INTRODUCTION
Effective Sales Management Depends on Keeping Salesforce Data Current and Accurate.
This starts with the right salesforce email integration.
Salesforce™ has revolutionized the way sales teams operate.
It has become the central database of information that sales reps rely on to do their jobs effectively. Sales leaders also rely on this critical data in order to make precise sales management decisions.
However, if the data being entered into Salesforce is incomplete or inaccurate, management becomes challenging and forecasts become unpredictable and inconsistent, at best.
The benefits of having accurate sales data are clear:
Prioritize
Improve
Optimize
Unfortunately, keeping Salesforce data accurate and up-to-date is an uphill battle.
The process of manually entering sales activity and customer data into Salesforce is often extremely tedious and frustrating, decreasing the chances that your sales reps will actually take the time to do it.
While getting sales reps to enter accurate and thorough data is an ongoing struggle, you simply can’t afford to not have this data.
The only real solution is to find a way to eliminate manual data entry entirely and make the whole process automatic.
Ideally, your sales reps would never have to even open Salesforce. They could perform their work as they normally do, and all of their sales activity and customer data would be synced from their email inbox and calendar to Salesforce automatically.
Fortunately, many products in recent years have been developed to enable this capability. In fact, there are now so many options for integrating email with Salesforce that it has become difficult for many sales teams to decide which one is the best fit for their specific needs.
In addition you will have access to a breakdown of the differences, strengths, and weaknesses of the top Salesforce email integration tools that you can use for reference in your research.
SUMMARY
Selecting a Salesforce Email Integration For Gmail & Outlook: Criteria
In 2018, Steve Roch and his team conducted an independent study of the top Salesforce email integration tools.
Steve is a CRM expert with 14 years as a Chief Information Officer for a software firm which relied heavily on CRM and email integration before founding a highly successful CRM practice, CRMCulture for 8 years.
Over the course of 6 months, Steve and his teams installed each application to test user stories, performance, and usability. They identified 5 main criteria to evaluate the performance of Salesforce Email integration solutions.
They found that this same criteria can be used when selecting an email-Salesforce integration for your organization:
Let’s explore each criterion in more detail.
CRITERIA #1
Email Environments Supported
Adding further complexity, depending on the version of Microsoft Outlook or Exchange Server you use, only certain methods of providing a sidebar (aka side panel, plug-in or extension) will be able to support your needs through the available API’s from Microsoft.
Email, Calendar and Mobile Integration with Salesforce Workflows
Although every organization will have different needs with different priorities some of the most common email tasks you will want to evaluate are:
Evaluate how good of a job is the system you are evaluating at handling multiple contacts on the To/Cc line. Does the system pull information for the multiple contacts in their initial side panel?
How good is the system at matching data and recognizing relationships across: opportunity, contact, role, and account? Keeping data associated with Opportunities is critical because this is where your sales activity data metrics are most useful for the purposes of managing pipeline.
Does your system allow you to create any kind of Salesforce record from the sidebar, without the need to login to Salesforce?
Some Salesforce integration solutions will only allow you to edit existing records, but do not handle the creation of accounts, new opportunities, nor have a calendar side panel. This defeats the purpose of having a sidebar altogether. If this functionality is poor in the system you are evaluating, your sales team will still be forced to login to the Salesforce interface which defeats the purpose of having an integration in the first place.
Does your system allow you to navigate through lists, contacts, opportunities, etc. Can you make searches, and update Salesforce records 100% without leaving your email? Or are you still forced to open Salesforce to perform these tasks?
Does your system allow you to link documents and attachments to a contact, account, or opportunity, from the sidebar?
Does your Salesforce email integration vendor offer iOS or Android applications, or add-ins for Outlook iOS as well? There are two major things users want to do while on the phone client: 1) link inbound and outbound email, and calendar events to a contact/opportunity and 2) navigate to key Salesforce data from the email. Can these tasks be performed with simplicity and utility, especially for initiating a new email to Salesforce contacts?
Email Clients Supported
Email Clients Supported
Another important criteria is simply the number of email clients supported. Beyond just looking at whether or not they support your particular email client, support for a large variety of clients is a predictor of the future stability, performance, and innovation capabilities of a vendor.
