Salesforce Outlook Integration | Outlook Integration Implementation Guide

Data and communication are the pillars of Salesforce. The CRM platform allows users to keep a track of their customer database and use the same to have personalized interactions with every customer. As email has now become an integral part of business communication, CRM platforms have been focusing on personalized communication through emails and using the data from email marketing campaigns for key business analytics. Salesforce leverages this functionality of data management and effective communication by integrating with Microsoft Outlook.

The Salesforce Outlook Integration

The Salesforce Outlook integration brings together a CRM platform and a personal information manager. It allows Salesforce users to keep a track of different events, schedule tasks, send personalized emails and streamline their internal and external communication by integrating with Outlook. On the other hand, the Salesforce Outlook integration helps Outlook users in adding CRM functionalities to their emails.

It allows them to keep a track of the responses they receive, generates leads out of the emails, creates powerful email marketing campaigns, and perform an array of other activities enhanced by CRM.

Why Do Your Sales Reps Need Salesforce Outlook Integration?

Several businesses are going ahead with the Salesforce Outlook integration to help their sales reps in driving better sales and improving communication with the customers. Here are some of the major benefits your organization, especially your sales reps, can avail of the Salesforce Outlook integration.

Improved Productivity

Increasing employee productivity has been the central idea of every CRM tool and platform. As a standalone CRM platform, Salesforce helps users in automating an array of processes, helping them getting their work done faster and improving their productivity. On integrating with Outlook, the platform focuses on optimizing the time your sales reps spend creating, sending, and reading emails every day. Every organization needs its sales reps to work on an email platform for a good chunk of their day. If you are using a separate CRM and emailing platform, your sales reps will spend a lot of their time switching between the two.

With the Salesforce Outlook integration, the two platforms merge their functionalities and provide your sales reps with a single unified interface to work on. They no longer need to send emails and track their customer database using two different entities. This prevents your team from wasting unnecessary time in multiple data entries in two applications, leaving scope for improved productivity as they can now focus more on conducting the actual sales.

Crafting Targeted Emails

The need for personalization has increased exponentially over the last few years and shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. This makes it important for your sales reps to create emails that are targeted to the right contacts and sent at the right time. When you integrate Salesforce with Outlook, the CRM functionality provides you with the specific likes, dislikes, needs, and preferences of the customers you cater to. You can use these details in creating personalized messages and deliver them to your contacts using Outlook.

Building Seamless Marketing Campaigns

The Marketing Cloud of Salesforce works best for creating powerful and targeted email marketing campaigns. Once you integrate Salesforce with Outlook, you can help your sales reps in reaching out to your target audience and persuade them to engage with your business. The automated tools and features of the integrated platform allow you to create a list of leads and contacts, segregate them on a priority basis, and ask them to subscribe to your services.

Once you get a list of subscribers, you can use the CRM and email functionalities in sending them regular emails, schedule the messages, send bulk messages, and cater to all the needs of your subscribers.

The Importance Of Einstein Activity Capture

The introduction of Einstein Analytics has resulted in a revolutionary change in the degree of automation and efficiency provided by Salesforce. The AI tool helps Salesforce users in obtaining valuable insights out of their database, make valid predictions, and automate the business processes further.

The platform of Einstein Activity Capture works really well with Outlook to streamline communication between your sales reps and the customers they cater to.

As the name suggests, Einstein Activity Capture helps your sales reps in connecting their email and calendar account (Outlook) to Salesforce. This allows them to capture all emails and calendar events and add them automatically to the activity timelines of the relevant Salesforce records.

You can consider this platform as an assistant keeping a track of every email you send, every email you receive, and every event you create. With this, your sales reps do not have to spend their time organizing their CRM from their email and calendar data.

Tools In Einstein Activity Capture

The functionality of Einstein Activity Capture is not limited to syncing data between Outlook and Salesforce. Here are some of the major tools provided by the platform that make work easier for your sales reps:

Capture Functionality

This tool captures the emails and events sent and received by your sales reps in real-time and add them to the activity timeline of the relevant records. This helps your sales reps in going through the tedious task of segregating the emails and making necessary data entries within your Salesforce database.

Moreover, whenever any subsequent activity occurs with a specific email or event, it is automatically recorded in your Salesforce database immediately.

Einstein Email Insights

This tool provides your sales reps with insightful information and critical sales analysis along with the relevant emails sent/received by them. This helps them get expert advice while sending/receiving specific emails, allowing them to improve their processes.

Activity Dashboard

The Activity Dashboard provides your sales reps with a summary of all the sales activities added to the Salesforce activity timeline, either manually or through Einstein Activity Capture. This helps your reps to visualize valuable data and break it down to derive important sales insights.

Activity Metrics

You can include Activity Metrics to your list views, page layouts, reports, triggers, processes, and other relevant areas to reflect the activities added to your Salesforce activity timeline, either manually or through Einstein Activity Capture. This helps your reps in creating suitable processes based on specific activity data.

Recommended Connections

As the name suggests, this tool makes the Leads and Contacts show your sales reps which colleagues have the strongest connection with a prospect. This makes it really easy for your team to prioritize the leads and nurture them in a way that increases the chances of a deal getting closed.

How To Set Up The Salesforce Outlook Integration

Setting up the Salesforce Outlook integration is a fairly simple and straightforward process. Here are the steps you need to follow for implementing the integration within your organization:

1. Log into your Salesforce account, click on Settings, and go to Setup.

2. Type “Outlook” in the quick find box and select the option of Outlook Integration and Sync.

3. Turn the Outlook Integration on.

4. Always make sure that the option of “Use Enable Enhanced with Outlook” is on for logging emails as standard message objects and activating email to Salesforce. Through this setting, your sales reps can add or log their Outlook emails (and their attachments) to Salesforce records as Salesforce emails. Also, your reps can add or log events (and their attachments) to Salesforce records. On using Einstein Activity Capture, email and event capture will automatically add Outlook emails and events to the activity timeline of relevant Salesforce records.

Finally, giver your sales reps instructions for setting up the integration in Microsoft Outlook to obtain an integrated platform.

Customizing The Outlook Integration Pane

Once you are done with the Salesforce Outlook integration, you can customize the features of the platform to provide your reps with the best selling experience.

Here are the steps involved in customizing the Outlook Integration pane for the best results:

1. Go to Setup and Outlook in the quick find box. Select the option of “Outlook Integration and Sync”.

2. Enable the option of Customize Content with App Builder.

3. In the Email Application Pane section, you will need to create a pane and use Lightning App Builder for adding relevant components to the pane and assigning the panes to the users. This provides you with a good amount of flexibility for customizing the way in which content looks on Outlook.

You can learn how to use Lightning App Builder to customize the integrated platform even more and providing the best selling experience to your sales reps.

The Final Word

The integration between Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook works like a charm for the sales reps who spend an unnecessary amount of hours in syncing data between their emails and CRM database.

This platform provides them with a centralized database that synchronizes the processes carried out in both Salesforce and Outlook in real-time. This helps your sales reps in reaching out to the right prospects by creating powerful email marketing campaigns. With such a wholesome approach towards marketing communication, your business is bound to achieve the desired traction.