Email continues to be a mission critical sales tool. In most cases, it is the most important way that sales reps communicate with prospects and customers. The standard Salesforce outlook integration approach is provided by a software plug-in called ‘Salesforce for Outlook’. But other email integration apps are available on the market, but only one is 100% automated and in the cloud. That Salesforce app is called Match My Email. The following describes the work flow of sales reps in today’s market place.
The business environment is evolving rapidly. 9 to 5 has been replaced by 24/7/365. Local markets have expanded to cover the 40 global time zones. In today’s competitive markets, it is mission critical that a sales team have timely information. A major drawback of manual email logging like Salesforce for Outlook is that it is only up-to-date when a sales rep is logged into Outlook and working on his or her email.
If a sales rep is working on a document, spreadsheet or presentation, on vacation, sick, in a meeting, having a personal day, traveling or just busy with other things, then email is not logged to SFDC and the information in Salesforce.com is out-of-date and incomplete. When the email record in Salesforce.com cannot be relied upon, inefficiencies and mix ups start to creep into the sales process. Sales rep A has to wait and ask sales rep B if he or she has emailed a client. Sales rep A puts off an important call because he doesn’t want to look uninformed. Sales rep B replicates the work of sales rep A because she is unaware that an email was just received from the client. The value of Salesforce.com to the sales rep diminishes and CRM utilization starts to drop.
With automated email integration like Match My Email, the email records in Salesforce.com are always up-to-date and complete. Match My Email’s cloud processes all new inbound and outgoing emails every twenty minutes, 24/7/365. With automated email integration, a sales rep can be sure that when he or she looks at a SFDC record, it contains every recent email to and from that client and the entire sales team. Certainty increases sales rep utilization. Utilization increases return on SFDC investment.