A step-by-step guide to integrating Salesforce with Outlook

A CRM like Salesforce is essential for sales representatives to do their job to the best of their abilities. If your team is already using Salesforce as part of your workflow, you’re well on your way to making your team as efficient as possible.

To get even more out of Salesforce—and your sales reps—you need an Outlook to Salesforce integration. Keep reading to find out how an Outlook to Salesforce integration can help your sales team get the most out of every customer interaction.

Why it’s important to integrate Outlook with Salesforce

In a recent survey by Affinity, 73% of Sales and Ops team members stated that their CRM is taking up too much of their team’s time, causing major productivity issues.* With an Outlook to Salesforce integration, teams can avoid manual data entry by automatically syncing contacts, events, and emails between the platforms. But saving valuable time isn’t the only advantage.

Here are just a few benefits of integrating Salesforce with Outlook:

• Get all of your Salesforce data where you already are—your inbox
• Keep customer data up-to-date in real time
• Save money and drive efficiency

When you integrate Outlook with Salesforce, you reduce the risk of introducing errors and the need for manual data entry, which improves data accuracy. Team members can access up-to-date, accurate customer data, allowing them to seamlessly manage their sales pipeline and create a personalized customer experience. 

Choosing a Salesforce to Outlook integration method

Before you jump headlong into integrating Salesforce and Outlook, it’s important to understand the different ways you can integrate the two platforms. Because they’re both common applications, there are a variety of options for integration. Each has its advantages and disadvantages depending on your company’s needs.

Let’s unpack the ins and outs of four Salesforce-to-Outlook integration methods. 

1. Affinity for Salesforce

Affinity for Salesforce provides all the benefits of integrating your Salesforce and Outlook data. However, it’s also the only solution that provides extensions, automation, data enrichment, and relationship intelligence in one application. 

Fifty-one percent of Sales and Ops team members say relationships are an important part of their sales process. Affinity automates the creation, updating, and augmentation of Salesforce records—including email and calendar data. This gives users a complete understanding of their company’s relationship network and the constantly evolving details of each relationship. 

With Affinity for Salesforce, your team can:

• View shared relationships and understand the strength of those relationships. A timeline of activities associated with an entity gives you the context you need to close more deals.
  

• Identify warm introduction paths by finding the right person on your team to contact company leaders and decision-makers.
  

• Automatically update and create Salesforce records through the Outlook integration.

• Increase Salesforce adoption and get more out of your CRM investment. Thirty-five percent of sales teams aren’t using their CRM because they don’t have enough time. With Affinity for Salesforce, you can automate Salesforce workflows, saving each user up to 226 hours per year. 

Affinity for Salesforce is the right solution if your team wants to go beyond logging emails and events, and to truly harness the power of relationships to close more deals.

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2. Einstein Activity Capture

Einstein Activity Capture (EAC) helps keep data syncing between Salesforce, your email, and calendar applications—like Outlook or Gmail—up-to-date by automatically creating entries in Salesforce. It looks at three types of data: emails, events, and contacts. You can choose which data types are synced with Salesforce to customize the application to your needs.

If seeing the complete lifecycle of a customer, it’s important to note that EAC has a data retention period of two years. Any activity logged 24 months ago will be deleted from the activity timeline. 

Einstein Activity Capture is the right solution for your company if you:

• Want a simple solution to connect Outlook to Salesforce 
• Only need 24 months of Salesforce data at any given time

3. Lightning Sync

Lightning Sync was a method that kept contacts and events in sync between your Microsoft or Google applications—like Outlook—and Salesforce. While this used to be the suggested integration method, as of Winter 2021, Lightning Sync has been retired in favor of Einstein Activity Capture. 

However, if your company subscribed to Salesforce before Winter 2021, Lightning Sync is still available. 

Salesforce Lightning Sync will no longer receive updates or feature enhancements, and Salesforce is recommending all Lightning Sync users transition to EAC. Additionally, Lightning Sync doesn’t sync recurring events, lacks support for some data types, and can be challenging to set up since Winter 2021.

Legacy Lightning Sync is the right solution for your company if you:

• Subscribed to Salesforce before Winter 2021
• Have already connected Lightning Sync in Salesforce

4. Salesforce for Outlook

Salesforce for Outlook is an application that allows Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook to share email messages, calendars, tasks, and contact data. Much like the other options, this integration enables Salesforce to be automatically updated based on the data found in your Outlook account. 

Salesforce for Outlook is a Salesforce-native application. The company announced it would no longer support the application as a part of its shift from supporting Internet Explorer to other browsers like Google Chrome. The full product retirement is scheduled for December 2027, so if you’re currently using Salesforce for Outlook, you’ll need to find a new Salesforce Outlook integration before then. 

How to connect Salesforce with Outlook

Now that you’ve been introduced to each integration method, we’ll walk you through the process for three options: Affinity for Salesforce, Einstein Activity Capture, and legacy Lightning Sync.

Connecting Affinity for Salesforce

Get the most out of Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook with Affinity’s automated data capture, CRM extension, and relationship intelligence. Follow these steps to set up the Affinity for Salesforce Outlook extension. 

Step 1

Sign in to an Outlook account that has access to your Affinity instance. From there, open any email, then click the ellipsis and select Get Add-ins to search for Affinity for Outlook. More information and screenshots can be found in this step-by-step guide. 

