How to Choose the Best Inbox Integration for This guide is written for information technology specialists who are looking for ways to improve productivity. is one of the most innovative and fastest growing companies on the planet. Over the last fifteen years, they ve grown to become the leader in customer relationship management (CRM). They ve led the cloud revolution which has spread to email with Google Apps for Business and Microsoft s Office 365, both of which allow for a business to do their entirely in the cloud. Both options, along with pride themselves on being customizable and powerful systems that can drive profitability. As companies move both their work suites and CRM into the cloud, they are increasingly looking to integrate the two to improve employee productivity, increase the quality and quantity of business data, and streamline their workflows. However, the biggest reason that companies are looking to integrate the two is one of practicality: poor user productivity is the single biggest thing holding most deployments back. And the biggest reason for poor user productivity is that it s an inefficient process for the vast majority of workers. is a fantastic resource for managers, but acts as a time drain for sales and support workers. Simply put, sales and support workers live in their inboxes, so they re unwilling to put in the time and effort needed to learn and use a bulky CRM system on a daily basis. This guide will help users of, and either Google Apps or Microsoft s email clients (Office 365 or Outlook), figure out if a third party integration makes sense for their organizations, and, if so, how to differentiate between the various vendors providing this service. This paper will begin with an overview of the prevailing research on CRM adoption and its impact on businesses. This is followed by an overview of the options available to increase CRM adoption. Focusing on cloud based, software as a service solutions, this paper will then provide a checklist of relevant questions to ask in order to help differentiate between the top providers of third party inbox integrations. Our objective is to help readers determine the best fit for their individual organizations. Problem of Adoption How common is poor adoption?
The statistics speak for themselves: Only 31 percent of companies reported user adoption of 90 percent (Accenture CSO Insights) A well known AMR study shows that 47 percent of companies reported serious challenges with user adoption that often put projects in jeopardy (AMR Research) Lack of user adoption is cited as the primary cause of 70 percent of failed CRM projects (Forrester Research) 50 percent of software functionality paid for and licensed by organizations is not actually used (Butler Group) What impact does poor adoption have on an organization? Low adoption is damaging to companies on multiple levels. It causes confusion, inaccurate business intelligence, and, a ton of lost value. Businesses may be able to get by without a fully functioning CRM, but there s a ton of lost potential value. That loss leaves room for the competition to take that potential revenue and profits for themselves. It s the classic story of a leaner, hungrier competitor coming in and disrupting a field. It s also just plain wasteful of money. In 2003 alone, it was estimated that over $1 billion was spent on software that companies weren t even using. Imagine that number today.that s why it s extremely important to increase that adoption rate. However, the true value comes from increasing it correctly. If a company was able to guarantee 100% adoption tomorrow, then their workforce would be wasting a ton of time inputting data into a bulky and hard to use system. Employees only have so many hours in a day. While CRM adoption is important, many workers feel that they time they spend making sales calls, talking with clients, and working on deals is more important than time spent inputting data. And they have a point! Why should they use software that ruins their workflow? The real key to improving CRM adoption is to make it as efficient and painless as you want the rest of your business to be. Think of your employees as customers would you sell your organization to them to use? What are the options for increasing productivity? One of the challenges that companies face with increasing productivity is figuring out what solution will work for getting their employees to input more data. There are a number of different ways that companies look to accomplish this.
The problem lies on trying too hard to improve the usage rate, but not actual productivity. In many cases, improving adoption can actually lose the company money in terms of employee time spent on data input rather than selling, supporting, or marketing a product. Here are some of the different options that companies have available for increasing adoption: 1. Gamification Gamification is a fast growing field in all sectors of business. Most commonly, businesses use gamification software to drive productivity in terms of things like number of calls made, number of support tickets handled, most leads converted, etc. It can be incredibly useful for an outbound sales team to have a friendly, competitive spirit. Gamification for can have drawbacks, though. If you re rewarding the employees that do an inefficient process the most times in a day, then you re going to end up with a lot of wasted time. Your employees will focus on the wrong things! Hence, it s not really a solution for increasing productivity. 2. Hiring more developers to make easier developers are in huge demand for businesses of all sizes. They make sure the backend of is working right by coding and setting the organization up to the needed specifications. As such, average starting salary for a developer can be north of $90,000 and much more for those with experience. Hiring a developer to focus solely on improving employee productivity is therefore very cost inefficient, especially if you need more than one, which is the case for many large organizations. And you re still asking employees to learn a foreign system. 3. Training If you thought hiring a developer was expensive, think about how costly training sessions are. Learning can be complex and time intensive. One or two hour training sessions won t cut it for a lot of employees. Training needs to be repeated and in depth if employees are going to remember it. Think about all the things that they could be doing other than learning an inefficient system with those hours. When you add in the cost of the trainers and the success rate of training programs in general, this too becomes a poor option. 4. Threats Believe it or not, this is one of the more common ways managers look to increase productivity. It s also one of the worst and most ineffective ways to do things. Most companies aren t going to risk firing an otherwise effective sales, support, or marketing employee because they aren t reporting on enough customer information.
