Salesforce has launched Salesforce Inbox Calendar, a tool which the company said will bring CRM data on known prospects into the user’s mobile calendar. The tool will be available in October 2016 and supports email service providers Gmail and Outlook, according to the company.
Salesforce Inbox Calendar enables sales reps to map prospect data from their CRM to meeting invitations. The company said that the tool can integrate information such as Salesforce records, past communications and opportunity data associated with the meeting attendees. The solution also integrates with Salesforce1, enabling users to update their meeting information from a mobile device.
“Today’s sales reps live and breathe by their calendars, but their calendars simply aren’t designed to help them be productive,” said Stephen Ehikian, GM of the company’s SMB CRM subsidiary SalesforceIQ, in a statement. “Salesforce Inbox Calendar will supercharge sales reps’ productivity by intelligently mapping relevant Salesforce data to every meeting invite, allowing reps to spend time connecting with customers and closing deals.”
Sales enablement has recently been a prominent topic of discussion within the B2B company, which has prompted many technology vendors to enhance their offerings to meet buyer needs. Research from the Aberdeen Group shows that B2B sales teams that are supported by sales enablement tools see nearly three times more reps achieve quota.
However, sales acceleration is a common hurdle for B2B sales teams. Sales reps have to search as many as 15 data sources to find relevant information on a single customer or prospect, leading to reps spending up to 70% of their time on tasks other than selling, according to a CSO Insights study. Salesforce states that with the new tool, reps will be able to automatically sync updates to Leads and Contacts in Sales Cloud, saving them time while also improving database accuracy.
