Posted in: Integration, Microsoft Outlook + Salesforce
Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook are both powerful tools for making any business more efficient. With Salesforce, it’s easy to manage contact information and give your salespeople the data they need to make more sales. Microsoft Outlook helps team members communicate with internal and external stakeholders, schedule meetings and create to-do lists to keep themselves on track. Although these tools are powerful on their own, you can make them even more powerful by integrating them. Consider integrating Salesforce with Outlook to enjoy the following benefits.
Say Goodbye to Redundancy
Outlook and Salesforce have several functions in common; if your team members are using both tools separately, they’re just duplicating their efforts. For example, Outlook and Salesforce are both used to create, store and retrieve customer contact information. If you enter customer data into one of them, you shouldn’t have to waste time entering the same data elsewhere. That’s where integration comes in.
When you integrate Salesforce with Outlook, you eliminate redundant processes that waste time and keep your team from focusing on sales and customer service. As an added benefit, you’ll also prevent data-entry errors that can occur when sales reps have to type the same data in multiple places. By eliminating time-wasting activities, you’ll be able to keep your team as productive as possible.
Improve Customer Service
Without integration, your team members have to take extra time to look through their Salesforce records to remember what they discussed during previous interactions with prospects and customers. If they don’t have time to look up Salesforce data before writing emails, attending meetings or calling prospects, they won’t be as prepared as they could be. Integration eliminates this problem by enabling users to see their Salesforce records right from their Outlook accounts.
Your team members will be able to see how many times they’ve communicated with each customer and what was discussed during each interaction, ensuring they know exactly what customers need. If one of your salespeople has a meeting with a prospect, they’ll know if the prospect is close to making a purchase decision or if they’re still in the initial stages of the customer journey. When dealing with longtime customers, your team members will be able to deliver a better customer experience. The result is improved customer service, which can help you retain valuable customers and reduce your marketing costs.
Customize Your System
Integrating Salesforce with Outlook gives you the opportunity to customize your system so that sales, marketing and customer service staff have access to the features they use most often. For example, you can customize the Outlook email application pane to give your sales team quick access to specific Salesforce content, reducing the amount of time it takes to get up to speed when a prospect returns a call or a new customer asks for after-sales support. Therefore, customizing your system saves time and increases efficiency.
Increase Data Integrity
In addition to preventing data-entry errors, integrating Salesforce with Outlook helps you to reduce the number of mistaken entries, ensuring your team has access to accurate reports. When your team has to manually enter data, there’s a greater likelihood that it gets entered incorrectly or even entered twice. By integrating Salesforce with Outlook, the same data will be copied over automatically, making it easier to rely on your data and make data-driven decisions.
Keep Employees in the Loop
When you use Salesforce and Outlook separately, it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks. If a sales appointment is entered in Salesforce and not in Outlook, for example, the salesperson might not remember to call or meet with the prospect at the right time. Such a mistake can result in lost sales and damage your company’s relationships with its customers. When you integrate Salesforce with Outlook, you can sync events, contacts and to-do items across both tools, ensuring that employees are always in the loop.
Personalize Your Emails
Generic communications aren’t nearly as effective at generating engagement as personalized ones are. The more targeted your emails, the higher your response rates are likely to be, reducing your overall costs without forcing your company to sacrifice sales. Integrating Salesforce with Outlook makes it easier to personalize your messages, resulting in higher open rates and more inbound messages from interested prospects.
By integrating Salesforce with Outlook, you’ll be giving your marketing team access to a treasure trove of data that can help them deliver a personalized experience that promotes brand loyalty and helps your company build a strong reputation for service. Your team can leverage that data to make sure your communications stand out from the pack.
Enhance Security
Your data needs to be accurate, but it also needs to be secure. Integrating Salesforce with Outlook can help you increase productivity without putting customer data at risk, giving you the best of both worlds. LinkPoint Connect for Salesforce honors your Salesforce permissions, which means no one in your organization can use Outlook to get around your CRM security controls. Additionally, LinkPoint Connect for Salesforce doesn’t store any of your customer data on its servers, which reduces the risk of a data breach.
If you decide to use LinkPoint Connect for Salesforce to integrate your CRM with Outlook, you’ll also get to decide if you want to do on-site installation or use software deployment tools. As a result, you’ll have total control over implementation, which can help keep your data secure.
Get Started
If you want to reap the benefits of integrating Salesforce with Outlook, LinkPoint360 is here to help. LinkPoint Connect for Salesforce integrates Salesforce with Outlook or IBM Notes, giving you access to a wide range of features that can help your team increase productivity, enhance security and deliver a better customer experience. Contact us today at 732-212-8401 to learn more.