What s worse is that it still doesn t solve the inefficiency issue. If you successfully get your employees to input tons of data into, then you may have just threatened them to be more inefficient! Simply put, this just isn t good for your company or your employees. 5. Integration with email Every businessperson has an intimate relationship with their email client, be it Gmail, Outlook, Exchange, Lotus Notes, or any other. It s where customers, support tickets, and new information comes in. When employees enter information from, they often have to copy + paste the data from their email. As such, it makes much more sense to have a deep integration solution inside their email client, especially one that fits it snugly to the existing user interface. Using a CRM system in Gmail is a lot less scary and intimidating than going to a heavy and cumbersome database site. Conclusion We think email integration is therefore the most used and recommended system for increasing the ROI of. The popularity of an email integration is driven by many of the same factors that led organizations to implement in the first place it s simply more efficient to do it in a familiar place to your employees. Compared with the other options listed above, email integration offers several key advantages: The upfront cost is zero almost all integration providers offer a trial period. You can test drive the product before investing any money. Implementation can be done quickly and effectively. It costs far less than spending money on developers, training, or inefficient gamification software. Upgrading to new software releases is effortless the SaaS (Software as a Service) model allows for new features to be added all the time. Data can be accessed and managed from virtually anywhere especially with companies that have a fully compatible and featured mobile app. SaaS offers the ease of scalability to growing organizations. There is an entire team of developers and specialized IT professionals working every day with a single minded focus making that one application the best it can be. Essential Features of an Inbox Integration All the leading + Inbox integrations are characterized by these main features: Saving emails to There should be a dedicated system that allows you to save emails to contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities, and more.
Editing of records contacts, leads, opportunities and more should be able to edited from your inbox. New record creation You can create contacts, leads, opportunities, and more right from the inbox. Email tracking You can track who opens your emails whenever and wherever they do it. Mobile You can update and use the integrator while on the go Security The company should pass the security review Reliability Durability and availability of service ratings in excess of 99% SaaS Requiring no purchase or maintenance of software Pricing A free trial period with fees charged per user account thereafter SLA Reasonable service level agreements ensuring high level of continued support How can I assess the differences between various email integrations? If you take a look at the most popular + Inbox integration solutions out there, you ll find that they share many common features. All provide the ability to look at certain information from your inbox. All of them offer data security and a free trial period, are implemented as SaaS, and have similar terms of use. However, beyond that, the services vary considerably in terms of ease of use, data management features, and the product vision that guides development moving forward. These differences can be hard to spot. A lot of companies offer integration in Gmail, but only a few offer anything close to a deep integration. The field for Outlook and Office 365 integration is narrower, but can still cause difficulty when selecting the best solution. For that reason, we have included a concise list of questions (below) to help you differentiate between offers as well as determine which may best suit your organization s needs. Before committing to a + Inbox integration, it is recommended that you test out the product take advantage of the trial period. During that time, be sure to compare services in terms of these core features: Saving emails to Email tracking templates inside the inbox A fully featured mobile app + Google/Outlook Calendar sync + Google/Outlook Contacts sync Automatic surfacing of contextual information Integration with other apps Support for custom objects and fields Support for dependent picklists and related lists
These are the ten areas where you are likely to find the most variability from service to service. Beyond these functional comparisons, explore the following areas in more depth to ensure an integration provider is best suited for your organization today and well into the future. Evaluating the marketplace 1. Can you save emails to? a. Making sure that you have a complete record of all the communication between your organization and your clients is critical. Despite this, some /Inbox integrations rely only on s native BCC to feature. This means you can t save emails against opportunities, accounts, and more. It s definitely a best practice to have full connection as a main feature of an app. 2. Does it offer email tracking? a. Can you see the who, where, and when of your outbound emails? Some providers offer this feature so that you can see who is opening your emails wherever and whenever they do it. This is especially useful if it s combinable with using email templates so you can have hard data about which email techniques are the most effective for your organization. 3. Does it have a mobile app? a. Salespeople use their phone to check email around 40x a day, on average! That s a crazy number, but it s true. Hence, a fully functioning mobile email app that allows you to have deep integration with your mobile inbox will ensure that your employees will never miss an option to add data to. Be sure to look hard at each company s mobile option and see which ones actually have DEEP integration. 4. Does it allow for templates inside your inbox? a. This is why the leading + Inbox companies emphasize productivity over adoption. At it s heart, the best productivity will drive adoption. Having email templates that automatically pull relevant information into an email is critical for saving tons of time. If the company offers email tracking, too, then you can see exactly which messages are having the most effectiveness. This will help you make the very best templates for your organization. 5. Does it offer calendar sync? a. Both Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar are two of the most user friendly calendar programs around. But allows for more data management and for a better record of what your employees do. The best Inbox + integrations out there offer this as part of their integration package. That way, users can access their calendars in a simpler and better interface no matter where they are. Assessing the provider 1. Does the provider specialize in serving the needs of business?
