Salesforce recently announced the sunsetting of Salesforce for Outlook. This change, while significant, opens up a world of opportunity for sales teams to revamp their sales processes and find solutions that enhance their productivity.
As the transition approaches in June 2024, it’s important to identify which capabilities your team needs when moving beyond Salesforce for Outlook and finding a new solution. This will ensure that your team can quickly adapt to the change and continue to achieve sales objectives.
Preparing for the End of Salesforce for Outlook
For current Salesforce for Outlook users, here are a few key steps to ensure a smooth transition for your team:
- Understand the timeline: Salesforce for Outlook will be retired in June 2024, which means you need to begin to evaluate different sales tools, identify the most suitable one, and begin the transition to either another Salesforce product or a third-party alternative.
- Identify essential features: Understand and list the Salesforce for Outlook features that your sales team frequently uses. Features could include the email and calendar integration, email tracking, or the ability to log tasks and events in Salesforce automatically. This list will serve as your baseline requirements when looking for a new solution.
- Review your sales processes: Use this transition as a chance to review and improve your current sales processes. Look at how your sales team interacts with customers and identify areas where there may be room for improvements in efficiency, automation, and information accessibility.
6 Tips for Choosing Your New Sales Tool
As you gear up for the transition, consider the following elements when choosing a replacement for Salesforce for Outlook:
1. Automated Activity Capture
Look for a solution that provides time-saving automation features that minimize manual Salesforce data entry and increase productivity. A tool that automatically captures contact, account, and activity data directly from Outlook can save more than 200 hours per person every year.
2. Unlimited Data Storage
Ideally, your activity capture tool should provide unlimited data storage. This allows your team to retain historical data and context indefinitely, which improves long-term decision-making.
3. Salesforce Reporting
Automatically capturing your inbox and calendar data is just the beginning. To further boost productivity, look for a solution that enables you to create triggers, reports, and dashboards directly in Salesforce. For example, if you have long sales cycles, you should be able to create a dashboard that shows the number of interactions your team has spent on an important deal to ensure they’re staying top of mind.
4. AI-Driven Relationship Insights
Your Salesforce data contains valuable relationship info that could lead your sales team to their next big deal. If you want a productivity tool that goes beyond activity capture, choose one that also maps and assesses your entire organization’s network so you have a better understanding of the strength and nature of every relationship.
This kind of relationship intelligence helps you generate or advance deals faster by uncovering which colleague can give a warm introduction or provide important context on a target prospect.
5. Integrative Access
Your new tool should seamlessly integrate with the other platforms that your sales team uses, making it easier to access information without switching back and forth. For example, your team will save valuable time if they can view, update, and create Salesforce records directly from their Outlook inbox or while browsing a prospect’s LinkedIn profile or company website.
6. User-Friendly
Prioritize an easy-to-use solution that enhances your existing Salesforce instance to increase user adoption and maximize your CRM investment.
How Affinity Can Help
Like Salesforce for Outlook, Affinity for Salesforce integrates with your email and calendar, automatically capturing contact, account, and activity data directly in Salesforce. However, Affinity does more than capture sales activities – it also uncovers insights that can help you win more business and close deals faster.
Affinity harnesses the power of AI to provide relationship intelligence, helping you identify warm introductions within your network and develop stronger relationships with your prospects. This allows you to leverage the strength of your network, making the entire sales process more efficient.
Find out more about why others are making the switch to Affinity for Salesforce.
Summary
The sunsetting of Salesforce for Outlook is an opportunity to reassess your sales tools and processes. By embracing automation and relationship intelligence, your team can increase efficiency, build better relationships, and close more deals.
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