Salesforce Activity Tracking and AI Insights That Actually Work

Help your sales team drive more deals and collaborate faster with contextual relationship intelligence data embedded in their Salesforce records.

Highlights

• Fully synchronize Email, Meeting, and Contact information from employee inboxes and email aliases. 
• Facilitate introductions and enhance team selling by surfacing available connections across the organization.
• Empower your users with relationship intelligence wherever they work.
• Enrich your Accounts and Contacts with key information from external data providers.
• Leverage native Salesforce Reports and Dashboard to analyze captured relationship data.  

As your organization and customer-facing teams grow, so does the amount of communications such as emails and meetings. Keeping these segregated within the email provider can do more harm than good, as historical context not only empowers your team members to make better decisions but it also ensures a seamless customer experience.

While the possibility exists, counting on manual effort from users to log this information in Salesforce is far from scalable. The reality is that much of your data may never make it to your CRM. 

Affinity for Salesforce bridges the gap between activities happening outside of Salesforce and your valuable customer information, ensuring a cohesive experience from start to finish, with key insights always available at the rep’s fingertips. Their otherwise unstructured email and meeting information is transformed into valuable insights, surfacing relationships that already exist between your team and prospects or customers, which can empower sellers to close deals at lightning speed. 

This in-depth overview will showcase the main Affinity for Salesforce features, ideal use cases, and setup effort, as well as how fast your users can (and will) enjoy this new integration. 

Features

Affinity for Salesforce promotes team selling and facilitates customer communication, while ensuring all interactions are automatically synced and linked to the Salesforce records, without manual intervention. 

Having the ability to tap into their colleagues’ network of connections in relation to their Accounts or Opportunities – what’s known as relationship intelligence – boosts sellers’ confidence and can ultimately help them manage and close deals while saving a great amount of research time. 

Bring Email and Meeting Activity into Salesforce

Everyone in the sales organization, from Account Executives to Business Development Reps, spends a significant chunk of their time communicating with customers and prospects – be it over emails or video calls. 

By far the most important aspect is knowing these conversations happened and who was involved. Affinity for Salesforce can automatically sync all this activity and relate it to Salesforce Accounts, Contact, or Opportunities. 

Sync Instances

While end users will work in Salesforce, their email, and other browser pages, Salesforce Admins do need to set up the Affinity integration and you will be provided with access to the Affinity app to do this. Following best practices, Affinity for Salesforce can be enabled in sandboxes for you to test the configuration prior to deploying changes, such as any new custom fields, to production. 

Leverage Salesforce List Views for Record Creation and Enrichment

Affinity offers automatic record creation and data enrichment for your Salesforce Accounts and Contacts. To make use of the functionality, you will have to select the list views containing the records to be enriched. The benefit of this approach is that because this is out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality, you can adjust the filters as needed over time and you can also control access to them through the standard mechanisms. 

Make sure that the list views selected here are not mistakenly modified or deleted in Salesforce by someone who has the Manage Public List Views permission. While you could select already existing ones (such as the one I have chosen below) it would be a good idea to create separate list views and name them in a way that makes it clear what they are used for. 

Reliable Enrichment With Affinity

Affinity collaborates with multiple data providers in order to feed your Salesforce records with the most up-to-date information about companies and their employees. None of this information is mandatory though, and none of the fields are part of the managed package, meaning that you have full liberty to pick and choose exactly what you create on your Account and Contact records. The advantage of this approach is that there are no unnecessary fields on the record that you will not use – and if the need for a new one rises down the line, you can create and expose it then. 

If you take a look at the Enrichment Types section, within the Account and Contact field mapping picklists you will find all the available fields for both objects, with over 30 fields you can map for Accounts and over 20 for Contacts. Information such as the date the very first email was sent, the number of employees, job titles, phone numbers, and even LinkedIn URLs is available. Additionally, you can enrich your Account records with even more insights from a historical perspective, such as the number of employees over 6, 12, or even 24 months. Once the Salesforce fields are created and permissions are granted to the integration user you’re leveraging for the connection, you can map as many fields as you’d like. 

