Do you find yourself constantly juggling between your inbox and Salesforce?
Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to view, create and update any type of Salesforce record directly from your inbox?
I recently sat down for a chat with Brandon Bruce, COO of Cirrus Insight to get Brandon's perspective on how Cirrus Insight can dramatically transform the way you work, by bridging the gap between your inbox and Salesforce.
Check out Cirrus Insight in Outlook:
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Show Notes:
- Get a FREE TRIAL of Cirrus Insight + 20% discount!
- Connect with Brandon Bruce on LinkedIn
- Follow Cirrus Insight on Twitter
David Giller: Brandon Bruce, welcome to the program. How are you today?
Brandon Bruce: It's
great to be here, David. Thanks for having me on.
David Giller: I love Cirrus Insight. Having been using Cirrus Insight for probably
almost as long as I've been using Salesforce. I love the tool. I love the efficiencies
it brings to me on a day to day basis. It feels very natural by bridging the
gap between my inbox and Salesforce. That's why I thought it would be awesome
to have you on the program to sort of share because sometimes people are sick
of hearing my own voice, to share along with you the insight and the experience
of what Cirrus Insight is all about with my audience. So in that regard, I'm
honored to have you on the program.
Brandon Bruce: I
appreciate the compliment and suffice it to say, we, meaning Cirrus Insight the
company, is really around because of early power users like you. So when we
started in December of 2011, it was the first application to connect Gmail to
Salesforce, the browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. When you and other
core folks in the Salesforce installed it and then were willing to jump on the
phone with me and kind of describe, "This is what workflow. We want to be
able to save emails against related records in Salesforce and we wan to be able
to see leads and contacts the Salesforce right inside our Gmail inbox, right
alongside the email that we're sending and receiving and here other additional
features, other bells and whistles that we want to see as you guys evolve the
product." That feedback was invaluable.
Honestly,
Ryan and I wouldn't have been able to build out the roadmap from scratch in the
way that our user base did for us by basically saying, "Hey, here's 500
things that we would like to see in Cirrus Insight, like to be able to do the
inbox in Salesforce," and that really set us on our path for at least the
next year, a year and a half after we launched and enabled us to build things
into the platform like Calendar Sync which we have been doing now for almost
five years to really keep your calendars in sync between Google Calendar and
Salesforce. It's really big platform developments like that where it was
extremely helpful to have you all on board.
David Giller: That's
fantastic. I can honestly say when not only for myself but as I'm working with
clients, helping them to utilize Salesforce, usually the first question that
comes up relates to the automatic behind the scenes, the pushing of emails that
they get in their inbox, pushing it into Salesforce so the synchronization of
emails, pushing of contacts both ways from there, whatever they're using,
whether it's Gmail or Outlook, pushing it from that system into Salesforce and
vice versa as well as Calendar. But at the same, bringing it to that next level
of, well, whether we like it or not, as much as you love Salesforce, perhaps
any other productivity tools, whether we like it or not, can't yet cut the
umbilical cord from the inbox.
So
most of us are spending a lot of time during the workday in our inbox and
bridging that, I think, bridging that gap between the inbox so that when you're
either crafting an outbound email or looking at an inbound email to also see,
to have that panel on the screen to see the corresponding Salesforce record for
the contact or the opportunity or to create the contact, the account, the
opportunity, the tasks, I think is something that I certainly as a user, I
never anticipated that, "Oh yeah, that would make even more sense than
just synchronizing data back and forth behind the scenes.
David Giller: So
I guess my question is what made you even think of that? Where did that come
about even?
Brandon Bruce: It
is funny because I agree with you as a user that once you start using it, it's
really hard to go back to the previous way. In fact, funny story, it wasn't
long after we launched, was funny in hindsight, it was funny at the time but
Amazon Web Services had a big outage years ago, right? Took down Netflix and
Instagram when those companies were still early, tens of thousands of other
really small tech companies like us. I started getting calls from our early
customers like, "Hey, the service is down." I said, "That's
terrible news and we're hustling and we're going to work with Amazon to get it
back up," et cetera.
But
I said, "Well, in the meantime, good news, Salesforce is still up. Gmail
is still up so you can still do your work just not with us bridging the gap and
some of them were like, "Yeah, well, we really adopted Cirrus Insight as
the new workflow so we can't really go back. We're considering it like a work
stoppage." So bad news, it became a very serious outage. But good news is
we learned that our product was really necessary. It wasn't the nice to have,
it was a must have for lots of sales teams, lots of customer facing teams.
That's what I found as a user. I mean, once you get accustomed to the workflow
and as an aside, we rhetorically asked in a lot of our demos, "Hey, it
sounds like your team, you're having trouble getting adoption of the inbox.
People aren't checking their emails."
Companies
will say, "Well, no." I mean, everyone has to check their email
obviously. I mean, you can't do a day of work without doing email so that's not
the problem. I would say, "Oh. So well, is it the CRM then? You're having
trouble getting people to use Salesforce, put information in reliably."
