Ground Report

Syncing emails, events, tasks and contacts from Outlook to Salesforce.com has been called the #1 pain point for Salesforce.com users.

Salesforce.com offers a free plug-in called Salesforce for Outlook (“SFO”) that is tasked with Outlook integration and SFO continues to improve. The Fall 2013 release of SFO is getting high marks for syncing Events, Tasks and Contacts, but reports from the field indicate that Salesforce email integration continues to be a big problem.

The fact that users are observing different experiences with Email versus Events, Tasks and Contacts is not surprising. Events, Tasks and Contacts are low volume occurrences. They don’t require action more than a half-dozen times per day. Low volume syncing tasks are best done with a manual tool like SFO that gives the user total control over what goes to and from Salesforce.com. Email, on the other hand, is high volume. The average email user receives and sends 110 emails per day – that is one email every five seconds during an 8 hour workday. A manual tool like SFO can’t handle high volume; email syncing and logging to Salesforce.com needs to be done automatically in the cloud.

That is where Match My Email comes it. It offloads the adding of emails to Salesforce.com to the cloud. It frees the sales rep from the impossible task of manually sorting and syncing 110 emails to Salesforce.com per day. Based on cloud technology, Match My Email has the advantage that it syncs emails to Salesforce 24/7/365 from all email systems and mobile devices. That means that regardless of what you are doing or where you are located, Match My Email is working in background matching emails to Salesforce.com records and uploading the matched emails to Salesforce.

At Dreamforce 2014 in session after session, the issue of Salesforce adoption came up. It is hard to get sales reps to use a CRM system when they are used to using Outlook and paper notes. Speaker after speaker at Dreamforce 2104 stated that Salesforce adoption is directly correlated to the amount of useful information resident in the Sales Cloud and/or Salesforce1. The more useful and complete the information in Salesforce, the more sales reps will use it. The problem is getting useful information into Salesforce. Luckily using a combination of Salesforce for Outlook and Match My Email will accelerate the migration of collaboration information into Salesforce.com and will increase adoption.