Salesforce.com is not cheap. The retail price for an Enterprise user of Sales Cloud is $1,800 per year. The Professional version for small and medium businesses is $900 per year.
Industry experts believe that 70% of Sales Cloud users buy at least one third-party app from the AppExchange. These apps add missing pieces to the Salesforce platform. Third-party Salesforce add-ons are crucial to maximizing return on a Salesforce deployment.
A case in point is Salesforce email integration. Out-of-the-box Salesforce does not offer a cloud-based email integration module. Users have to buy cloud-based email integration off the AppExchange.
The most advanced cloud-based app on the AppExchange is Match My Email. The app costs $22.95 per user per month, or 12% of the price of a SFDC Enterprise license. Adding cloud-based email integration to Salesforce offers important advantages. User productivity is increased and user adoption and usage accelerated. Cloud-based syncing puts all emails into Salesforce automatically. It increases the value of the information in Salesforce exponentially. Inside each customer record, a sales rep can see all the emails – inbound and outbound – that relate to the customer. If the SFDC record is shared with other Salesforce users, the user can see not only his or her emails, but the emails of the other members of the sales team. Cloud-based email integration transforms Salesforce. It makes the email information in Salesforce better than the email information in Outlook, Gmail, MacMail, OX Mail and/or Thunderbird. Better email information in Salesforce means that the CRM is more useful. Users will rely on the email data in Salesforce to do their job. Salesforce will become the “one-stop shop” where a sales rep can organize and manage his or her customer interactions.
Add better email handling tools in Salesforce and you can take productivity to the next level. With Match My Email, the user can click on a specific email and REPLY, REPLY ALL or FORWARD. Being able to respond to a customer email directly from inside Salesforce makes the CRM easier to use and improves email response times. No more jumping back and forth between Salesforce and the email system.
It is estimated that cloud-based email syncing and logging saves the average sales rep FOUR HOURS of boring, repetitive, non-value added work per month. Eliminating a click here and there adds up to real money over time. Plus making a sales rep’s job less boring and more creative increases job satisfaction and performance.
Finally, Salesforce includes a technology called List Views. Cloud-based email integration in combination with List View technology can be configured to automate email response lists. List Views are a way to filter Salesforce records by a ‘condition’. A condition might be ‘no emails from the client in 7 days’. Such a condition can be used to flag problem accounts that need attention.
With the List View technology, sales rep don’t have to set follow up Tasks. The system can generate follow-up lists automatically. Because the List Views are dynamic, once an action is taken the customer account will disappear automatically from the List. List View email response workflows can shorten the time invested in responding to an email from minutes to seconds — especially in combination with Salesforce’s email template module.
The best way to quickly see the features and benefits of Match My Email is to schedule a Live Demo using the scheduling tool at https://www.matchmyemail.com/schedule-your-live-demo/.