"Oh yeah, it's a huge headache, right? We can't get people to log in. When
they're logged in, they're not putting in the data right. They're not putting
as often as we'd like, et cetera." I said, "Oh, okay. Well, in that case,
let's just solve this by bringing the CRM into the inbox. We know everyone's
spending their whole day inside Gmail, inside Outlook, let's make CRM
Salesforce as easy to do, as easy to use as email list everyone's accustomed to
and we spend our day there. That was really kind of the early aha moment my
co-founder Ryan had when he started building Cirrus Insight is for those of us
in customer facing roles, in sales roles. We really live in the inbox because
that's where we're having customer communications.
Meanwhile,
Salesforce is a brilliant database. It's a management reporting tool. It's
where we can catalog information so that we have a record, historical record of
what's happening and we can also make some pipeline and forecasting predictions
but the key then is keep salespeople close to the customer, so let them stay in
their inbox, don't force them to go into Salesforce or any other system for
that matter and enable them to do the work easily from there. So as you
mentioned before, there's a lot of background processes. We can sync all your
email, sync your calendar events, make it really easy to add bits and context.
But what's nice to see is over the past several years, what Cirrus Insight has
done, what we've tried to do with the platform is make it really integral to
anybody's workflow.
So
if your workflow includes, well, every time I after I have a meeting and you'd
update that meeting to identify did the other parties attend, what was their
feedback, what type of meeting was it, what are the next actionable steps of
the meeting, et cetera, rather than having to go into Salesforce to enter that
information, we make it so you can do it from inside your Google Calendar or
inside your Gmail inbox by selecting the right check boxes and the right pick
list, everything from standard pick list or custom fields. We support custom
objects, record types, et cetera. So we really mirror the experience that
businesses and Salesforce admins had built out for their users but we make it
accessible, readily accessible from the inbox.
David Giller: Which
is why I personally love and can't live without it. I mean, seriously whether
getting an email from a person that I've never interacted with before and I can
immediately see on the right hand side on the Cirrus Insight panel from within
the inbox, I can see on the panel that, "Oh, this person does not exist in
Salesforce." Or in the flip side, speaking with someone who I have had
interactions with before, I don't have to open up another window to look in
Salesforce to find that contact, to find the related opportunities or cases or
activities, it's right there. It's right in front of me. It's right in my inbox
which I think is-
Brandon Bruce: Yeah,
that's interesting. It's a little, it's a microcosm of the old time industrial
revolution, like time and motion studies, right? So you're at a desk and then,
"Oh, I need to go and pull a file on somebody. So I got to stand up, walk
across the room, open up the file cabinet, pull the file and take it back to my
desk and call the customer." That's how it used to be. Today, it's similar
but instead of the file cabinet, everything's in the Cloud so all the data is
there but now you're in two separate tabs, your email in one tab, Salesforce in
the other tab. When I get an email from you and it says David Giller and I'm
saying, "Well, okay. I know David but what's our history? Do I even have
open opportunities? Are collaborating on anything? Are we trying to solve a
case together?" I'm not sure.
I
guess I need to go open up a new tab. Search for him in Salesforce, find the
right search result, drill into the record and look through it. Or with Cirrus
Insight, I just stay in the inbox, immediately I receive your email and it
says, "Oh, David and I are working through two opportunities. But we also
have one outstanding and the last time I talked to David, it was on a
podcast," right, on a Tuesday. There it all is. So I didn't waste any time
proverbially walking across the room to pull the file, instead, I just stay
where I was. So from the time and motion perspective, it saves a lot of time
and it naturally, I'm thinking and listeners maybe thinking, "Well,
they're both tabs. I mean, how long can it possibly take?" The answer is
you'd be surprised.
To
run a search, to mentally kind of dedupe it, look through which record is the
right one to open, et cetera and then to go back into Gmail and craft your
response. Each one of those actions takes time. You're talking we got 60 to 90
seconds let's say to run that process, it's probably a little bit longer, but
to estimate. But if you're in sales and it's not infrequent that I'll get 100
to 200 actionable emails a day, then it really adds up then you're talking
about an hour and that makes a huge difference, right, spending an hour of additional
time talking with customers, actually trying to build a relationship versus
going back and forth and doing manual data entry, huge difference over the
course of a week, month, year.
David Giller: I
couldn't agree more. In fact, I think the value is exponentially higher as soon
as we start to consider all of the data points that colleagues within the
organization might have contributed associated to the particular record you're
looking at. So if I'm receiving an email or I'm sending an email to a client
who's whether they are really excited or really upset and to be able to see
that, "Oh, this person actually has a couple of open cases that are
sitting and collecting dusts for a while," or, "Oh, marketing just
invited this person to a really important, a VIP event that's coming up."
To be able to see all of those other records that not only I put in but my
colleagues within the organization contributed to that record, it makes it even
more enriched in terms of the data that I'm going to find with the fewest
clicks and to the scenario that you just described, Brandon, by going into
Salesforce and looking at all of these records.
It's
like, "Wait a minute, now it's taking me exponentially longer to drill
into the five open cases and three open campaigns that this person is also
related to." So I think the value is even more, is even higher as others
within the organization are enriching the data as well.
