On Saturday morning, Match My Email was down for scheduled maintenance. I couldn’t see what was going on between the sales team, support and the customer base. I nearly freaked out. I felt blind and powerless.
True, it was Saturday morning and there wasn’t a lot going on, but I didn’t know that. I couldn’t see. Yes, I might be a control freak and shouldn’t be working on the weekend. But I have come to expect a certain level of transparency in Salesforce and when it’s gone I feel anxious.
Luckily, by 12 noon the app was up again and life could return to normal. Since the app automatically goes back 24 hours, the maintenance gap was covered.
Match My Email provides me with visibility to the email stream. In it, I can see the emails being sent and received by the entire sales team and support staff. I use a special configuration in Match My Email. Typically, Match My Email keeps emails private to the user. But an account owner can email Match My Email and ask them to change a setting in the backend, so he or she can see all the emails of all the users in the account.
The emails are shown in a web tab labeled Email Cloud. This tab is embedded in the fabric of Salesforce. When I log into Salesforce, the Email Cloud is automatically opened. In the Email Cloud, I can see every email that has been received and sent by all the sales people who report to me. If the email matches to a record in Salesforce I can see which record(s) and navigate to them by clicking on a link. If the email doesn’t related to any record in Salesforce, it will be labeled NO MATCH. I have to option with NO MATCH emails to either match them with to an existing record or create a new SFDC record using the +Match tool.
Visibility to the entire email stream in the Email Cloud tab saves a lot time. I don’t have to ask a sales rep if he or she has replied to a customer email. I can see the customer email and the reply. If I am curious as to the size of the deal or its status, the information is often in the email or its attachments. I don’t have to ask sales reps routine questions any more, instead I can focus on catching mistakes, correcting oversights, resolving issues and improving the sales process.
100% transparency has the subtle effect of changing email etiquette. Knowing that all emails can be read increases the quality of communications. Changing email culture can have a very positive impact on sales productivity.
Match My Email provides fully automated Salesforce email integration for Outlook, Gmail, MacMail and IMAP. The app works in the cloud so it is always on, 24/7/365. It is estimated to save the average sales rep 5 hours per month syncing emails to Salesforce and tracking customer correspondence. For sales manager, it provides an email stream monitoring screen and activity tracking dashboards. The app costs $14.95 per user per month.