Cloud-based email integration for Saleforce.com like Match My Email increases sales productivity and quality
A CRM system without good email integration is the equivalent of driving blind. No one would drive blind – except in an Al Pacino movie — yet many sales organizations try to compete without the visibility of email integration. Most customer relationship management systems like Salesforce.com have inadequate email integration. Many Salesforce users have asked why? After all, Salesforce is outstanding, leading edge, the gold standard in CRM software, in most aspects of its solution, yet Salesforce email integration appears to have been neglected.
Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, is on the record as saying that email is the wrong way to communicate with customers. But like it or not, email is still the dominate mode of communications between businesses and their customers, especially for Internet retailers, distributors/wholesalers and B2B businesses.
To Salesforce.com’s credit, they do have the AppExchange which includes some very cool email integration apps under Sales, Email & Calendar Sync. You have to look a little ways down the list for the best ones. The apps at the top appears to be there based on longevity. One of my favorites is Match My Email.
Avoid Manual Salesforce Plug-Ins
Avoid the manual software plug-ins on the AppExchange – Cirrus Path, Linkpoint360, Maildrop – as well as Salesforce for Outlook. These apps are appealing on the surface because they install quickly and work in familiar ways but fundamentally they don’t solve the email integration problem. These plug-ins only work on specific email systems – they are not platform independent – and they are manual. Manual plug-ins doom the sales team to hours and hours of unrewarding manual work finding ‘context’ and clicking buttons. As with any manual system that does not result in immediate reward, email logging will decline quickly with a manual tool due to user ‘burnout’. Gradually Salesforce will also fall into disuse because the email information in it is not complete, up-to-date or reliable. Manual tools are almost as bad as not logging emails into Salesforce at all, because they create the illusion of email integration, but not the substance.
Avoid Semi-Automatic Salesforce Apps
Then there are the semi-automatic email integration apps like VCS SmartMail, iHance and Cure CRM. These systems are better than manual tools because they automatically sort and file some emails into Salesforce, but they are halfway solutions. These systems include ‘holding bins’ where ambiguous emails are stored if the system can’t figure out where to put them. These ‘resolve’ screens force the end-user to log in once in a while and decide where to put ‘ambiguous’ emails – an ambiguous email might have three contacts in the email header and the system doesn’t know which Contact to store the email in. So semi-automatic systems also suffer from the main drawback of manual plug-ins; they don’t create a 100% complete and up-to-date email record in Saleforce. With semi-automatic system, the email record in Salesforce is, by definition, incomplete, inaccurate and out-of-date so the users can’t trust the email information in SFDC.
Implement Fully Automated Salesforce Email Integration
Automated email syncing and logging to Salesforce needs to be based on ‘multiple address and record matching’ or ‘MultiMatch’ in order to work flawlessly. MultiMatch means that emails are added into every Salesforce record that has an email address match with them. So the email might be added to more than one Contact, roll up into an Account and be associated with an Open Opportunity.
However, MultiMatch without Comprehensive Deduplication creates an automated mess in Salesforce. So automated email integration – this is one of the unique selling points of Match My Email – must have both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ deduplicaton – external deduplication means the system will be dedupe an email as it rolls up from multiple external Contacts to an Account and internal deduplication means that the same email sent and/or received by multiple sales team members will only be logged once in Salesforce.
The net result of a well-designed automated email integration solution like Match My Email is that there will be a 100% complete, up-to-date and accurate email record in Salesforce. Emails will be visible in each record that they related to so users can be sure that they are seeing the entire email flow between the sales team and external customers. The email log is up-to-date because Match My Email works on a twenty minute cycle, so on average every email is logged in 10 minutes of receipt or sent.
Due to the ‘canonical’ email log created by automated email integration app, sales professionals will use Salesforce more frequently because Salesforce will actually contain a more comprehensive record of the email communications between the client and the extended sales team than the user’s mailbox.