Salesforce for Outlook is being sunsetted in 2027. But with functionality like the action menu already withdrawn, now is the time to easily transition to Affinity for Salesforce to unlock even more efficiency.
You might be evaluating other options that have features like Salesforce for Outlook, but Affinity for Salesforce does more than only boost productivity. It gives you a competitive advantage by cutting through the noise and uncovering insights that can be the difference between winning and losing deals.
In this blog, we’ll discuss five reasons why Salesforce Inbox users are moving beyond simple activity capture by transitioning to Affinity for Salesforce.
1. Time-saving automation to boost productivity
Like Salesforce for Outlook, Affinity for Salesforce offers email and calendar integration, automatically capturing contact, account, and activity data directly in Salesforce. This can save more than 200 hours of manual CRM work each year per user. With Affinity for Salesforce, sales and deal teams have more time to focus on research, selling, and closing deals instead of time-consuming administrative tasks.
2. Relationship insights that drive more high-quality opportunities
Affinity for Salesforce's AI-driven relationship insights help sellers establish strong connections with prospects. This relationship intelligence feature—not available in Salesforce for Outlook or Einstein Activity Capture—analyzes your entire company’s network of relationships, making it easy to identify which of your colleagues is the best person to make a warm introduction or provide context on a new opportunity.
Relationship strength scores are calculated based on the recency and frequency of interactions between your colleagues and your company’s expanded network of connections.
With warm introductions, you can quickly identify connections to decision-makers and expedite the sales process—deals that start with a warm intro close 25% faster!
3. Unlimited data storage for better long term decision-making
While alternatives like Einstein Activity Capture limit data storage to two years, Affinity for Salesforce retains your data indefinitely, so your team always has access to valuable historical context.
Additionally, because Affinity data isn’t streamed from a 3rd party location like Amazon Web Services, you can generate triggers, reports, and dashboards directly in Salesforce. For example, you can set up a trigger to alert a specific salesperson when a relationship score drops below a certain threshold, so you stay top-of-mind with your contacts. Or, you can create a dashboard showing the number of interactions your team has spent on an important deal.
4. Seamless access to Salesforce records and Affinity insights from your inbox and browser
Affinity for Salesforce allows users to access relationship, contact, activity, and deal insights from multiple tools that sellers use every day—such as their inbox and browser—without constantly switching to Salesforce. This seamless integration dramatically improves efficiency, letting sales teams focus on what truly matters—finding high-quality opportunities and closing deals.
You can view, update, and create contact, account, and opportunity records directly from your Outlook inbox or while browsing a prospect's LinkedIn or company website without ever opening Salesforce. These Affinity for Salesforce extensions give you complete visibility of your company’s network to quickly identify existing relationships. You can find out who to go to for a warm introduction to a key buyer you’re researching on LinkedIn, all without ever opening Salesforce.
5. Easy transition and user-friendly experience
Affinity for Salesforce's data automation and native integration with Salesforce ensures a smooth transition for Salesforce for Outlook customers. When you sync Salesforce with Affinity, your Salesforce records automatically update to include the historical engagement activity with every company and contact your organization has ever interacted with.
You’ll also gain access to biographic and firmographic data, and key relationship insights you’ve never had before, enabling you to move deals forward faster.
Moving beyond Salesforce for Outlook
For Salesforce for Outlook users, Affinity for Salesforce offers a compelling competitive advantage. With its advanced automation, valuable relationship intelligence, unlimited data storage, and user-friendly design, Affinity for Salesforce is the ideal upgrade for sales teams looking to improve efficiency, foster lucrative relationships, and close more deals.
Take a look at this 90-second video to see how Affinity for Salesforce can help your team close more deals.
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