Email Integration: The Key to Salesforce.com Productivity

Salesforce.com is an amazing CRM platform. It does just about everything except good email integration. Salesforce.com doesn’t work well with Outlook, Gmail, MacMail, Lotus or any of IMAP email services provided by the web site hosters like GoDaddy, Yahoo, web.com, 1&1 or Hostways. Unfortunately, good email integration is the key to Salesforce.com adoption, sustained use and productivity. A CRM system without integrated email is like a postal system without letters. The contact/address information is captured and organized, workflow is optimized but the customer records/mailboxes are devoid of communications. It is true that there are many forms of electronic communications and they keep proliferating: chat, instant message, Skype, text, sms, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Chatter, but email is still the dominate form of business communications. For a CRM system to be complete and convenient, it needs to incorporate a log of the email communications, back and forth, with each customer in each and every CRM record and in real time. Fortunately, new technology is now available on the AppExchange in the form of Match My Email which offers automated SalesForce email integration that solves the problem.

The top management of Salesforce.com has a very strong aversion to email. Marc Beniouff is constantly badmouthing email as a technological throwback. One of his recent themes is “How are you connected with your customer, your partners, your employees. Email? Those days are over.” Salesforce.com’s email blindspot doesn’t make sense given the company’s visionary technology and product design. How can they ignore email when new fad products like Sanebox are popping up to help people manage email overload. I recently heard a story about a meeting with a VP of Product Management at Salesforce. The meeting started poorly because the ’email’ word was uttered. It took the rest of the meeting to calm the man down and get him to focus on the topic at hand. Email is like waving a red cloth in front of the Salesforce.com bull.

Some cynics have whispered the Salesforce hates email out of self-interest. They say that the Salesforce.com cloud could not handle fully automated email syncing and logging. The database structure is not robust enough. It wasn’t designed for the high level of transaction processing, dynamic storage and constant input/output required by email integration. The cynics point out that, with 3 million users who on average would process 100 emails and log 25 to Salesforce per day, the SFDC cloud would be overwhelmed. Salesforce would be processing 3,472 emails per second and almost 1 terabyte of Data Storage per day (counting the plain text email data and the index files needed to search the emails) — 300 terabytes per year. The cynics are not sure Salesforce.com knows how to do that and maintain latency and its gross margin.

Another hint is reflected in how Salesforce.com charges for Data Storage – the structured, searchable data in Salesforce. Currently, the price is $6,000 per GB per year. In contrast, Amazon Web Services charges $1.20 per GB per year for raw storage. $6,000 per year for a GB of structured data points to a very expensive database infrastructure underlying the SFDC cloud. Perhaps the Salesforce.com cloud can’t scale to accommodate email integration, hence the constant pushback against so obvious and necessary a feature.

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