

• The prospect sees text messages directly from Lumin.ai that use the prospect's time zone, determined from the prospect's postal code (or, if that's unavailable, the prospect's state/province).
• The prospect also gets a calendar invite from your calendar (e.g.,Google or Outlook 365). On the prospect's calendar, that invite displays in the prospect's time zone, as determined by the prospect's calendar settings—subject to the caveat above regarding Outlook 365's odd design.
• The sales representative sees notifications directly from Lumin.ai that use the representative's time zone, determined by the representative's settings in the Lumin.ai system.
• The sales representative's calendar also sees the calendar event displayed in the representative's time zone, determined by the representative's calendar settings—subject to the caveat above regarding Outlook 365's odd design.

Footnote: Arizona, the Texas Panhandle, and Other Exceptions

Lumin.ai accurately handles a number of geographic regions with unusual time-zone rules. These fall into two categories.

First, 13 US states and 9 Canadian provinces straddle a time zone. For example, Kentucky's western half is in the Central Time Zone, while the eastern half is in Eastern. To ensure accurate time-zone determination, Lumin.ai uses your prospect's zip or postal code, falling back to the state or province only if a zip or postal code is not available. Thus, you can be confident that Lumin.ai correctly treats time zones in these regions.

Second, Arizona and several other regions around the world do not follow Daylight Savings Time (DST) and therefore do not change their clocks in the Fall and Spring. You can be confident that the Lumin.ai software does exactly the right thing with these DST exceptions, and communicates with prospects and sales representatives clearly; for example, when communicating with a prospect in Arizona, Lumin.ai might use a phrase such as "3:00 PM Arizona Time".

Nevertheless, prospects and sales representatives both get confused from time to time, particularly with terminology. We hope that these two examples help clear any confusion.

1. Utah is in the Mountain Time Zone year round. As with clocks in 48 other states, Utah clocks "spring forward" and "fall back" year. During the summer, Utah uses Mountain Daylight Time (MDT); and during the winter, it uses Mountain Standard Time (MST).
2. Arizona is also in the Mountain Time Zone year round. Arizona clocks do not change with DST. During the summer and winter. Arizona uses Mountain Standard Time (MST). During the summer, MST (used in Arizona) happens to match PDT (Pacific Daylight Time, used in California).

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Weaving Lumin.ai into your sales process is very non-invasive! Training requirements for your sales team are very minimal. If your processes are well-defined and simple, and if you use our existing calendar and CRM integrations, we can have your system live in 2-3 weeks. This includes:

• Drafting text copy and finalizing it with you
• Setting up the product integrations
• Facilitating your texting compliance application to The Campaign Registry
• Orienting your team

If your sales process or tool set require additional coding, the timeline can stretch to 5-6 weeks.