There are three kinds of email syncing tools available for Salesforce.com.
1. Manual
2. Semi-manual
3. Fully automatic
There are pros and cons to each approach. Manual tools are easy to install, but involve a lot of repetitive work thereafter. Semi-manual tools are harder to install and then require daily monitoring. Fully automatic services require the most time to set-up but then offer ‘work free’ email syncing and logging that is ‘set-up and forget’ because it is always on and produces a 100% up-to-date and complete email record.
Manual tools are software plug-ins and they install quickly. Cirrus Insight’s Gmail syncing tool claims to install in three minutes. But manual tools like Salesforce for Outlook force the user to click each and every time they want to send an email to Salesforce.com for syncing and logging. It is estimated that the average user will click on the ‘sync’ button embedded in Outlook or Gmail 25,000 times per year. That is a lot of repetitive clicking and a lot of wasted effort. Sales reps generally don’t like to do administrative work that does not result in more sales and higher commissions. So while manual tools are quick to install, they condemn the user to hours and hours of drudgery. Manual tools like Linkpoint 360 cannot produce an up-to-date and 100% complete email archive in Salesforce.com because they depend on humans and humans make mistakes and forget to do things. If a colleague is on vacation or just plain lazy, his email will not be logged in Salesforce.com for reference if a customer calls about an RFP, invoice or order and you might lose the sale.
Semi-Manual tools take longer to install but save the sales person the job of personally logging each and every email into Salesforce.com — they save the end-user 15,000 clicks per year. Installation is in the 15-30 minute range. Semi-manual tools like iHance send emails to Salesforce.com in bulk and then sort them by ‘email address’ inside Salesforce.com. If an email has a perfect one-to-one correlation with a Salesforce.com object, then the tool logs the email automatically into that single object. However, if the email contains multiple email addresses it will be marked ‘Ambiguous’ and sent to a quarantine screen to be resolved. If the email does not contain a relevant email address, it is marked ‘personal’ and held for human ‘resolution’ or deletion. That means that the sales rep has to log into the semi-manual tool many times during the work day to make sure that all emails are getting uploaded properly to Salesforce.com. This activity is estimate to take at least one hour per day and involve hundreds of mouse clicks. If the sales rep does not log in and work on his or her ambiguous or personal emails, those emails will not be logged, so semi-manual tools are never up-to-date, plus they are prone to human error and omissions. It is impossible to guarantee a 100% complete email log in Salesforce.com with a semi-manual tool like VCS Smart Email, CCRM or CureCRM.
There is only one fully automatic email syncing and logging service for Salesforce.com on the market: Match My Email. Match My Email takes between 30 and 45 minutes to install and requires some training because the end-user can set import rules and privacy controls. But once Match My Email is set-up it, it works completely automatically and in background. Customers refer to it as a ‘set up and forget’ application. After set up, email syncing and logging just disappears as a task or concern. The system is always on whether or not the user is logged in. It works in real-time so the email log is up-to-date. It incorporates MultiMatch technology so emails are synced to all relevant Salesforce.com objects. Match My Email saves a Salesforce.com user 25,000 mouse clicks per year; it saves a sales reps company 100 hours of labor and about $5,000 of time.
Match My Email costs $17.95 per user per year and has a payback period of less than one month.
