After in-house server crash, Crystal rebuilds integrations on Paragon

About Crystal

Crystal is a pre-meeting intelligence platform, giving sales teams and other business professionals the insights needed to prepare for important meetings. We sat down with Paul Jones, VP of Engineering at Crystal, to learn about their experience with integrations and with Paragon.

The Challenge: In-house integrations caused significant downtime

“We had a couple of in-house CRM integrations by the time I joined - the way it was set up, if someone imported an entire new contact list into Salesforce, that would kick off thousands of jobs immediately on our servers. At a conference, one of our customers kicked off one of these jobs which took down Crystal because the job queue couldn’t handle the spike.” - Paul Jones

To sell to sales teams, Crystal needed to have seamless native integrations with the major CRM platforms - notably Salesforce and HubSpot. However, the native CRM integrations they had built in-house were brittle.

Given that their integrations shared the same codebase and infrastructure as the rest of the Crystal product, integration-triggered job queues could overwhelm their servers and lead to downtime/data loss.

Despite this issue, they had put off fixing the existing CRM integrations because the legacy of a problem to deal with (the code was written in Ruby) - that was until their CEO discovered Paragon.

The Turning Point - Finding Paragon

With Paragon, Crystal’s engineering team was able to quickly rebuild their CRM integrations without needing to worry about concurrency, queuing, or other complex deployment processes.

"The experience with Paragon was transformative for Crystal. Paragon's intuitive platform allowed our development team to quickly and efficiently rebuild the CRM integrations." - Paul Jones

Crystal saw the impact buying a solution had on their product. "What we needed to do was keep the engineers focused on new Crystal features... and leverage a platform like Paragon for integrations." This partnership allowed Crystal to focus on its core product while ensuring their CRM integrations were robust, scalable, and reliable.

The Result: Scalable and Durable CRM Integrations

With Paragon, Crystal developed deep and scalable CRM integrations that automated the syncing of customer data and sales strategies based on personality insights. Users can create contacts in Salesforce and automatically have them enriched with personality data via Crystal. This streamlined approach not only solved the initial integration challenges, but also enabled Crystal to build deeper functionality for their customers.

The Impact: Reduced maintenance and More Closed Deals

Onboarding Paragon delivered significant benefits, including the reduction of integration maintenance time and the enhanced ability to close more deals through having specific integrations.

“Once it's working, very little maintenance is needed… Furthermore, the ability to rapidly deploy integrations before the end of the quarter made Paragon’s benefit undeniable: Being able to spin that up in the week before the new year gave our sales team the ability to go into conversations and just say, 'We have a Salesforce integration now let's talk." - Paul Jones

Looking ahead: Building deeper integrations

Crystal saw the importance of selecting the right tool for the problem. Paul reflected that choosing the right tool would not only solve the technical challenges of integrations, but also enhance their strategic focus. "Our journey with Paragon is a testament to the impact of integrating the right tools, allowing us to enhance our product offering and streamline operations without sacrificing innovation.” Looking ahead, Crystal is building more functionality into their calendar integrations. We will continue to update this as Crystal progresses their integration journey.