In fact, most Salesforce consulting partners and their customers prefer not to navigate through these complexities and would prefer a single vendor who can support their integration requirements regardless of email environment as email clients and services are upgraded or migrated.
Email clients supported may include:
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Outlook Desktop, Office 365, and Outlook for Mac 2016
When comparing Outlook support, you need to look at mainly two factors:
- Outlook Client Support (Desktop and Web)
- Outlook Support with Exchange Server, Terminal/Citrix Server, or Published Desktops
Additional Outlook criteria to consider:
Add-Ins: With Outlook 2016, both traditional Windows add-ins and web-based add-ins are supported. Does the vendor you are evaluating offer installable windows-client add-ins, which have much better performance, or do they only offer web-based add-ins that only work for Outlook Desktop or Office365?
Security: Does the product require access to your company’s Exchange server credentials in the cloud? This kind of direct server access creates vulnerabilities in your network. We recommend looking for a product who’s connection paths of data are completely configurable and secured with SSO, SAML, or OAuth. This is explored in more depth in Criteria #5 below.
Gmail
If your organization relies on Google’s email and calendar apps, there are a few criteria you will want to keep in mind when making your evaluation:
Is there a chrome extension to support Gmail?
How does the solution link inbound/outbound email/calendar items to the corresponding Salesforce contact/lead? Automatically or with a prompt after sending an email?
Is the interface different for Gmail than it is for Outlook? Some tools offer completely different interfaces for Gmail with fewer features than the interface for Outlook.
Does the sidebar also support Gmail Calendar? Is the calendar sidebar useful for preparing for meetings, identifying and adding new contacts that appear in the meeting attendees, and for taking notes about the meeting?
How fast is the sidebar at retrieving and pushing data to/from Salesforce?
Does the sidebar experience caching issues when navigating through emails quickly, or performing certain actions and then moving on to another email?
Does the sidebar disconnect itself and log the user out after a period of inactivity?
Mobile Support
In addition to providing a side panel (or plug-in) for email systems, check if your vendor also provides a mobile phone version of their product offering a similar experience to that of their Side Panel and delivered via both Android and iOS.
The main evaluation criteria for mobile options are:
Is the mobile application is available from both the iOS and Android app stores?
If one is using the Outlook application from their phone, does the product offer an add-in that works on both iOS and Android? Does it provide all the same linking and sidebar experience of the desktop or web apps?
Does the mobile application provide a fully functional email client, including Calendar, Contacts and Tasks?
Does the mobile application allow users to link incoming email to Salesforce records, including linking to Opportunities or other objects?
Does the mobile application allow users to select contacts on the To/Cc/From lines and see relevant Salesforce data and related lists?
Does the mobile application gives users the capability to search for Salesforce contacts and initiate a new email to them while simultaneously linking the sent email to the appropriate Salesforce records
CRITERIA #2
Performance, Stability, and Implementation
It’s also important to gauge the amount of technical support that may be required. Most larger orgs will sacrifice features for stability to ease their implementation and support burden.
Performance, Stability, and Implementation Criteria
CRITERIA #3
Basic Salesforce Integration
When it comes to integrating email/calendar with Salesforce, what you have to consider is whether the user will be able to have some control, or if the solution is fully-automated.
Generally the former is preferred because fully-automated solutions that link emails and calendar items automatically, without any user interaction, are prone to creating a lot of duplicate and junk data in Salesforce.
Side Panel Evaluation
Be sure to evaluate the ease of use and completeness of the side panel as a fully working Salesforce environment, including interacting with related lists, and having a side panel for the calendar.
In general, side panel apps can be categorized into two distinct approaches in their initial view of the side panel:
- List of all Contacts: Those that initially show all the contacts on the To/Cc/From line in a list and then allow one to drill into specific contacts to see more detail.
- Single Contact: Those that show the detail of the first contact found on the To/Cc/From.
Most users find that it is much more important to see the list of contacts/accounts/opportunities (known and unknown to Salesforce).
In particular, the 2nd approach often causes users to miss key contacts, accounts, and opportunities otherwise shown in the first approach.
Additionally, the first approach is superior for the task of quickly linking the email. Vendors that use the list approach make it simple to link the email to all of the various contacts and other Salesforce objects.