a. The needs of individual users and small companies can vary considerably from those of the enterprise. Is the service designed for individuals and small businesses? Does it focus exclusively on the needs of medium to large organizations? Is it a generalist that serves all types of users? Obviously, the best choice is a service that specializes in your organization s specific needs. Make sure that the service you select focuses on organizations of your size. They should be able to offer use cases, customer success stories, and examples of how they ll help you increase your productivity. 2. Do they have a track record of providing secure service? a. In the age of cloud based systems and customers being ever more aware of privacy and security issues, it s vital to use companies that have a history of delivering 100% secure services. Make sure to look at what customers they have and whether they re listed on the AppExchange. All companies listed on the AppExchange have to go through an intensive and notoriously difficult security review before they re allowed to list their product. 3. Does this provider offer any other cloud based services? a. Try and get a sense at how well the company knows the cloud industry concerning, Google and Microsoft. See how many deep integrations they offer. See if they have a fully featured mobile app. Check their expertise by comparing the information they give out about, Google or Microsoft, and business in general to see if they make sense and give a good overview of the industry. 4. What is the provider s development plan for the platform? a. How often does the provider come out with new services? Are they resting on what they ve done or are they working hard to make their product better? See what they ve come out with recently and ask them what they have planned. A good provider will view their service as both a service and a platform. They should have integrations with other apps and constantly striving to make their product better. With a SaaS model, this means that you ll continually be at the forefront of the marketplace. How future proof is the + Inbox integration? The inbox will never go away. Email is the single most important communication method for businesses, and it ll stay that way for the long term future. However, the location of the inbox may change. More and more, salespeople are turning to smartphones and tablets to get their work done. As such, it s never been more important to have a + Inbox integration that has a fully featured and supported mobile app. This will ensure that your employees get the best service even as they transition to being more mobile than ever before. And it s likely that they will. The stats are pretty staggering. Consider that: Worldwide mobile email users are expected to double from 897 million to 1.7 billion by 2017. 94% of Fortune 500 companies are testing or deploying ipads for enterprise use. 70% of emails are first read on mobile devices. Mobile CRM increases average sales rates by 20%
Summary Cloud based business software is going to increasingly become integrated into the day to day operations of many organizations over the next several years. is the current leader in enterprise customer relationship management software and is projected to take over more and more of the market share with each passing year. Despite this dominance, still suffers from the same problem endemic with all CRM solutions: a lack of user adoption. The number one reason for poor CRM adoption is that employees rightly recognize that it reduces their productivity. Learning a cumbersome system and entering data inefficiently numerous times a day can add up to a lot of wasted employee time. Hence, more and more companies are pursuing ways to improve adoption by improving the efficiency with which works. The most effective ways companies can do this is by integrating in their email client, for two big reasons. Simply put, the first reason is that sales, support, and marketing employees live in the inbox. It s where they communicate with customers, so their CRM ought to be right there. For two, all this time spent in the inbox means that employees of all technical skill levels become familiar with both the user interface and the general order of the inbox. As such, their CRM should be right there for practical purposes, too it s less threatening. More than anything else, + email integration has been proven to be the best solution for issues with productivity. Other solutions are either cost prohibitive, focused on adoption rather than productivity, or infeasible. Ultimately, the best + email integration for an organization will be the one that best suits its needs today and can develop in line with its future requirements. This document has outlined several of the variables that can distinguish one provider from the other. These differences are summarized in a discussion and included in an assessment worksheet. Using these tools can save time and will increase the likelihood of selecting the service best suited for your particular organization s needs. About Cirrus Insight Cirrus Insight is the #1 app for integrating with Gmail and Google Apps, Outlook, or Office 365. Users can create and manage leads, contacts, tasks, cases and opportunities right from where the inbox where they work. With Cirrus Insight, users can streamline workflow, boost productivity and sell smarter. Launched in 2011, Cirrus Insight is based in Laguna Hills, CA. For more information, visit www.cirrusinsight.com. For information on our ios app, visit https://www.cirrusinsight.com/mobile/. And for information on our + Google Drive integration, visit www.cirrusfiles.net.
