My mother once said that I was “so lazy it was a form of intelligence”; a backhanded compliment, for sure, but one containing more than a grain of truth. My whole life I have been looking for ways to make my life easier. How can I make the most money with the least amount of effort?
With this temperament, naturally I gravitated towards Sales. For me, Sales is where the action is, where the rubber meets the road, where you prosper or fail on your wits, where you can make the most amount of money with the least effort. Like most sales reps, I like people, love the hunt, relish a good meeting. When I win a deal I feel good; when I lose a deal I feel angry. Every day I wake up with a clear challenge – close that deal.
The worst part of my job is the CRM system. I didn’t get into Sales to do data entry. My dream CRM would be one where all the information gets into the system automatically. All I want the CRM for is a place where I can look up data on my prospects and customers or remind myself of where we are in the sales process. I want that info at my fingertips whether I am in the office, at home or on the road.
Recently, my company got Salesforce.com. It is clearly better than what we had before. I like the way it creates Lead automatically from web forms (we get more and more of our Leads from the Internet). I love the way it lets me share Contacts and Opportunities with the rest of the sales team. It makes pipeline estimation a breeze.
But I don’t like the way Salesforce.com handles emails. I want it to add all the emails in my Outlook automatically in each record. I don’t want to have to click a button every time an email needs to be logged into Salesforce.com. The manual tool that they gave called Salesforce for Outlook really falls short. It puts the burden of email logging on my back. That is wrong; the CRM system should sync my emails for me.
Luckily the Salesforce Admin at our company is helpful and clever. When I complained to him that I needed to somehow add Outlook to Salesforce, he told me that there was a solution on the AppExchange called Match My Email. Match My Email is a Salesforce email integration platform that automates the adding of my emails from Outlook to Salesforce. All we had to do was enter my email username and password and authenticate to my Salesforce.com account and the system worked from there. It was set up and forget. Because it is in the cloud it is always on, working with all my mobile devices – iPhone, Blackberry, Surface and iPad – and office PC and MacBook Air at home. The icing on the cake was that it automatically brings all my old emails into Salesforce.com – at the rate of 10,800 per month — so I am able to create a 100% complete and accurate email log in SFDC.
I recommend that you talk to your Salesforce Admin about Match My Email. It will let you be your true self, “so lazy it’s a form of intelligence.”