Brandon Bruce: It's
true. it's a mirror of Salesforce itself, or maybe even better it's a window in
the Salesforce. Salesforce has always, any CRM platform, is always more
valuable when your colleagues, your partners, third party vendors even that
you're sharing your order with have input information that's actionable. So
before starting Cirrus, I worked in fund raising and it was always a oh, oh
moment if we were preparing to go ask a significant donor, lets say to sponsor
a scholarship or a classroom and then come to find out that a couple of weeks
ago, someone already asked them to sponsor a [brick 00:14:48] and that was so
disappointing that they hadn't seen that we were preparing this big ask and
instead had really let the donor off the hook by the small ask, "Hey, we
do $1,000 brick, we're paving this walkway," versus, "Hey, will you do
a $50,000 endowed scholarship?"
Very
different ask and it would have nice for the different parts of the campus to
be on the same page but how do you do that when the different parts of campus
are half mile apart. They've got their own budgets, et cetera. Well, you've got
to get all the information in a central place. Then even better, even when it's
in that central place, it still relies on peole going to that place and
checking it. That's good. But even better is instead of having to go check it,
as soon as I'm crafting the email to the donor, let's say I was the one asking
for the brick, "Dear donor. I'm writing to ask about a brick. Wait a
second, do we have an open opportunity for $50,000 with this donor? I better
wait before I send this email. I better call my colleague and find out what
they have planned because if the donor gives $1,000, they might consider that
to be their gift for the year and walk away and so we got a problem.
So
100% agree with what you're saying. It's when we all agree, when we all enter
in kind of a social contract like, "Hey, I'm going to put the important
stuff in the Salesforce so we can all see it." Then it's when we surface
that, right, when we're having conversations whether by email or a scheduled
meeting in the calendar or a phone call, that we can see that information and
say, "Oh, before I send this big proposal, why don't I go ahead and try to
close those three open cases?" ..It's really low while these are sitting there waiting to be resolved. Or,
"Before I pick up the phone to call this customer, it looks like someone
else on my team called them three hours ago. I should go find out if they
connected, what that call was all about. So it's nice to have that transparency
inside the organization. Because typically, transparency leads to increased
accountability because everyone's on the same page. You know you have the same
information I have so we can be accountable to each other.
David Giller: Absolutely.
Yeah, those are some great examples in terms of ... It's also showing how the
data and functionality goes hand in hand with adoption and accountability which
is I think a resonating theme with every organization that uses Salesforce.
Brandon Bruce: Absolutely.
I think there's no question what we've seen is Salesforce continue to add more
functionality and features in this direction which has been great for us to see
as customers and also as partners. So what we've done now over the past couple
of years is to continue to differentiate ourselves and our product offering and
continue to try to offer the best possible service to our customers and as we
on board new customers, we're readily able to explain, "Hey, this is
Cirrus Insight fits, alongside all of the other applications that are available
inside the Salesforce ecosystem. This is how we work with those." This is
how we become integral into your workflow whether you're a support team,
customer success team, sales team, anything customer facing, we can add value.
We typically don't sell to purely internal users, although occasionally we do.
But if you're customer facing, this is where we can be useful because we're
plugging into where you spend a good portion of your day, inside the Calendar
and the inbox.
David Giller: So
let's talk a little bit more about the differences between Cirrus Insight and
Salesforce inbox or Lightning for Gmail.
Brandon Bruce: Yeah,
absolutely. So over the last, we'll call it especially a year and a half, two
years, Salesforce has introduced a couple features or products. So on the one
hand, you got like Salesforce for Gmail, Lightning for Gmail it's now called,
Lightning for Outlook, used to be called Salesforce for Outlook, those could be
considered more features. You can use them as part of your Salesforce subscription.
Those will tend to have basic integration with Salesforce, like you want to
save an email against a meet or contact, you can definitely do that, you want
to see an instant look up of meet or contact inside your inbox, it will
definitely do that too. Those are all the core things that we launched with
Cirrus Insight six years ago as well.
But
when you start to get into kind of the, we'll call them the power tools for the
inbox, I want to track emails so I can see when my recipients open them. I want
to use Salesforce email templates with merge tabs and be able to send out
quality, personalized emails based on that approved marketing content. I want
to schedule out a drip campaign of multiple emails over time that are all
personalized. I want to be able to quickly schedule meetings with customers by
embedding my calendar availability into my email so they simply click a time
and it books the meeting. Those are all the things that Cirrus Insight has in
the core platform. Those are not things that a Lightning for Gmail or a
Lightning for Outlook has. Those are kind of the obvious differentiators.
Then
we have like a whole separate product at Salesforce inbox. So Salesforce
largely obtained the foundation for that with the Relate IQ acquisition and so
Salesforce inbox which was previously called Relate IQ and then was Relate IQ
for Salesforce inbox. It went through a couple of different names. Now
Salesforce inbox. So it has some of the Salesforce integration, right? Save an
email with Salesforce, update records in Salesforce, do the look ups from the
inbox. It also adds some of the productivity features. So email tracking, you
really see when people open your emails, et cetera. But lacks some of the kind
of bigger platform type features that we've added to Cirrus Insight.