Basic Salesforce Integration Criteria
You will want to evaluate products according to the following most common tasks and workflows a typical sales user performs as part of their day-to-day email and Salesforce work:
How well does the product handle navigating, searching and updating Salesforce records, without leaving the native email or calendar interface?
How does the product handle the creation of new Salesforce records from within the apps side panel? Can all editing and record creation can be done without ever going to Salesforce? These records include leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and custom objects, from either email or calendar items.
Does drilling down into Contacts offer a combined view of Account-related lists and Contact-related lists, making it easy to see related opportunities?
Do Detail and Related Lists (including custom objects) pull from page layout and compact layout definitions automatically, including custom objects? Or, is additional configuration required?
The act of linking the email should be carefully considered. How easy is it to link inbound/outbound email and calendar items to the Salesforce contacts/leads? Most vendors offer a “quick” method that links the email to all contacts and one or more related objects all from one screen. How does the product handle multiple contacts on the From/To/Cc line? Some vendors don’t handle this as well as others.
Evaluate the ease and completeness of linking inbound/ outbound email/calendar to opportunities and custom objects. Does the side panel properly show Opportunities, whether related only by Account or by OpportunityContactRole?
How does the product handle linking attachments to either native Salesforce Attachments or Files? Does it offer alternative storage locations for attachments, such as DropBox, OneDrive, SharePoint etc.?
Is the Side Panel available for the Calendar? Does the side panel appear in the larger calendar (preview) view in addition to when the calendar item is opened?
CRITERIA #4
Advanced Features
The research revealed a high degree of variation amongst the vendors for advanced features.
When evaluating products, keep the following categories of Advanced Features in mind:
Sales Enablement & Acceleration
Sales enablement and acceleration features are the collection of features such as:
- Email Templates & Short Cut Text
- Send Later or Scheduled Email
- Remind me if no response
- Batch Email
Calendar Availability Tools
Calendar Booking Tools are now critical in the sales workflow and most of the vendors now offer options for making the users availability known to the customer and also allow the customer to then book a meeting, without all the back and forth emails.
There are two approaches that the vendors take, each with their own pros and cons:
The Fully-Available Calendar as a link
Pros
The absolute best customer experience. Empowers the customer to pick a time that is convenient for them.
Embedding the link in your signature “Book a Meeting” is a one-time only event
The customer is more likely to find a time that works for them and ultimately the meeting is more likely to get booked than pushing them for a certain day/time.
Well suited for early lead development when getting the meeting is more important than a big push for a specific date/time.
Cons
The user needs to keep their calendar accurate and block out times that they don’t want to meet. However, we find that it’s not a big deal once the meeting is booked to change the time, 99% of the time the customer accepts the new time.
A calendar with a lot of open meeting slots can give the customer the impression that you aren’t very busy and therefore not in demand.
With most products, the meetings generated are named with generic subjects requiring the user to then update the Outlook Meeting to something meaningful after it has been created.
The Time-Picking or Choose Availability method.
Sales user picks specific time slots and those are offered as buttons in the email.
Pros
Sales users surveyed initially preferred to pick the times rather than offering a wide-open calendar. They believe that it’s the job of the salesman to drive the customer to do what they want to do and on their timeline.
However, we mostly found this was just an insecurity in having the full calendar published even though no details are shown.
Cons
This often provides a poor customer experience, as you are pushing the customer into timeslots that may not work for them, or when they get around to picking the slot, the time slot is no longer available.
If the sales user doesn’t offer up a suitable time slot, it’s back to the same old game of emailing back and forth for a mutual time.
This method is considerably more time consuming for the user to pick time slots.
Often, the times chosen are no longer available when the customer eventually gets around to booking the meeting. Most vendors handle this scenario well, though, and do not allow double-booked meetings, but it is indeed frustrating to the customer.
Automatic Email/Calendar Sync to Salesforce
Many customers and specific industries require every email interaction and calendar item to be captured in Salesforce. Not many vendors offer the capability to do this automatically.
A few vendors offer a solution both on the email side (where emails automatically link to opportunities) and on the Calendar, where they make a distinction between meetings with and without attendees (so that if desired one can disable sync for calendar items that aren’t customer related, i.e. Doctor’s Appointments, Job Interviews, etc).
If your organization needs to capture email interactions and calendar items in Salesforce, make sure that the product you’re considering offers the ability to sync these activities automatically.
