As a sales manager, I need to know what is going on with leads and customers in real time. To do my job, I need to see the emails flowing between my sales team and the customer base as they happen. I have been called a control freak. I just see it as doing my job.
The free Outlook email integration tool provided by Salesforce.com called Salesforce for Outlook didn’t get the job done. My sales team was always late logging emails from Outlook to Salesforce from this manual tool. Often they didn’t sync the emails at all. When I looked into Salesforce, I would see only part of the story, not the whole picture. Partial information in Salesforce led to mistakes. Deals would get mishandled. Too many times, we would look confused and clumsy in front of our customers.
I told my tech guy that I had had enough with Salesforce for Outlook. It was not meeting my Outlook email integration needs. I told him that I needed an email integration solution for Outlook that would automate the filing of emails to Salesforce – and do it in real time 24/7/365. I wanted a system that would let me look into any client record – whether it was a Lead, Contact, Account, Opportunity or Case — and see all the communications between the sales team and the customer.
The tool had to work for incoming and outgoing emails and capture them regardless of whether the customer was in TO:, FROM: , CC: or BCC:. I wanted a tool that would work regardless of what a sales professional was doing. It needed to work if they were on vacation, sick, traveling or in a meeting. The tool had to be 100% reliable and create an up-to-date record of all email communications in Salesforce. And the solution had to work on all my devices: PC, iPad and iPhone.
My brilliant tech, after checking the AppExchange, recommended Match My Email. Match My Email is a cloud solution so it works with everything at once – PC, Mac, Blackberry, Android and iPhone. By working at the cloud or network level, it is always on regardless of what a member of the sales team is doing. On a 20 minute cycle, it imports, processes and files email to the right records in Salesforce. The email are shown in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-use graphical view called EMAIL MESSAGES that shows FROM, SUBJECT, DATE & TIME, ATTACHMENT and how the email relates to other records in Salesforce in something called the TYPE:MATCHES column. I can hover over the SUBJECT and read the email contents in a pop-up window. EMAIL MESSAGES includes buttons to MATCH, UNMATCH and DELETE emails – all from inside of Salesforce.com
Whereas Salesforce for Outlook brings Salesforce into Outlook, Match My Email brings your mailbox into Salesforce. The more information there is in Salesforce, the more the sales team will uses it and the more adoption it will get.
I am extremely happy with Match My Email. In fact, I can’t imagine how I did my job without it. Now I can open the Match My Email web tab in Salesforce whenever I want and see exactly what has been going on across the global sales team. I don’t have to ask a sales rep anymore if they emailed ‘so and so’. I can see all email communications in black and white in real time. I can see exactly what they wrote and how the prospect or customer responded.
In the old days – before Match My Email – I would waste hours per day trying to figure out what was going on. Now I have it all at my fingertips.
Perhaps I am a control freak. But with Match My Email I am a happy control freak.