So
for example, the ability to schedule out drip campaigns which can include
emails, can include scripts for making phone calls as well as action items,
like for step three of a given drip campaign, I need to update this particular
custom object from Salesforce, that's something that we do. Some really tight
integration with Process Builder which is pretty slick. Then additionally, on
the platform side and we recently added this through acquisition of our own,
the company called Attach.io, is the ability to track attachments. Super
excited about this because for years, all of us have just been dragging these
bulky PowerPoint slide decks PDF proposals and contracts, Word Documents, in
the email and we send them and we have no idea what happens to that attachment.
It could be blocked by spam filters or it could exceed the file size that a
company or an individual is going to accept or they could just fail to see that
there's an attachment on that email, they just miss it and we really don't know.
We really what happens to our attachments once we send them.
Plus,
we have no ability to edit the attachment, hence going back and forth with a
Word Doc like 20 times, version five, version six, version seven. It's hard to
keep track of all that stuff. So what Attach does, Attach.io which we bought
and now integrating into Cirrus Insight does is you take all those marketing
approved, sales approved collateral, put them all on this Cloud repository
inside of Attach and each of those slide decks and documents and PDFs now get
their own individualized links that you can put into emails, you can put in
your email signature, you can put in social posts on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Facebook, et cetera. You can put on blogs. That way, when you send out that
link to a customer and say, "Hey, why don't you check out this slide deck.
I think it speaks to your use case." When they click on that, you get
instantly alerted, "Hey, Brandon just viewed your slide deck and in fact
he's viewing it now."
So
you can go and actually watch someone view your sales collateral in real time
which is really helpful because you spent all this time and energy or marketing
has putting together this slide deck or proposal, then you can actually watch
someone look through it and it's a 10-slide deck and then everyone leaves after
slide six, like, "What the heck is going on? They're never getting to the
money part right at the end. So it's not really working." So you get kind
of this instant feedback of that works and what doesn't and you can also see
which customers are engaged versus not engaged. If they go back and open the
proposal a dozen times in the first 48 hours, yeah, they're seriously thinking
about it. You should probably pick up the phone and call them or certainly at
least follow up by email and see, "Hey, maybe we can get this deal
done."
By
contrast, if they open it up once, go through a third of it, close it and
leave, that's not a strong of a signal, obviously. If they circulate around the
office in five or 10 different people then share their name and email in order
to view the file, now you're really cooking, right? They've shared it with
everybody on the team. They're trying to get buy-in and you can use that to
your advantage in trying to close the sale or advance the relationship. So
we're very bullish on attachment tracking.
The
other thing and I use this feature myself all the time so I love to talk about
it is the scheduling. So we enable our users to choose time from their
calendar, insert them dynamically into an email, send the email and then the
recipient can just choose a time that's convenient for them. I remember the
first time I received an email like this, the person was using a product called
Assistant.to, and I thought, "Man, that was awesome." Like I scheduled
a meeting with a person. I wanted to meet with them. They didn't even have to
reply and I certainly didn't have to go back and forth 20 times trying to
decide what times should we meet, what day should we meet, what times are you
in, oh, that time just got booked up, maybe we can try for a different time. So
none of us got fatigue in the conversation, none of us kind of gave up on it.
Instead, I just chose the time that I liked and then I got booked
automatically.
So
we have that feature and then we've taken it to the next step by saying,
"Well, not only that but you can also just put a page, your own
personalized web embedded your free, busy, available and you can share that
page out with customers and prospects and vendors, et cetera, as you choose and
that way it makes it really easy for folks that want to schedule a demo with
you, schedule time to meet up in person, what have you, just by going directly
to your calendar and choosing that time that works for them and then you get
the invitation and it's seamless. So that's how we schedule across our sales
the vast majority of our meeting with customers.
Then
we also create customized pages whenever we go to a conference or a trade show.
We'll create a custom calendar that shows this is where we're going to be, this
is when we're available to meet, this is how long we like to meet for the trade
show, just quick 15-minute demo meetings et cetera, that way it helps us book
up our calendars whenever we travel, we can maximize the time and also
customers can maximize their scheduling by working around keynotes, et cetera.
So those are kind of some of the big things that we feel like today
differentiates Cirrus Insight.
Plus
of course, and we've had this for years, our support for other apps that are
virtual course applications, other apps that are developed for the app
exchange. So for example, you take chatter, the ability to see a chatter feed,
update a chatter feed from the inbox. We have that as well. So there's a lot of
really deep, deep Salesforce integration into the record types, checklists,
custom object stuff that's always differentiated Cirrus Insight. Then we add to
that drip campaigns which we call flight plans, attachment tracking, enterprise
scheduling and that's where we feel like our platform really gets powerful for
our customers.
David Giller: Yeah,
the differences are pretty stark and I have to tell you, just from my own
utilization of Cirrus Insight, I personally, I'm a Gmail person. I've cut the
umbilical cord with Outlook quite a few years ago so I'm using Gmail everyday.
For me, to be able to use the Cirrus Insight features streamlines and
simplifies my day tremendously. I see this through and just to use some
examples of the some of the things that you've about how I use every single day
for creating records. It's not only creating of leads or contacts, sometimes I
might have, it could be even a relative or a long time friend who's emailing me
and through the course of the email, I realize it's time to create an
opportunity and I don't have to leave the inbox to create that Salesforce
opportunity record.
