For sales persons to adopt/use Salesforce.com, it must present them with all the information that they need to do their job. That means that within Salesforce there must be tasks, contacts, calendar, email and call logs. When this information is at the sales professional’s finger tips – well organized and easy to find – Salesforce adoption and usage will soar. Salesforce.com users implementing cloud-based, automated email integration report daily user log-ins rates of near 100%.
Salesforce does a good job with tasks, contacts, calendar and call logs out-of-the-box. However, its email integration tools are weak. Adding automatic tools like Match My Email that add emails to Salesforce.com in the cloud immediately increase Salesforce.com adoption and utilization.
Cloud-based email integration offers many advantages over software. The most important are that is can be configured to be fully automated, always on and platform/device independent. Cloud technology can embed the emails flowing back and forth between the customer/prospect and the sale teams seamlessly into Salesforce.com – with no manual effort on the part of the sales professional. When a sales professional views a record in SFDC, all emails – inbound and outbound – will be captured, sorted, de-duplicated and clearly presented in each Salesforce record type: Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Cases and Opportunities. The sales professional can then choose email, voice, text, chat, or social networks to take the next step with the prospect/customer — all without leaving Salesforce.com.
Cloud-based email integration apps like Match My Email offer an automated way to get email information into Salesforce.com and filed in the right records. Because Match My Email is fully automated, it saves the sales professional time both in terms of data input and data retrieval.
As we all know, it is hard to get sales professionals to adopt and use any CRM system. This has been a fact of life since the first CRM systems were introduced by IBM in the 1980’s. Salesforce.com is no exception. Successful sales professionals all have simple, improvised tools that enable them to do their jobs: notepads, notebooks, index cards, diaries and email accounts. Getting them to change and adopt cloud technology is a challenge.
Successful CRM deployments have one thing in common; they all provide information and tools that make selling easier for the sales professional. A universal law of CRM deployments is that sales professional adoption and usage is directly proportional to the amount of information in the CRM. In a team selling environment, that information also needs to be shared.
Over the years, the information types and tools needed to implement a successful CRM system have crystallized. A successful CRM needs shared tasks, calendars, contacts, emails, call logs and social network links. Salesforce.com does a very good job with shared tasks, calendars, contacts, call logs and social network links. Where it falls short is with email. This lack of good email integration forces sales professional to constantly access their email account – i.e., leave Salesforce – to see their most important and current client interactions. Email integration brings this email information inside of Salesforce so the sales professional doesn’t have to leave SFDC because all the important data needed to manage a deal or qualify a lead are in one place.
Cloud-based email integration is estimated to save the average Salesforce users about 3 hours of time per month. This time is saved by eliminating (1) the repetitive task of manually filing emails into Salesforce and (2) the need to jump back and forth in and out of Salesforce to figure out what recent email correspondence with the client/prospect has been.