Einstein Activity Capture is a great solution for Salesforce activity tracking. Einstein Activity Capture for Salesforce pulls in calendar events and emails and then identifies all the information then matches the information to already existing Salesforce Accounts and Contacts.
Activity Tracking Salesforce Biggest Problems
The problem that exists is that Einstein Activity Capture in Salesforce is not able to capture brand-new leads and contacts. There will be no new contacts added only the already existing will be updated which leaves little room for real-time updates.
Most B2B SaaS companies are using Salesforce as their CRM and system of record. Salesforce has rightfully earned the position of being the biggest SaaS of them all. But what started out as the little guy declaring “No Software” against the “Big Iron” establishment has turned into David becoming Goliath.
Today the Salesforce ecosystem sprawls beyond CRM and snakes into Marketing, Finance, Support, Social, Messaging, Dashboarding, Reporting, Document Management, Project Management, collaboration and now artificial intelligence.
A few years ago Marc Benioff made the declaration that he relied on an Artificial Intelligence machine known as “Einstein” every Monday morning at his executive round table. After his discussion with his executives Benioff turns to his computer and “I ask Einstein, ‘I heard what everybody said but what do you actually think?'”
At SalesDirector.ai, we agree with Benioff’s vision that with the right data that a computer is in a better position to accurately identify patterns, trends, predictive analytics and forecasts than a human is. But there is the rub! With the right data! The right data.
Unfortunately, an algorithm is only as reliable and accurate as the data it consumes. And, inside most B2B sales organizations the data in the CRM is a mess. Sales reps are notoriously lazy (er, too busy) to input every detail and interaction of every person, prospect and customer they communicate with on a daily basis. They tend to only log the emails or meetings for the most important person that they are corresponding or meeting with and leave out the other attendees at the meeting or the rest of the folks who were cc’ed on the email. Perpetuate this “laziness” across a sales organization of 50 or 500 reps and you quickly have a very scant and unreliable system of record.
Salesforce has attempted to resolve this “data entry problem” over the years with a variety of syncs, plugins, extensions and other clumsy addons. The most recent victim is Salesforce Lightning Sync which is scheduled to be sunset in the Fall of 2021. As a result, Salesforce is suggesting that all Salesforce users that want to log emails and events in Salesforce switch to Einstein Activity Capture (EAC). EAC has several benefits over Lightning Sync – mostly that it is a server-to-serve based solution rather than relying on a client-side plugin like its predecessor. But underneath the slick marketing and promises of Einstein Activity Capture are some shortcomings to be aware of – especially if you are trying to scale your revenue operations team.
The problems that arise are:
- Salesforce Admin is the only one that can delete emails. Other users cannot just go in and clean out the emails that are no longer valuable.
- If your business decides to no longer use Einstein Activity Capture and moves away the data that was stored on the CRM will be deleted.
- The event and email data are not available by your API, User Interface, or standard reporting. This also means that further down the line Business Intelligence systems cannot draw from it.
- Because the data is inaccessible (non editable) you are not able to trigger workflows or leverage process builder for updating fields, etc.
According to Salesforce: “Data that is captured by Einstein Activity Capture is stored outside of Salesforce and, therefore, does not affect your Salesforce data allocations.” What this means is there is no accurate real-time activity tracking in Salesforce.
Einstein Activity Capture for Salesforce has gained momentum on getting engagement and sales activity into the CRM and allows for Einstein partners to further innovate.
But, if you are searching for a Einstein activity capture alternative that is not from Salesforce we recommend you take a peek at SalesDirector.ai’s AutoScribe.
Here is a full comparison:
What About Salesforce Inbox and Lightning Sync?
As of Winter 2021, Lightning Sync will not be available in Lightning for new Salesforce customers. Einstein Activity Capture is Salesforce’s long term solution for syncing contacts and events between Microsoft and Google applications with Salesforce. As Salesforce continues to push customers to Einstein Activity Capture be aware of the limitations listed above in this article. If you are still on an older version of Salesforce and are using Salesforce Inbox keep in mind that your users are still manually linking emails to records in Salesforce.
This article was last updated 4/26/2022 at 10:16am.