In a previous article, we shared why we thought Email Tracking in Salesforce was an unsolved problem.

Over the past few months, we’ve spoken to 100+ organizations using various tools ranging from Einstein Activity Capture (SFDC’s native solution) to Sales Tools like Outreach, SalesLoft and others confirming that there is a meaningful gap between rep inboxes and what can be seen in the CRM.

The question that keeps coming up is “how much?” — just how big is the email data gap and what’s its impact on RevOps ability to forecast?

To answer this, we conducted a benchmark study with a customer to see just what % of Email activity was missing from CRM by comparing the volume and type of emails captured by Outreach.io and Truly side by side.

Results

% Increase in Emails Captured and Synced by Truly.co vs. Outreach.io
increase in emails captured in Salesforce
Types of interactions missing were:
  • Outbound email attempts that bounced (indicator of champion leaving company, bad contact data)
  • Customer-to-Customer emails with the rep cc’ed (complex evaluations with multiple stakeholders)
  • Customer-to-non-reps emails with the rep cc’ed (eg: finance, legal discussions)
  • Customers who don’t exist as contacts in Salesforce (procurement reaching out to discuss multi-year early renewal)
  • SDR emails that get pushed down to a contact that we haven’t spoken to yet (eg: CEO prospecting push to Director)
  • Virtual documents shared via GDocs/Asana. (movement on deal that is happening across other channels)
  • Moreover, we found that GCal related activity synced 1-2 days late.
  • …and more

 

% Increase in Unique Contacts Tracked by Truly.co vs. Outreach.io

It’s one thing to talk about email volume, but that can be skewed by intense back-and-forths with just a handful of contacts.

So we wondered, how many unique ‘shadow’ customers/prospects were engaging with the reps across each role.

The results were astounding:

 

contact lift salesforce

Even in the most contact-heavy role of SDRs, where we assume that everything is handled by contact providers like ZoomInfo and sequencing providers like Outreach.io, 13% of the actual engagements from customers weren’t making it into the CRM

And in very unstructured/dynamic roles like Account Management saw a whopping 32% of the people engaging with the company not being accounted for in the CRM!

Best of all, this customer was able to automate the creation of these contacts behind the scenes by using Truly’s salesforce package.

 

Methodology

  • The customer who participated in the benchmark study was a mid-sized SaaS software company that sold to Mid-Market and Enterprise organizations
  • The sampling period was one week and divided across three pools of users
  • The sample size was 1000 emails
  • Emails were matched one by one over the sample period using subject/data to account for emails that are missing and/or synced with a meaningful difference in date.
  • Each email difference was reconciled based on documented logic and undocumented logic that we derived by comparing different email examples

 

What explains this big difference?

As we mentioned in the original article, the difference can’t be explained by a single feature — it’s a fundamental difference in data architecture between software that’s focused on automation (sales tools) vs. attribution (Truly).
This requires sophisticated modeling of the data to separate:
  1. what email data gets processed
  2. what emails are stored,
  3. what emails are synced (eg: handling the same email received by multiple people)
  4. what contacts emails are synced to
  5. what metadata structure needs to exist in many-to-many interactions to enable automations/analytics
All while also respecting data governance rules to ensure that emails that shouldn’t be logged don’t make it into the CRM (eg: in our case, we sell to our HR Provider and we also exchange emails with sensitive HR issues)

See the difference for yourself.

With just 30 mins of configuration, you can start a 7-day trial and see the results for yourself!