Step 2

Once you've downloaded the Affinity for Outlook Add-in, you can start taking Affinity-related actions directly in your inbox.

To access Salesforce data, open any email thread in Outlook, then click the Affinity for Outlook icon. The Affinity for Outlook sidebar will appear to the right of the email.

Step 3

Based on the participants in the email thread, you will see all related accounts and contacts. Click on any of the accounts or contacts to see more details and access opportunities, notes, connections, and activity timelines.

​​Additionally, you can update information on any record shown in the extension, and create new account, contact, or opportunity records without leaving your inbox.

Step 4

Now that you’ve connected Outlook to Affinity for Salesforce, learn how to close deals faster with access to Affinity’s relationship intelligence.

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Connecting Einstein Activity Capture

Follow these steps to complete the Outlook and Salesforce integration using Einstein Activity Capture. Once finished, all activities from the prior 24 months will be synced.

Step 1: In Salesforce, go to Setup. Next, navigate to Einstein Activity Capture. Save time by typing “Einstein Activity Capture” into Quick Find and selecting Settings.

‍Step 2: Select Microsoft Office 365 as your email and calendar service.

‍Step 3: Select your connection method—you must set up the connection at the organization level before setting up each user-level authentication. 

• If you choose the organization level, you’ll be prompted to log into your organization’s Office 365 account to accept Salesforce access to Microsoft Office Exchange 365. 
• You’ll be prompted to create and name the integration if you choose the user level. ‍

‍Step 4: Review your sync settings to ensure your emails, events, and contacts are synced between Salesforce and Outlook.

Step 5: Add users and profiles, and set activity sharing settings to “Share with Everyone” so that all Salesforce users within your organization can access the same customer data. 

Connecting Legacy Lightning Sync 

If you’re actively using Salesforce, Lighting Sync is a potential option to integrate your Outlook contacts and calendar with Salesforce.

Step 1: In Salesforce, go to Setup. Next, navigate to Desktop Integration and select Lightning Sync. Click on Install Now. 

‍Step 2: Save the installation file to your desktop when prompted. Once the file has been saved, open the file and begin installing Lightning.

‍Step 3: In Outlook, select the Lighting Sync icon and click Log in to Salesforce. Enter your Salesforce login credentials and grant Outlook access to your Salesforce account. 

‍Step 4: Next, you need to enable sync directions to ensure Outlook and Salesforce speak to each other. In the Lightning Sync sidecar, open Settings. Select sync directions for contacts and calendar events, then save all updates. 

‍Step 5: Finally, open Field Mappings in the sidebar. Ensure all Outlook fields correspond to the correct Salesforce fields—for example, first name, email, company, etc. 

Best practices for managing the Salesforce to Outlook integration

You can follow these best practices to maximize the value of integrating Outlook and Salesforce. These best practices will help your sales reps get the most out of the automation after the Salesforce-Outlook configuration.

1. Before you integrate, clean up your data to avoid duplicate, irrelevant, or obsolete data from syncing. This will keep your data clean and make the integration more effective.

2. Start with a smaller test group before rolling out the integration to the whole company. With Affinity for Salesforce, you can grant access to administrators only or choose a select group of users before giving company-wide access.
   

3. Invest in training for end users on proper usage of the system. If they understand how records sync between systems, they’ll be more likely to spot any potential issues. 

4. Keep your inboxes clear by disabling Salesforce email alerts to prevent duplicate emails and cluttered inboxes.
   

5. When mapping your fields across Salesforce and Outlook, be sure to double-check all entries to avoid duplicate data from being collected.
   

If you truly want to help your sales team succeed, you need a solution beyond most applications’ bi-directional automation to get the most out of your Salesforce and Outlook integration. The secret? Use your data to close more deals—that’s where Affinity for Salesforce and its relationship intelligence can help you find, manage, and close more deals efficiently.

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Integrating Salesforce with Outlook FAQs 

Why should Salesforce and Outlook be integrated?

There are many benefits to integrating Salesforce and Outlook for your company. Sales team productivity increases because sellers no longer need to switch between multiple platforms and they reduce time spent on manual data entry. 

The integration improves the accuracy of your Salesforce data because when you only enter data once, there’s less room for errors to be introduced. It also allows your team members to provide your customers with a more personalized experience—with Affinity for Salesforce’s relationship intelligence, you can access even more relationship insights to close more deals. 

What can you do with the Salesforce integration with Outlook?

Every integration method gives you different capabilities, but you can automatically share calendar, event, email, and contact data between Salesforce and Outlook when the two platforms are integrated. With Affinity for Salesforce, you also gain access to automatically generated relationship insights to give you more paths to warm introductions using a complete history of customer and prospect engagement. 

What’s the difference between Salesforce for Outlook and a Salesforce Outlook integration?

Salesforce Outlook integrations are applications that connect your Salesforce and Outlook accounts to share data like emails, contacts, events, and more. The difference between Salesforce for Outlook and a Salesforce Outlook integration is that Salesforce for Outlook will be retired by the end of 2027; get ahead by starting to think about a new solution.

* Data from Affinity’s 2024 survey of 250+ business leaders across investment banking, media and communications, real estate, professional services, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and enterprise technology.