Salesforce Embeds Calendaring in CRM Application

CRM Adoption and Gamification: Tips for Success

IT organizations may soon find themselves managing multiple email clients that have been optimized for specific job functions. As a pioneer of this concept, Salesforce has been making the case for email clients that are optimized for the tasks salespeople need to perform. This week, Salesforce took that concept a step further by adding calendaring capabilities.

Stephen Ehikian, general manager for SalesforceIQ products at Salesforce, says Salesforce Inbox Calendar reduces the amount of workflow friction between email and calendaring and Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) software. Most salespeople spend the majority of their days in these three applications so it makes sense to tightly integrate them as much as possible, says Ehikian.

From an IT perspective, Ehikian says, Salesforce Inbox Calendar and Salesforce Inbox are simply one more type of client software that an IT organization needs to support.

“From the perspective of the email server, they are just another client,” says Ehikian.

Of course, where things might get interesting is when every job function starts getting email and calendaring functionality embedded in the application they use most often. The nuances of supporting all of those email and calendaring client extensions could make an already difficult task just that much more complicated.

Naturally, there are productivity gains to be made in terms of smoothing out the daily workflow experience for end users. In the case of salespeople, for example, they pretty much live and die by the sales appointments they make. The question each organization will have to ask themselves is to what degree the extra effort and cost needed to accomplish that goal is actually worth it.

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