Evaluation Worksheet Look, we feel your pain. Using and getting folks to use is a big challenge. Lack of adoption is the #1 reason why a CRM implementation fails. That s not good, because CRMs are vital to a company s growth. At Cirrus Insight, our solution to CRM productivity and adoption is simple: put in the inbox. Rather than force sales and support reps to use Bcc to and to copy/paste contact information into, we give your users the ability to log emails, save contacts, and more right from their inbox. We also provide email tracking, calendar sync, tasks integration, opportunity and case management. Plus, our mobile app enables users to take the benefits of Cirrus Insight on the go. You can use Cirrus Insight in Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, iphone, ipad, and Android. Your license allows access anywhere, so even if you re an organization with a variety of email clients, Cirrus Insight works wherever you are. We believe we offer the most powerful integration of with your inbox. More than 1,000 reviewers agree, making us the second highest rated application of all time on the AppExchange. As you re shopping around, use this handy checklist to make sure you re getting the best solution.
Gmail Criteria Cirrus Insight Company A Company B Company C Saving emails to Automatically view contextual contact information from Email and Link Tracking Schedule Emails to Send Later Follow Up Notifications Templates in Gmail Has a fully featured mobile app for ios and Android Tasks Integration Automatically tracks usage with deep analytics Great for sales, support, and marketing users Automatic support for custom fields and custom objects
Two way Calendar Sync with Invitee Sync Contact Sync from to Google Contacts Supports record types, dependent picklists, custom fields, and validation rules Integrates with other AppExchange apps Quick/easy installation Account Management Dashboard Create and update leads/contacts inside Gmail Create and update records inside Gmail Works across multiple company domains Single sign on (SSO) support One to one screenshare support and knowledge base with video guides
Outlook 2010/2013/2016 Criteria Cirrus Insight Company A Company B Company C Saving emails to Email and Link Tracking Surface Contextual Information from Templates in Outlook Has a fully featured mobile app Automatically tracks usage with deep analytics Serves Support, Marketing, and Sales employees Automatic support for custom fields and custom objects Two way Calendar Sync with Office 365 Supports record types, dependent picklists, custom fields, and validation rules Integrates with other AppExchange apps
Quick/easy installation Account Management Dashboard Create and update leads/contacts inside Outlook Create and update records/cases inside Outlook Works across multiple company domains Single sign on (SSO) support One to one screenshare support with video guides Office 365 Criteria Cirrus Insight Company A Company B Company C Saving emails to Email and Link Tracking Surface Contextual Information from Templates in Outlook
Has a fully featured mobile app Automatically tracks usage with deep analytics Serves Support, Marketing, and Sales employees Automatic support for custom fields and custom objects Two way Calendar Sync Supports record types, dependent picklists, custom fields, and validation rules Integrates with other AppExchange apps Quick/easy installation Account Management Dashboard Create and update leads/contacts inside Outlook Create and update records/cases inside Outlook Works across multiple company domains Single sign on (SSO) support
One to one screenshare support and knowledge base with video guides iphone, ipad, Android Criteria Saving emails to Email Tracking Surface Contextual Information from Set Follow Up Tasks and Schedule Meetings Open records directly in 1 Has a fully featured mobile email client Automatically tracks usage with deep analytics Make and log calls from the mobile inbox Serves Support, Marketing, and Sales employees Cirrus Insight Mobile Company A Company B Company C
Automatic support for custom field and custom objects Two way Calendar Sync with Google Apps or Office 365 Contact Sync from to Google Contacts Supports record types, dependent picklists, custom fields, and validation rules Supports multiple email accounts Quick/easy installation Account Management Dashboard Create and update leads/contacts from email Create and update records from email Works across multiple company domains Single sign on (SSO) support One to one screenshare support with video guides
Cirrus Files Evaluation Worksheet Have a disorganized document management system? We understand the trouble. Cirrus Files is our app for two way sync of and Google Drive. We ve been using it internally for quite a while. We wanted all of our Google Drive documents and files to be accessible in the correct accounts, opportunities, and cases in. After looking at some of the options on the market, we decided that the best course of action was to build our own. With Cirrus Files, you can create and edit Google Drive documents from right inside. You can also upload files in and have them save right into Google Drive. Cirrus Files takes advantage of the best of both worlds: the collaboration and low cost storage of Google Drive, and the customer relationship management features of. We truly feel that we have the deepest and most powerful /Google Drive integration around, so we want to make sure that you understand all the features available on the market. As you re shopping around, use this handy checklist to make sure you re getting the best solution. Company A: Company B: Company C: Criteria Cirrus Files Company A Company B Company C Create and edit Google Drive documents from inside
Automatically populate new records with document templates Save attachments to records from Gmail Upload files to Google Drive from inside Upload files from your mobile device to Upload >3mb files to Make any file in Google Drive visible in Control viewing/editing permissions for different users View and edit existing Google Drive files in Link existing records to Google Drive Collaborate with customers and allow them to upload to via Google Drive Quick/easy installation One to one screenshare support with video guides