Salesforce.com’s hate of email stems from the inherent overlap between groupware and a CRM application like Salesforce.com (whether the CRM is in the cloud or not). Groupware systems include email, contacts, calendar and tasks. CRM systems include webmail, contacts, calendar and tasks. True, CRM includes features that groupware doesn’t have like pipeline, workflow and shared records. But the overlap between groupware (read email) and Salesforce creates a natural conflict in any organization. Which interface will dominant the sales rep attention? Will the sales rep spend more time in the mailbox or in Salesforce?
If Salesforce is going to win this battle, it needs to adopt automated email integration as a way of dragging email data into Salesforce and making Salesforce the better source of reliable information about customers correspondence. One AppExchange app, Match My Email has already implemented this kind of automated approach and moves email info into Salesforce, instead of Salesforce data into the mailbox.
Email has one huge advantage over CRM; the entire organization uses groupware and only the smaller customer facing groups use CRM. This has the effect of pulling the sales rep out of the CRM to check his or her email if the sales rep has to communicate with the wider organization.
The dominance of groupware over CRM can be seen in the numbers. According to The Radicati Group, there were 400 million Outlook/Exchange seats – on-premise and hosted — in 2012. That number has actually boomed in the past two years as Office 365 has been rolled out. With GoDaddy standardizing on Office 365 last weekend for its millions of its proprietary Workspace users, the momentum of Office 365 is strong. Office 365 is much easier to use than an on-premise Exchange server plus it integrates seamlessly with mobile devices through standard API’s like IMAP. Gmail is reported to have more than 500 million users worldwide and 5 million businesses which use its Google Apps groupware in the cloud. Gmail is even easier to setup and maintain than Office 365 – but it presents privacy issues.
Salesforce.com no longer discloses its customer or seat counts but as of the last official release in June 2011, Salesforce.com had 82,100 customers and 2.1 million seats. Assuming that the Salesforce’s installed base has grown 40% per year since 2011, the company has about 6 million seats. With 6 million Salesforce seats battling 1 billion groupware seats for the attention of the sales rep, Salesforce has good reason to be unfriendly toward email.
Salesforce.com dilemma since inception has been to get sales reps to use its groupware elements – tasks, contacts, calendar — and not the same groupware features in Outlook, Lotus and Gmail. It has never tried to integrate email into the CRM probably because email is a storage management headache, uses up too much database I/O and its price point is low – dollars versus Benjies per month. This strategy has not hurt Salesforce.com growth – yet — but the rise of Gmail could present it with a real challenge starting at the low end of the market.
Case in point. Cirrus Insight. This tiny company is Google-izing CRM. Those are not my words. That is the title of a webinar that Cirrus Insight is giving with a Salesforce.com consulting partner, Cloud Sherpas. Cirrus Insight has leveraged Chrome technology – using Chrome extensions – to import Salesforce.com data, what they call ‘context’, into Gmail. Working in Gmail with Cirrus Insight, the sales rep can sync tasks, contacts and calendar with Salesforce without ever logging into Salesforce. He or she can also see which Salesforce record(s) shares the email address(es) with the email. The sales rep can then click a button and log the email into the selected Salesforce record. With Cirrus Insight, a sales rep can work in Gmail all day long and never have to log into Salesforce.
Cirrus Insight maintains that with its Chrome plug-in there are more data interactions with Salesforce, but in reality, with their product, actual Salesforce log-ins decline to minimal levels. Cirrus does not see itself as just a Salesforce.com add-on. It sees itself as transforming Gmail into a data hub. Its app can import data into Gmail from Quickbooks, Zendesk, deck.com, and Hubstop already. With Cirrus Path, the Salesfore.com CRM is just another database extension of Gmail. Cirrus Insight is really Google-izing, read marginalizing Salesforce to the sales rep.
Curiously, Salesforce.com’s Outlook for Salesforce is mimicking Cirrus Insight in the much larger Microsoft ecosystem. If Salesforce.com keeps improving Outlook for Salesforce, they will inadvertently be Outlook-izing CRM.
If the Google-ization of Salesforce worries you, then you should take a look at another approach to email integration for Salesforce.com that actually increases Salesforce.com usage and adoption – Match My Email. A short list of reasons to be concerned by Google-ization are: Gmail silos data and does not promote email transparency or sharing amongst the sales team; Gmail makes the job of getting sales reps to use Salesforce harder; and it creates rather useless, spotty and out-of-date email info in Salesforce further weakening the importance of the CRM.
On the other hand, Match My Email is actually invisible to the Gmail and Outlook user. It works unobtrusively in the cloud syncing and importing email 24/7/365 into Salesforce from all email devices [cellphones, tablets, laptops, desktops] and email platforms. It eliminates hours of meaningless tasks like clicking Add To Salesforce and creates up-to-date and complete email info in Salesforce. The email info is shared amongst the sales team. But most importantly, Match My Email re-directs the sales rep back to Salesforce and away from groupware.
With Match My Email, the sales rep’s Inbox and Sent Items are visible inside of Salesforce.com in a Web Tab and if they match to a record inside the record itself. So the email ‘context’ is brought into Salesforce, not the other way around. With Match My Email, users create new Salesforce records from email data while inside the Salesforce interface – again using the web tab. Most importantly, Match My Email keeps the sales rep inside Salesforce where he or she can use Shared Tasks (not individual tasks), Shared Calendars (not a separate calendar) and Shared Contacts (not a segregated contact list) and see Shared Emails across the sales team.
With an app like Match My Email, Salesforce would win its perennial struggle with groupware and email and make Salesforce the core business application for their daily work. It makes one wonder why Salesforce has not bought Match My Email or at least recommended it to its users.