Last Updated on April 25, 2024 by Rakesh Gupta
If your company uses Salesforce for Outlook, change is on its way.
Salesforce for Outlook is an integration tool developed by Salesforce to synchronize emails, contacts, tasks, and events between Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook. This tool allows users to view Salesforce data directly within Outlook and vice versa, facilitating easier management of customer information and activities from within their email client. Inbox extensions for Salesforce are particularly useful for sales professionals who rely on seamless integration between their email provider and Salesforce to streamline workflows and improve productivity.
However, Salesforce is retiring Salesforce for Outlook and has started reducing support and limiting functionality, which may stymie your team’s ability to find and close deals. While Salesforce is introducing alternative solutions, these come with new tradeoffs and different feature sets. The good news is that the AppExchange is full of solutions with similar (or more advanced) functionality to Salesforce for Outlook.
How to Evaluate Salesforce for Outlook Alternatives
Transitioning to a new tool is an opportunity not just to maintain the status quo, but to optimize and improve. However, this task can be daunting when considering the myriad of available alternatives, each offering its unique set of features and capabilities.
Recognizing this challenge, we put together the following steps to guide you through the evaluation process. From assessing your team’s specific needs to scheduling a personalized demo, these steps will help you confidently identify the best Salesforce for Outlook alternative for your company.
Assess Your Team’s Needs
Begin by analyzing your team’s current usage of Salesforce for Outlook. Determine the features that are most utilized and identify any gaps or limitations that your sales team faces. Understanding these needs is crucial for selecting a replacement that aligns with your company’s workflows and improves your sales team’s performance.
Evaluate Integration Compatibility
Ensure any alternative to Salesforce for Outlook that you consider can seamlessly integrate with your existing Salesforce environment. The ability to accurately sync email and calendar activities is essential for sales teams to maintain efficiency and avoid crossed wires.
Consider Customization Capabilities
Examine the level of customization that each alternative offers. It should allow you to create a user experience that reflects your team’s specific requirements and aligns with your sales strategy. For example, some activity capture solutions will allow you to set more granular privacy permissions so you can designate how much or how little activity data (e.g. subject lines or email bodies) is shared on a per user basis.
Analyze User Adoption Potential
Every Admin knows that an app’s success hinges on its adoption by the end-users. When evaluating alternatives, consider the user interface and overall user experience. Look for a solution that is intuitive and requires minimal training, as this can greatly influence the adoption rate within your team.
Understand Data Storage and Reporting Limitations
Many activity capture solutions have time-based expiry limits and store the captured data outside of your Salesforce instance, preventing your team from effectively using it in Salesforce’s native reports. Ideally, your next tool should store captured data indefinitely in a way that can be easily utilized within Salesforce. This will allow you to create Salesforce triggers, reports, and dashboards, and ensure your team always has access to historical data.
Explore Advanced Features
Beyond the basic functionality, explore the advanced features that alternatives offer. Sales insights, enriched data, and relationship intelligence can provide your sales team with a competitive edge. Determine which features would benefit your team the most and weigh them in your decision-making process.
Review Data Security and Compliance Measures
With the increasing focus on data protection regulations, it’s important to ensure that any alternative to Salesforce for Outlook adheres to these standards. Review the security measures each alternative employs to protect sensitive information.
Consider Implementation and Ongoing Support
The initial setup and long-term support offered by a vendor can significantly impact the success of the new solution. Investigate the level of assistance provided during the implementation phase, including migration support from Salesforce for Outlook. Ongoing support is just as critical, so evaluate the responsiveness, availability, and quality of the vendor’s customer service.
Schedule a Personalized Demo
Before making a final decision, schedule a demo with your tool of choice so you can see it in action. Go into the demo with a list of pain points, wants, and needs, so you can ensure you’ve selected the best alternative for your company.
Why Salesforce for Outlook Users are Transitioning to Affinity for Salesforce
Like Salesforce for Outlook, Affinity for Salesforce integrates with your email and calendar, automatically capturing activity data in Salesforce. However, Affinity does more than capture sales activities.
With Affinity’s Google and Outlook extensions, your sales team can:
- Find their next client while researching on Google or LinkedIn. Affinity helps sellers assess and qualify prospects in real time by automatically surfacing enriched data and insights via inbox and browser extensions.
- Update the sales pipeline. Sellers can update deal data and statuses and create contacts, accounts, or opportunities directly from their email or web browser.
- Share insights with colleagues. Notes, record updates, and account changes made in an Affinity for Salesforce extension will be instantly viewable in Salesforce.
- Use shared connections to close more deals. Sellers can easily identify which of their colleagues is connected to a prospective account, so they can provide historical context or initiate a warm introduction.
- Prioritize relationships and outreach. Sellers can use captured data and relationship insights in Salesforce reports and triggers to stay on top of important relationships and prioritize opportunities.
- Trust your CRM data. In addition to reducing manual effort, automatically creating, updating, and enriching Salesforce records improves data hygiene and ensures sellers always have the context they need.
Whether you’re looking for a Salesforce for Outlook replacement or are in the process of evaluating similar tools, we’ve compiled a list of alternatives and their corresponding pros and cons.
👉 Get a demo of Affinity for Salesforce
Formative Assessment
I hope you found this article informative and helpful in selecting the appropriate product to integrate Salesforce with Outlook.
Affinity for Salesforce not only streamlines the process of updating a CRM, saving considerable time, but also leverages relationship intelligence to offer paths for warm introductions, helping to initiate and seal deals effectively.
