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As an investment salesperson, adding meetings to your calendar, Zoom, Salesforce, and other platforms can be tedious. Even though you know that it's also necessary so that you can follow-up effectively, it does make you feel more like a data entry person than a salesperson, especially if you're setting up a lot of meetings per day.
To eliminate the double entry of meetings, Salesforce allows its users to sync their Outlook Calendars with their Salesforce instance. This takes away some of the friction when it comes to entering meetings, and ensures that you're not missing any crucial meetings on either platform.
At Dakota, entering meetings and meeting notes in Salesforce is something that is part of our sales team's DNA, and we believe it's critical to enter accurate, reliable meeting information in order to do follow-up effectively.
We've been using Salesforce as our CRM to do just this since 2006, and have raised over $40 billion in that time.
In this article, we're sharing how you can sync your Outlook calendar with Salesforce to increase your team's efficiency and create a follow-up system. By the end of the article, you'll have a clear idea of how to get started.
First, we'll dive into why syncing between your calendar and Salesforce matters.
The Cost of Meeting Double-Entry
We all know that there are so many hours in the day, and if you're having your sales team spend their time entering meetings and meeting details across multiple platforms, chances are, they're missing out on doing much more productive activities.
Syncing meetings across platforms allows for three key things:
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Salespeople can stay focused on selling. Did you know that salespeople spend over half of their day doing activities that aren't selling? Things like data and meeting entry are some of the tasks that take them away from what they should be doing, which is setting and holding meetings.
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Eliminate errors and bad data. Having people enter meetings again and again only increases the likelihood of a date being entered incorrectly, a name getting spelled wrong, or someone being left off the invitation list. Syncing meetings removes the human error factor and is a core part of CRM data hygiene, ensuring nothing gets missed.
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Increased CRM adoption. We've said it time and again, but the number one reason your sales team doesn't want to use their CRM is because the data inside of it is bad, outdated, or incomplete. If they know that good, accurate data is getting put into the CRM, and even better, getting put in automatically, they're far more likely to fully adopt the CRM in the end.
Next we'll outline the steps to setting up the sync between your Outlook Calendar and Salesforce.
Before You Start
Einstein Activity Capture has to be enabled for your org and assigned to your profile before "Connected Accounts" will show up or work in your personal settings. This is an admin-level setup step done once for the whole team. If you search for Connected Accounts and don't see it, or the New Account button won't connect, check with your Salesforce admin first rather than assuming something is broken on your end.
To learn more about our CRM options, talk to one of our Integration specialists.
How to sync your Outlook Calendar with Salesforce
Once Einstein Activity Capture is enabled for your org, the sync between your inbox and your Salesforce instance is a one-time setup for each user, done through Einstein Activity Capture. Einstein Activity Capture handles both Outlook and Google Calendars the same way:
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From your personal settings, enter Connected Accounts in the Quick Find box, and then select Email and Calendar Accounts. If your admin connected an account for you, it will be listed under Connected Accounts. If it's not, try refreshing the page.
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Click New Account.
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Follow the steps to connect your account. Historical emails and events take some time to populate on related Salesforce records after you connect, but newly created meetings and Inbox features are available right away.
Keep The Rest of Your CRM As Accurate As Your Calendar
Syncing your calendar solves half the data problem. The other half is everything else in your CRM: account records, contact details, job changes, and the allocator data your team relies on to prioritize outreach.
The Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce App applies the same principle to the rest of your CRM. Instead of manually updating accounts and contacts, Dakota Marketplace syncs allocator data directly into Salesforce daily, with real-time job and role change alerts, 150+ custom data fields, and a fully configured setup with no manual implementation required. It works the same way your calendar sync does: connect it once, and the data stays current without anyone re-entering it by hand.
To see how Dakota Marketplace for Salesforce keeps the rest of your CRM as clean as your calendar, schedule a call today.