Then
I can even more seamlessly use, I'm personally using Conga to create, Conga
Composer to create the actual proposal template that I'm sending the client and
then once again using Cirrus back in my inbox, I'm using Cirrus in order to
leverage the email template, the cover letter of an email that's going to the
person and at the same time using the calendar features, let's set up our next
call and it completely blows them away, first of all in terms of how quickly I
was able to turn it around and I told them straight out I'm a firm believer in
transparency, "Hey, it's not that I'm the Energizer bunny or I'm super
caffeinated, it's just I happen to be using the right tools and I'm doing it
with very few clicks. This is really not a big deal."
Brandon Bruce: Yeah.
I think that's a key, it's a key point because I think frequently we stop at
saying, "Well hey, we can save activities in the Salesforce and we can
create leads and contacts, right?" These really building block bread and
butter parts of what it means to do customer relationship management. But that
really is just the foundation, like it's really interesting to your point is
really getting embedded into the workflow. What is it exactly across the entire
lifecycle of a relationship with a customer that I do and that includes things
like you're mentioning, how do I generate a document using this third party
application with Salesforce and then send it to the customer and then when I get
that reply, what do I do with the reply, what if they send back a red line, do
I save that deadline document into the record, do I relate it to the
opportunity, do I then chatter on the opportunity to the DL team to share with
them that this bio has hit the record.
When
you really start to document that time and motion not just for, "Hey, we
added another lead with the CRM," but more, "Hey, I just moved this
prospect into stage four of the opportunity pipeline and then the following
things happen and they're automatically added to this drip campaign and we're
tracking attachments and we're automatically scheduling meetings." Then
things get really interesting. Then you can start finding those second and
third order efficiencies beyond just doing basic prospecting which is hard
enough for all of us that have done it for many years but getting into the full
workflow of what it means to maintain and build and grow a customer
relationship. Yeah, we love that stuff, that's why we built the app.
David Giller: Yeah.
I can also tell you that there are so many examples where it's far more than
what I'll describe, like the use case that I shared a moment ago is I'll refer
to it as a one to one relationship, one person, one opportunity, one proposal,
rather simple and straight forward, even though the ... While at the same the
same time the efficiencies are monumental, they're tremendous. But I think
we've all been in scenarios where we receive an email and in that one email, it
could be a bulleted list. Let's say it's a bulleted list, me being in a
Salesforce consulting business, I could easily be receiving an email from a
client that has a bulleted list of here are all of the things that I need you
to do, I need your help with as it relates to our Salesforce configuration.
What I want to do, it's more than just pushing that one email into Salesforce,
that's easy. But what if each item on that bulleted list is truly its own
separate case or a task?
So
from within the inbox, I can simply cut and paste each bulleted item, turn it
into its own unique case, give it the appropriate categorization, assign it to
the appropriate team member, give it the appropriate status because maybe I
started working on some on them. So I could easily be creative five, 12,
whatever cases, directly again from the inbox and even assigning it to other
internal team members for additional follow up which goes far, even far beyond
that one to one relationship scenario that I described earlier and at the same
time all of those cases are natively in Salesforce. They're tied directly back
to the appropriate account, the appropriate contact person, the appropriate
customer. They're as I mentioned earlier, assigned to the appropriate team
member for follow up.
Brandon Bruce: In
a lot of ways, doing CRM kind of reminds me of it's like surfing the web,
right, or arriving at the home page of YouTube and you're like ... You end up
adventuring around.
David Giller: Right.
Brandon Bruce: It's
not because you're wasting time, maybe we are on YouTube once in a while but
it's because these emails aren't straight ahead necessarily. They're not
sending us in one particular direction. In fact, that's what sales is all
about, creating these connections between things that look disconnected. So to
your point, this maybe a prospect that we can work on in 10 different ways,
across 10 different accounts with hundreds of opportunities in the future,
let's say they're an architect. They're not just going to do this one building.
So then how do deal with that? How do we make those connections in our CRM so
we can track the relationship going forward, where should we put the emails,
where should we put the activities and can you drill in kind of like you surf
the web, can you drill into all those different related records, all those
different accounts, see the different activities and so for?
The
answer certainly rhetorically with Cirrus Insight is you can, just like you can
in Salesforce with the benefit that you don't have to go into Salesforce to do
it. You can drill through those different levels. Now, you can I think go
pretty much infinitely deep in Cirrus Insight, you just keep drilling down,
down, down till you find the record you need and then you can pop back up again
and create the relationship that you wanted. So yeah, it's interesting how much
that's evolved from the early days when we launched, where we had pretty basic
functionality with the core objects of Salesforce, leads, contacts, accounts,
activities, opportunities, cases.
Now
we have customers like, "Well, we see all that but what we really need is
for you guys to support these three custom objects which we've written to
really handle our business." We say, "That's great. Cirrus Insight
automatically mirrors the configuration that you've created in Salesforce. All
that custom work that you do is fully supported out of the box, and yes, all
your profile and permission sets will work just like you've created them in
Salesforce so people and see and do what they're allowed to do in Salesforce,
not more not less." Folks are like, "Well, this is great because we
wrote that object or we created this junction because we want it to work this
way." So we're in the nice position to be able to say, "You know your
business better than anyone else possibly could, so whatever you've written to
make it work well, we want to support that for your users in the context of
where they spend a lot of time in the inbox."