In addition to the field enrichment, there is one more setting available for Accounts:, respectively “Create Contacts Under Account List View”. When enabled, this lets you automatically identify Contacts based on the company’s domain and create them under the Accounts available in the list view, as long as an email exchange or meeting existed with an internal employee who has been enabled as a user. This way, even if the Contact doesn’t exist, the users won’t have to create them manually.

As you would expect, you can still decide whether the activities are synced. If, for example, your organization would only like to sync emails but not meetings, this can be done. However, unless it is against company policy, the recommendation would be to turn on both to get the most out of your data.

The Relationship Score is a clear differentiator for Affinity, as while reps could spend time manually syncing records, developing an actual calculation based on raw email and meeting data is definitely no easy feat! With their proprietary algorithm based on the frequency and recency of communication between your internal users and their network of external connections, Affinity calculates a score from 0 to 100 which both sellers as well as sales leadership can leverage when making decisions or reporting on engagements. 

This score will be available on Affinity Connections, a custom object included in the managed package, and within Affinity’s inbox and browser extensions. 

Opportunity Enrichment

Optionally, emails and meetings linked to Accounts can also be related to Opportunities for ease of access when working directly on the Salesforce records. Currently, two options are available when determining the Opportunity that the activities are related to: the latest created Opportunity based on the standard CreatedDate field, and the latest updated Opportunity based on the LastModifiedDate field.

Explore Connections and Activities

Following the configuration steps being completed within the Affinity App, the next step is to expose the information to your end users where they need it most. Within the managed package, there are a few Visualforce pages readily available to be embedded on Record Pages and/or Page Layouts. These offer an easy-to-digest experience for sellers when they review either the activities or connections that have been identified for their Accounts. 

Below I have embedded the Affinity Connections and Affinity Activities Visualforce pages in a Tabs component on the Account Record Page. They can, however, be used on Contacts as well. 

The Affinity Activities tab will showcase all the emails and meetings related to the Account, with the possibility to filter as needed. From a security perspective, emails and meetings are logged as standard Salesforce activities, but you have the option to remove all the information and simply log that an email happened, or, for example, remove the email body only by setting the Activity Sync Rule per user. 

Users can also blacklist any email addresses which should not be synced. Having interactions logged as Salesforce activities means that they will be visible in the standard Activity Timeline and will appear in any existing Reports your team might already use for Emails and Events. 

The Affinity Connections tab highlights the true power of relationship intelligence, in the form of Contacts from the Account the seller is working on that have had previous email exchanges or meetings with other colleagues in the organization. This lays the groundwork for a warm introduction and significantly reduces the time that would otherwise be spent trying to get in touch with the target customer. The list includes both people you know and people your colleagues know. 

A fairly new addition when it comes to connections is the Inferred Connections category, which is based on shared previous work experience between your colleagues and people who currently work for the Account. 

Since all the information from Affinity is synced into Salesforce fields, you can also add them as needed on the Page Layouts or Record Pages if you’re already using Dynamic Forms. As page real estate is limited, you may opt for some of them to be exposed while others are easily used in Reports only, depending on what is more relevant to your end users. 

Affinity for Outlook and Gmail

Account executives usually spend a great amount of time collaborating via email, and there may be situations in which a new person is introduced in the thread, or none of the contact or account data actually exists in Salesforce yet. With Affinity’s inbox extensions, they can review what has been automatically identified and easily create the missing Accounts which can then have the Contacts associated with them automatically if the functionality is turned on. Contacts or Opportunities can also be manually created from the add-in as needed. 

On top of this, sellers can review Salesforce information within the add-in, add relevant notes, and edit key fields without having to navigate to Salesforce and disrupt their flow of work. The connections are obtained through domain matching against their colleagues’ activity. 

Insightful Analytics

With more than a dozen Reports and two main Dashboards shipped with the Affinity for Salesforce managed package, your team can easily take action on data through the standard Salesforce reporting capabilities. Not only that but both the Reports and Dashboards can be customized to best reflect what your sellers and sales leadership would like to see.  

This makes it easy to review how the Relationship Score impacts coverage across various industries, how it relates to revenue goals, as well as who sellers can further collaborate with for an introduction to certain roles within a target Account. All this information is contextual and based on your data, meaning that it is fully reliable and updates over time as your team’s network grows. 

Roadmap?

