For sales teams to build stronger sales strategies, they rely on insights from historical data from their communication with clients. Analyzing this data manually takes time which limits the time taken by the sales team to market products. One of the best solutions is to use AI to collect data from calls made, emails sent, and any other strategy used by a sales team to reach out to customers.
The salesforce tool plays a significant role in automatically collecting data that helps the teams capture the most important actions required. Syncing data from multiple sources makes it easier for sales teams to view data from one place. Einstein Activity Capture is a tool that helps sync data from different sources. The tools have their advantages and disadvantages.
How Einstein Activity Capture works
Einstein activity capture works best when it integrates with a Gmail account or an MS Office 365 account. After connecting, the tool logs Gmail communications with Amazon Web Services directly instead of Salesforce. This is a major setback many sales teams have with this tool.
One of the major disadvantages of salesforce Einstein activity capture is that it can only store Gmail activities for up to six months and MS office activities for up to two years. That means the activities can no longer be accessed after that period. Revenue Grid doesn’t store data for a limited period but avails it whenever it is needed. If a business person decides to migrate to the sales team, the data in Einstein activity capture will be lost. This is different from Revenue Grid because it doesn’t lose data at any time.
Advantages of Einstein Activity Capture
Connects sent mails with received mail accounts
The tool syncs data from both sent and received emails, including events, and saves them on its activity timeline. It categorizes its data in the following main categories:
- Personal accounts
- Sales leads
- Sales opportunities
- Contacts
- Other Accounts
The tool redeems a lot of time for the sales team by performing important tasks that give the team critical insights into sales. The tool is a good choice for sales teams that don’t need to store data for over six months.
Gives graph presentations
The Einstein capture activity timeline presents data in graphs which makes it easier for the sales team to draw insights. This data includes information that has been manually entered into the Salesforce tool. It is easy to compare graphs from different data or periods for better insights.
Sales teams get insights from emails
Einstein Activity Capture processes email activities and generates essential information from email logins. The sales team gets insights on emails that need follow-up and the products that a customer may desire to buy. Using the generated insights, marketers can create personalized responses to customers.
Captures important metrics
The EAC AI algorithms generate important metrics such as:
- The last time the sales team made calls
- The number of days they have been inactive
- The last time they were active
Disadvantages of using Einstein Activity Capture
- It has limited options for customizing data capture: Sales teams don’t get a chance to customize data capturing to fit their unique needs. The team cannot, for example, capture contacts from specific email categories. The tool syncs emails from the entire list, which doesn’t give the team unique sales opportunities. They have to work with the entire data and then manually sort the data they need most.
- Doesn’t store data in Salesforce directly: The EAC tool doesn’t directly store data in the Salesforce tool. Instead, it stores it in the Amazon Web Services tool.
- Cannot migrate data: It is not possible to migrate EAC data because it will all be lost.
- Disabling EAC means data loss: Salesforce consistently stores data and avails it all the time, unlike EAC, which loses data when it is disabled.
- Stores data for a limited period: Data stored in EAC expires in six months if it was generated from Gmail and 24 months if it was generated from MS office 365.
- Limited licenses: EAC has limited licenses, and a business person has to buy more licenses if they need to capture more activities.
- Not the best choice for longer sales cycles: Due to its limited storage time, EAC is not the best choice for sales teams with the longer sales cycle. Once the stored data expires, the team can no longer benefit from historical insights when projecting future sales strategies.