David Giller: Yeah.
Absolutely. I have to tell you the one feature out of ... There's a lot of
features that I love about Cirrus Insight but the one feature that for me
brings it just completely over the top that I love is seeing the live real time
open and click metrics. So for those who are not familiar with it, most people
will automatic ... When they hear the terms that I just used, the open click
metrics, they automatically assume that it's the equivalent of getting a read
receipt in Outlook. It is way more than that. So what I'm talking about is and
I'm going to put it within the context of a realistic use case that I
experience all the time, whether I send someone an email, maybe it's a client
that has been completely dormant, I have not spoken with in quite a few years
or I sent someone an email many months ago about some new features that
Salesforce recently came out with or recommendation that I gave them or a
proposal that I send someone and I have not heard anything from them in a
while.
All
of a sudden, out of the blue, I get a notification on my screen that that
person opened up that email just now or even gets more interesting and I start
chuckling is they open a sequence of several emails that I've sent them over
the period of time that they're suddenly opening all of these emails within the
course of two to three minutes and I can also see exactly which URL they are
clicking on on that moment. So I am bracing myself, I have to hold back from
picking up the phone and calling them, "Hey, what's going on
exactly?" I am bracing myself waiting for either a fresh email to hit my inbox
from them or I'm waiting for my phone to ring. I don't need to look at caller
ID. I know exactly who's going to be calling me within the next couple of
minutes. I love this feature.
Brandon Bruce: Yeah.
It is somewhat addictive, right? Because you get a little dopamine hit just
like Facebook messenger alert, "Hey my friend just sent me a message. I
better check it." But what's useful here is that with sales, you're making
money. So perhaps it's even a bigger dopamine hit. That proposal email that you
sent in fact got opened and in fact they're opening it many times today.
David Giller: Right.
Brandon Bruce: This
is exciting and the same is true on me link tracking like, "Oh, they're
clicking all the links I sent them to all our different web pages and they're
really checking out our site, they want to learn more or they want to know what
I sent them and then oh they just opened the proposal and I'm tracking
that." So all those different engagement metrics, the email open alerts,
the link click alerts, the attachment open alerts, how they're viewing the
attachment, et cetera, all play into this overall kind of sales and [inaudible
00:36:42] game where you start to get a vibe of is this heading the right
direction, are we going to advance to the next stage of the relationship.
Versus,
"Yeah, I keep emailing this person and they never open the email."
It's not engaging. Which maybe an indicator of lack of interest but it may also
be because maybe your email, they're hitting their filter, maybe they're getting
filtered out for some reason. So it's letting you know that this means of
communication, email, may not be working with this customer. It maybe time to
pick up the phone or if you're local, it maybe time to go visit the office and
do a personal stop by. So it at least lets you know where you stand at or it
gives you indicators on where you might stand in a particular deal so that you
can figure out what should I do next. To your point, should I in fact call?
Sometimes that is the right thing and it's the right thing to do right away.
As
soon as they open the proposal, you can call and just say, "Hey, I just
want to follow up. I sent a proposal. Did you receive it?" Then they'll
say, "What a coincidence. I'm looking at it right now." "Well,
it's not a coincidence. I knew you're looking at it." But for all intents
and purposes. "Oh, well that's great. Well, I'll tell you what, while you
have it open, I'll just hold here. Have a quick read. Let me know if you have
any questions. Maybe we can just knock it out now, save each other some
time." That's thoughtful, tracking them whether they've opened or not,
maybe somewhat spooky, helping to get the deal done faster for the sake of the
customer and for you, that's thoughtful so there's a happy medium there that allows
us to kind of streamline and simplify the back and forth communications that
today it requires to get anything done. This gives a way, a path forward to
getting things done hopefully a bit faster.
David Giller: Yeah.
Absolutely. Can you share with my listeners a little bit about aside from the
live notifications, the historical view of tracking metrics. So let's say I
have one particular email that I sent to a bunch of people or the historical
metrics as it relates to this one person and what is this person's tendency to
open emails that I send them. Can you give us a little bit of, share the
features and the benefits of what Cirrus Insight gives as it relates to looking
at those types of metrics?
Brandon Bruce: Yeah,
it's nice. I mean, in our day of analytics and metrics, sales intelligence, it
is useful to be able to see not just real time alerts, as it's happening right
now, but let's look back over the last month let's say, which of the templates
that I used to personalize my emails last month worked the best based on open
rate, right? Was the subject interesting? Did it get people to open it? And or
based on engagement. So was there a link in the email? Did people click it?
Were they interested in that call to action and that slide deck that I offered
to show them and the web page that I was trying to get them to go to to read
more about our offering or some special offer?
So
being able to see which templates performed the best for example helps me to
say, "Look, I am going to start leveraging this template more and this one
that nobody opens, it's time to phase that one out, regardless of what anybody
else on the team might say or what marketing is saying, 'This is our great
language.' 'Well, the results are indicating that maybe it's not in a sales
context. Maybe it works really well for once a month marketing emails. Maybe
it's not right for a one to one message. It doesn't have that level of
personalization."