Marketing Automation
Very few solutions offer any sort of Marketing Automation type features, but here are a few to keep in mind:
Intuitive Batch Email: An intuitive batch email feature utilizes email templates to send batch emails to multiple contacts at once.
Automated Email Campaigns: This feature allows users to place contacts onto an email campaign that automatically executes pre-determined emails at specific intervals, similar to more robust marketing automation solutions.
Analytics
Many vendors offer Email Open tracking or notifications, as well as Link tracking features. Here are some criteria to consider when evaluating products with Analytics capabilities:
False Positives: Does the product create a special code as to not report false positives (such as opening your own sent mail)?
Aggregate Reporting Per Contact Does the product provide aggregate reporting per contact? Or, can you only see analytics when re-opening the same email?
CRITERIA #5
Security and Storage
Some products require global impersonation, giving admins unlimited access to every single mailbox on your company’s Exchange mail server. This kind of direct server access is inadvisable, as it could potentially expose your network to unauthorized individuals.
Make sure that the product you’re considering provides enterprise-level security, where connection paths of data are completely configurable and secured with single sign-on (SSO).
Single Sign-On (SSO)
According to OneLogin, single sign-on (SSO) is “a system that enables users to securely authenticate with multiple applications and websites by logging in only once—with just one set of credentials (username and password). With SSO, the application or website that the user is trying to access relies on a trusted third party to verify that users are who they say they are. Authentication requests and information are passed using standard, secure protocols, such as SAML or OAuth.”
A common example of SSO is a website, service, or application that allows you to sign in using your existing Google or Facebook account, rather than having to create an entirely new account.
According to Salesforce, there are many benefits to using SSO:
In particular, check to see if the vendor you are evaluating provides SSO, and allows you to sign into your account using your Salesforce credentials, instead of creating specific credentials for their product.
Additional Security Considerations
You will want to evaluate products according to the following security considerations:
Data Storage Considerations
You will also want to evaluate how the vendor handles data storage. Ideally, the product should store the bare minimum amount of data possible to provide the feature. In order to ensure the security and privacy of your data, make sure to ask about the following:
Integrating your email and calendar with Salesforce can help achieve several related objectives in your organization:
- Does the vendor’s sidebar store your Salesforce data?
- Does the vendor’s email sync feature store the body and attachments of your emails, or just the meta-data?
- Does the vendor’s email and web visitor tracking store these records, or just the meta-data?
- Does the vendor’s calendar scheduling tool store these records, or just the meta-data?
- Does the vendor’s mobile app store your email and Salesforce records, or just the meta-data?
CONCLUSION & NEXT STEPS
Conclusion
Integrating your email and calendar with Salesforce can help achieve several related objectives in your organization:
- Increase data quality: With more complete and accurate sales activity data, you are able to increase sales capacity, validate forecasts, and make better decisions overall. However, consider what it takes to get this data. Data quality will not improve by asking sales reps to enter more data into the CRM. Whatever solution you choose needs to be transparent for the sales reps and do the work of automatically capturing this data for them.
- Improve the performance of reps: Better data means better customer engagement insight for reps, which helps them prioritize their daily work. By bringing Salesforce to the inbox, and adding automation functionality, sales reps will have better insight into every customer, and will be able to focus their efforts on those customers with the higher probability to close.
- Eliminate non-selling time: By eliminating data-entry and admin activities, you can put that time back towards selling. This alone can increase sales capacity by 33% or more.
- Manage sales based on data: Sales activity is the best predictor of sales success, and as such, having complete and accurate data for sales to optimize their territories and manage sales rep performance is critical for optimizing sales capacity.
We hope that this ultimate guide helps you see past the hype and sales pitches, and helps you understand the true strengths and weaknesses of each solution.
CONCLUSION & NEXT STEPS
Next steps
Selecting a Salesforce Email Integration
Get a pdf copy of the guide on this page, summarizing all of the key factors you need to consider when considering a Salesforce-email integration
Full Comparison Report of the Top Salesforce Email Integration Solutions
In 2018, Steve Roch, CRM expert with 14 years of experience, installed each of the top 6 Salesforce email integration applications to test user stories, performance, and usability:
ZynBit, Salesforce Lightning, LinkPoint360, Cirrus Insight, Salesforce Inbox, SmartCloud Connect
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