Why you need to integrate Salesforce with your email

Do you struggle with getting your team to keep your Salesforce records up to date? You’re not alone. The average sales rep spends 32 minutes a day on manual data entry.

That’s because CRMs — customer relationship management software — require constant upkeep: logging conversations, pulling reports, and updating opportunity statuses. Reps have to open multiple tabs and log in to another tool to update and reference CRM data. Since it lives separate from your inbox, it ends up feeling like a barrier to getting work done — instead of what it could be: a tool that can help you get closer to your customers and their needs.

That’s why Front integrates with Salesforce and other popular CRMs to connect your customer records with where you actually get work done — your inbox. The best part? It stays updated automatically, so nothing falls through the cracks. By syncing Salesforce with Front, you can see complete conversation history, better understand your customer journey, and get context on business challenges. Your team can actually see the value of your CRM.

With Front, you can access and update Salesforce directly next to your customer emails.

While you can send emails from Salesforce, often you’re working from your email to talk to customers. Here’s what you can gain from integrating your CRM into your inbox with Front.

1. It brings the focus back on your customers.

Your CRM is critical for building a great customer experience, tracking your customer interactions, and overseeing your customer’s journey. But it’s a big investment: teams spend a lot of time keeping it updated and locating information in it when they need it. It’s easy to lose sight of the reason you made the investment in the first place: to better manage customer relationships.

With your CRM in your inbox, your team’s focus stays where it should be: on your customers. They’re not clicking around to pull up opportunities and scrolling through records to log new conversations. Instead, they’re reading and replying to customer messages, with critical data right where they need it.

Access all your critical CRM data directly in your inbox.

When you integrate Salesforce with your email in Front, every piece of information you need is directly next to your messages:

• Contact details

• Account information

• Opportunity and status details

• Lead tracking

• Task updates

• Custom fields

• Custom objects

When you open a message, you know exactly who the customer is, what plan they’re on, and how they’ve interacted with your team in the past. It’s easy to get a quick view of exactly what you need to craft a compelling message. That way you’re not worried about the data — you’re focused on the customer.

2. It makes updating Salesforce quick and easy.

If you’re spending more than a half an hour every day updating your CRM, that equals 17 days over the course of a year — 17 days that could have been spent communicating with customers. Timely updates are critical, as a CRM is only useful if it’s consistent and accurate, but making those updates doesn’t need to be such a slog.

With access to Salesforce in your email, staying in sync is easy for your team:

1. It’s hard to forget to update Salesforce because it’s right there, in your inbox. There’s no “out of sight, out of mind” slip-ups.

2. There are no barriers between your customer messages and your Salesforce records. No new tabs, waiting for the page to load, clicking around, and so forth. It’s easy, updated, in real time.

You can edit Salesforce activities in real time in Front, so your information always stays up-to-date.

In Front, Account Executives and Sales Development Reps can update records and tasks directly from the related conversation. Converting a lead or changing an opportunity status is as simple as a few clicks.

With real time updates in Salesforce, everyone wins — your sales team spends less time on administrative tasks. Managers’ reports and forecasts are always current, so you can all trust the data you’re looking at. And more details from the sales process are captured for other teams’ benefit down the line.

3. You can share CRM insights with the rest of your team.

Salesforce has the potential to be your team’s customer data jackpot. From your initial outreach, through the sales process, onboarding, and support issues, your CRM becomes more than a bunch of phone numbers and status updates — it’s a full story of your relationship with every customer. Customer Support, Account Management, Marketing, or Product Management — anyone in your business who engages with customers — can benefit from it.

Integrating Salesforce with your team’s daily workflow can positively impact your customer experience later on in the customer lifecycle:

• Account Managers can get the information they need to tailor onboarding to a new customer’s specific needs.

• Product Managers can put feature requests into the right context: where the customer is in their lifecycle, what plan they’re on, or what their pain points were that led them to buy.

• Customer Support can spot higher level trends based on the issues different groups of customers are experiencing. All because they have the customer records that enable them to do their best work for your customers.

Edit Salesforce opportunities in Front.

With Salesforce in your inbox, everyone in your company can access the valuable information Salesforce holds. In some cases, teammates who only need to reference customer data won’t need licenses to access information, so you can save on CRM licensing.

4. Data is more meaningful when paired with actual conversations.

Numbers go a lot further with concrete examples to back them up. That’s why your CRM data needs to live in your inbox, right next to your customer conversations. Then you can connect customer data, like their industry and previous touch points, with their actual words and opinions, like, “We’re really excited about X feature, but our team is too small to purchase this just yet.”

Your CRM data and customer conversations together are much more powerful than data or conversations alone. With trust in their data and more time to spend on what matters, your team can feel confident in your CRM, and as a result, make customers happier.

Here are some of the actions you can do without ever leaving your inbox using the Front Salesforce integration:

• Create, view, and edit the following Salesforce records related to a message sender: Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, Tasks, Activities, and Cases.

• Create, view, and edit custom objects related to the message sender, provided they are linked to one of the standard objects above.

• Convert a Lead to a Contact with an Account.

• Enforce mandatory fields for creating new records (marked with a red *).

• Customize what fields and objects are shown in Settings.

• Click on fields like Full Name, Account Name, or Opportunity Name to view more details in Salesforce.

• Look up the information of any Contact or Lead using the search bar.

Learn how to integrate Salesforce with your inbox in Front. Don’t use Salesforce? You can integrate PipeDrive, Base, Zoho CRM, HubSpot, and more into your inbox, too.