So
that sort of historical data on the template side can be really useful and on
the one to one communication side, yeah, I can look and see, okay, of all of my
interactions with David, the relationship seem to be escalating. Are we getting
closer to a sale or perhaps not? So maybe early, yeah, we were ... He was
really opening all the emails that I was sending, really engaging and opening
them a lot and in fact clicking on all the links. But now, things seem to have
cooled down a bit. I'm sending him all these great information, these case
studies and so forth but something's going sideways here. The engagement is way
down. What does this indicate? Maybe he's on vacation. That could be one
answer. But maybe it also indicates you're shopping around or maybe it means
the deal is dead. So it sends me in the right direction to find more information
to help corroborate whether in fact I'm making progress or not.
So
having all that data in there is useful in each individual deal. It's also
useful for just prioritizing our time. So a sales person might be working 100
bids or 100 existing customers for an add-on or expansion opportunities. But
which of those 100 customers that you're going to spend the most time with?
They can't possibly establish a high level of relationship with all of them
simultaneously. They're going to right out of time. So based on those
engagement metrics that you referenced, okay, this one looks particularly
interested. I'm going to spend the most amount of time with them and then in
descending order, as people get less and less interested, I'm still going to
keep in touch, I'm still going to try to nurture those relationship with
various touch points whether those are emails or phone calls or in-person
business, et cetera.
But
I'm really going to focus my effort on the folks that are engaging today and
that's going to comprise the highest probability in my forecast for the next
month. That's where things get interesting. It goes from engagement to sort of
how do we connect that with revenue, with outcomes and so we built in for
example to our drip campaign engagement metrics is this concept of an outcome.
You're doing all these work but what is exactly what you're trying to get to
and if it's a trial start of your software then define that as the outcome and
give it a dollar value. Back into that number by looking at your conversion
rates and say, "Well, the trial start is worth $5 for this company and so
therefore if in my efforts I'm successful in getting a trial start, I will
attribute $5 to that effort."
Then
you can you can go back and say, "Okay, this particular drip campaign,"
or as we call them internally a flight, because we call drip campaigns flight
plans, "this flight had this sort of payback. We got this ROI. We built
this flight and it took us two hours to custom craft these personalized emails
and phone scripts, et cetera, but as a result of that, we made $15,000 and
therefore this is our ROI, versus we had this other flight that only made 5,000
and then we had our best flight of all time that made 25." So you can
start choosing which ones to use in which situations based on the probability
that they'll net out a positive ROI.
David Giller: Very
cool. Yeah, that level of metrics to be able to see what's going on helps
anyone, certainly if you're in sales but let alone any other type of role
within the organization to prioritize your time, does it make sense for me to
follow up with initiative or, "Hey, I'm running behind my goal on this
particular initiative for this drip campaign where I haven't brought in the
dollars that I expected to." To be able to see, you're essentially holding
yourself accountable.
Brandon Bruce: Absolutely.
I mean, that's the key, right, to success anywhere. All of us want to be part
of a fast moving or most of us want to be part of a fast moving, exciting, high
growth situation because we're buoyed by that, we're lifted up by the team
around us and all the energy and excitement. At the same time, we're all
accountable to ourselves. We know in our heart of hearts what our individual
contributions are and we all want to be significant contributors to whatever
we're trying to do individually and whatever our organization is trying to do.
So getting to this, being part of a feedback loop, having an individual
feedback loop which is relatively new when it comes to tracking emails,
tracking calendar events, et cetera, tracking attachments, the tech has been
out there for some time so early adopters..
But
for most of the working population, these are pretty new tools. It's unique to
have an individualized feedback loop versus hearing about the overarching
feedback loop on all of our marketing initiatives, right? So people have had
those feedback groups for a long time. We ran this commercial, this is what
came back. We ran these ads. We sent these big blast emails to hundreds of thousands
of people. This was the click through rate, the engagement rate, et cetera. But
it's been only in the very recent past that we started to do that for ourselves
as individuals. What about the emails that I'm sending? Just a little quick
reply to my customers, are those good or are those not good?
Most
of us hadn't been tracking that very much until the last few years. I think
that's getting exciting because it means that we can get that instant feedback
on, "Okay, do my efforts make sense? Am I spending the time doing the
right thing? Does email work for me? Should I be calling more people or vice
versa?" That's helpful information. We all want to spend time doing the
things that make the most difference.
David Giller: Absolutely.
So can you tell me what, to the extent that you're able to share, what's coming
next for Cirrus Insight? What do you see as being on the horizon?
Brandon Bruce: That's
a great question. I think as we look at our platform, one of the things that we
tried to focus on here last few years is let's make sure we're solid all the
way. We like to envision it, kind of cradle the grave of the sales
relationship, it's kind of a torture analogy but at the very beginning, you
want to be able to add new prospects, new leads into your pipeline. How do we
do that? Well, [inaudible 00:46:21] an email from somebody and then we say,
"Well, are they in Salesforce or not?" So Cirrus Insight will tell
you, they're in Salesforce, they're not in Salesforce. If they're not, we
enable you to instantly grab the relevant information from the person's email
signature and add them in as a new lead or contact and we also supplement that
data with information about them as an individual as well as about their
account, their company, their organization, that we sorted through third part
database vendors.
