Connecting Salesforce to your email inbox

Cirrus Insight Integration or Salesforce Integration – Which is right for you?

We get this question a lot. And the answer is: it depends, and here’s why.

Quite frankly, we used to always recommend Cirrus Insight because the Salesforce Integrations were a bit buggy and overall, just didn’t offer the greatest user experience. But…

Salesforce has been making significant improvements to its integrations for Gmail or Outlook, and it just keeps getting better. Also, it’s FREE. For many nonprofit organizations, we understand that’s the magic word that makes this decision easy. But there are still a few considerations to keep in mind.

The Salesforce integration features are really great and include things like: the ability to look up and interact with Salesforce records from a side panel right within your inbox.

Here you can open or create new records, send or log emails, take advantage of your existing Salesforce email templates, or create new ones right from within your inbox. And the tools that display in the side panel automatically adjust depending on the action you’re taking in your email.

All this can certainly help speed up your day-to-day workflow.

Did a major donor email you information about a gift commitment? Log the email and create a pledge opportunity right from your inbox.

Are you sending reminder emails for a small upcoming event, and want to repeat the basic content but also personalize it each time? Type it up once, save it as a template, then reuse it again and again right from your inbox.

Want to see a list of your day’s tasks and act on them right from your inbox? Yep, you can do that too.

But here’s when you might want to consider Cirrus Insight:

When you’re looking for more robust features, Salesforce offers “Inbox” for an additional fee, but in our experience, Cirrus Insight still remains the better choice – if you’re going to pay for a tool, Cirrus Insight is the more fully-featured and user-friendly option.

Use Cirrus Insight for all of the features already mentioned, plus take advantage of useful things like: calendar scheduling and booking tools, list sends, signature and business card scan and capture tools, social lookups, and more.

Cirrus Insight inbox integration connects Outlook and Gmail calendars, emails, and tasks to one or many instances of Salesforce, and their Pro plan – which offers that rich and robust feature-set just mentioned – is quite modestly priced.

Or use both. Pay for Cirrus Insight for those staff members that can really benefit from the robust functionality, and take advantage of Salesforce’s free email integration for your staff who are happy with a more simple integration. That’s what we do here at Percolator.

Either way, you’re going to get a great tool without a lot of impact on your budget. And in a time full of emails and task lists, having Salesforce integrated with your inbox is an easy win.

Learn how to get the Salesforce Gmail Integration here, and the Outlook Integration here.

Or learn more about Cirrus Insight’s pricing plans and schedule a demo here. Be sure to ask about their nonprofit discounts.

Want to know more? Let us know how we can help.