So
that's the very beginning. At the very end, you get a signed contract, right?
That's the close of a sale and then it advances to the customer success role.
So from that perspective, we've added on attachment tracking where you can send
a proposal and track and see what happens to it and we built out some threshold
eSignature integration. So our team internally uses that to send out our
contracts and we get those signed. So now we have the bookends of the beginning
of the relationship, the signed deal at the end and a lot of what happens in
the meantime, right, you're sending emails back and forth, you want to track
those news templates, you're scheduling meetings with the person so we've got
all that. We've got the ongoing kind of nurturing through drip campaigns.
We've
got some telephony integration. I can see us over the coming year or more
building out even more on the telephony side. So right now we have call scripts
built it and you can click the hyper link for the phone number, pop it open in
Google Voice or Skype or whatever you use and complete that call and add call
notes. I can see that going deeper. So yeah, I think it's going to be exciting
time. We have our near term roadmap that goes out six, 12 months. At the same
time, having done this for six years, it's pretty safe to say the ecosystem
changes so fast, software changes so fast that I think I would feel and end up
looking silly if I say, "It's exactly what we're going to build because
this is the state of the art." The state of the art is going to change
over the next year and we're going to be pulled and pushed and driven into new
directions by what our customers are asking for.
I
think I'm as curious as the next person to see what's next for sales, for those
of us that are customer facing and then our role historically for the past six
years had been to meet that demand, build those things as quickly as we can.
David Giller: That
is incredible. I really can't wait to see what the ecosystem comes up with next
and where it goes because it's been, from my perspective, it's been nothing but
an amazing ride, not only because I love technology but like we talked about
earlier, the practical efficiencies that are introduced by using the tool on a
regular basis and bridging the gap between the inbox and Salesforce which is
otherwise a major source of pain for those of who aren't aware of Cirrus
Insight being around and being available.
Brandon Bruce: We
are around and available and thankfully very accessible and easy, right? So
this isn't the big, "Hey, make sure [crosstalk 00:49:15] an admin or a
boss to get this installed." We're talking about like a two-click install.
We're an extension into your Chrome browser or Firefox browser. Or if you use
Outlook, it's about a two or three-click install for the plugin or you can use
the Office 365 Cloud add-in and we have mobile apps for Android and iPhone. So
really at the end of the day, our goal is to say, "If you're spending time
in an inbox on some platform or device, we want to be either connecting you
with Salesforce if you use Salesforce." If you don't use Salesforce, we
still have a version for Gmail that just have all kind of the email and
calendar power tools built it.
So
at our core, we're a Salesforce integration application but we've also branched
out now to serve folks that don't use Salesforce. So if half your company
doesn't use Salesforce, but they still want to be able to track emails and use
templates, we've got those folks covered too.
David Giller: Sweet.
As a special gift for Brainiate listeners, we have a free trial and 20% off. So
for those of you who are listening, you want to get started with Cirrus
Insight, you can get a free trial and 20% off and all you have to do is go ...
You can either go to the Cirrus Insight website and use promo code Brainiate or
you can use the link that will be provided in the show notes. With that,
Brandon, I want to thank you for being on the Brainiate Show. Thank you for
sharing your wisdom and your insight and your perspective on Cirrus Insight. I
love it.
Brandon Bruce: Awesome.
Hey, it's always great to be on. We've been friends for a long time so I
appreciate you taking the time to have me on and chat about sales software and
Salesforce stuff. We do it all day and we always enjoy it.
David Giller: Yeah,
sharing the love with the rest of the Salesforce is what it's all about because
to me it just helps empower others to use the same types of tools and best
practices that you and I take for granted.
Brandon Bruce: Yeah,
I echo your point. We're constantly learning from the community and we're going
to be out and about. We've done a few already this year. We're going to out and
about, a lot of user group meetings around the country. If you happen to be
listening and you're part of a user group or you help organize one, let us
know. We always love coming and sponsoring and presenting. Then of course, for
those that are listening that are going to head out to Dream Force in the fall
in San Francisco, we're always there and we sponsor a number of fun events
there. So hopefully, for those folks that are listening that we haven't had a
chance to meet already, one of those events will provide an opportunity to do
so.
David Giller: Super.
Brandon, thanks for joining.
Brandon Bruce: You
bet. Thanks, Dave.
David Giller: All
right. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Brainiate Show. If you've found
this content helpful, feel free to share it with your colleagues at work and on
social media. If you have additional thoughts on the topic, go ahead and drop
me a note as I would love to hear from you. If you haven't already done so,
make sure to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or Spotify. Also you might
want to check out my Brainiate YouTube channel for videos, demos and other
wacky Salesforce related content with corresponding visual elements to help you
become a Salesforce rockstar. Also, don't forget to check out the show notes
for links to any resources that I mentioned today. I look forward to seeing you
in the next episode.
David Giller a Salesforce MVP, User Group Leader, Trainer, Consultant, Blogger & Author.
Although he started his career as an attorney, David entered the world of enterprise-scale IT management at NBCUniversal, & continued at GE Capital, where he was first introduced to Salesforce & became known as "The Salesforce Guru."
David is now CEO of Brainiate, helping companies unleash the power of Salesforce.
You can read more about David's bizarre career path here.
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