At the time of writing this, there are a few key areas the Affinity for Salesforce team is focusing on making improvements:

Cleaner contact data

In addition to introducing the ability to capture email and meeting activities associated with email aliases, the Affinity team is now going to enable users to capture alternate email addresses for Salesforce contacts. By implementing a way to track alternate email addresses, you can reduce the number of duplicate contacts and ensure contact records are more complete so you can see the full history of engagement.

Additional AI capabilities

Affinity currently uses AI to enhance CRM functionalities and provide deeper insights into business relationships. The team is continuing to build new AI-features that will give your team the information they need to make more informed decisions across the entire life of a deal.

More privacy controls

Affinity is working on introducing more granular privacy controls for Affinity for Salesforce that will give Admins greater flexibility and control over their data and sync settings. These enhancements will help protect sensitive information and ensure compliance with evolving data privacy regulations. 

Use Cases

Regardless of what industry your company is in, relationship intelligence is something that your entire sales organization can make use of across various use cases – but most important is sellers being able to access already existing CRM information while they are not working within Salesforce. 

You can rapidly boost your team’s productivity with Affinity Pathfinder. Available as a Chrome Extension which team members can easily install from the web store, Affinity Pathfinder offers users reliable context while they are researching a company’s website or LinkedIn Profiles. If the record doesn’t yet exist in Salesforce, Affinity provides key information about the company, such as their industry, potential connections, number of employees, or even investors right within the extension.

The extension also allows sellers to update Salesforce fields as needed, create new records, and analyze any available connection data to further be used for the particular deal they are working on. Additionally, the Relationship Score indicator is visible for each of the contacts, allowing the seller to immediately see who the best person to reach out to for further introductions would be.  

As well as the streamlined experience for sellers, once the Affinity information is in Salesforce, you as a Salesforce professional can work with your business stakeholders to build custom automations using the data synced on either the Account or Contact level using custom fields. 

For example, you could easily create a Flow that will send an email notification to the Account Owner whenever a new Affinity Connection that has a Relationship Score over a certain threshold is created. Alternatively, you could send a notification if, let’s say, the Relationship Score drops under a certain threshold, in order to ensure that teams keep maintaining their key relationships over time. 

Since all of the data is within your CRM, you can have simple or more complex automations leveraging it as needed. Make sure to take a close look over the available information that Affinity can provide before deciding which Account, Affinity Connection, or Contact fields you will be using. 

Impact

Overall, the ability to bring together already existing information from users’ emails and calendars directly within Salesforce – alongside the enrichment functionality for Accounts, Contacts, and even Opportunities – ensures that Affinity for Salesforce has the potential to offer actionable insights at your rep’s fingertips faster than ever. With the additional extensions for both inbox and browser, regardless of where the work is being conducted, it will become a breeze to ensure your Salesforce information is always up to date. 

Setup

Getting started with Affinity for Salesforce is much easier than you would expect from a tool that can transform your seller’s work with Salesforce. Following the managed package installation, it’s all about your organization’s choices as far as data enrichment, field mapping, and choice of functionality within the tenant that the Affinity team will set up for you. 

For the managed package installation, make sure to confirm the prerequisites are completed beforehand:

• Set up Enhanced Email.
• Set up Enhanced Notes.
• Set up Shared Activities.
• Make sure the Type field for the Task object is visible.

As soon as you start creating users within the external Affinity tenant, they will receive an email prompting them to install the Chrome extension and Outlook add-in to explore the functionality further while their inbox is being synced. Keep in mind that their historical emails, meetings, and contacts will all be synced unless excluded and used to assess the potential relationships and prior engagements – this process may take up to a day. Affinity for Salesforce does support email aliases as well, hence ensuring that all the activity will be considered.

While the Affinity Customer Success team will walk you through the onboarding process, there is also an extensive step-by-step guide readily available for you and your team to seamlessly get started with the Salesforce integration. 

Support

Even though the entire functionality is documented in Affinity’s Help Center, there may be situations where you have a question about your particular use cases or implementation. The support team is just one email away, and you can reach them at ​​[email protected] to get your question answered in no time.  

Pricing

Affinity’s AppExchange listing is priced at $100/user/month. For a tailored offer suitable for your organization, you can reach out to the Affinity team at [email protected].

Summary

All in all, relationship intelligence is not only just here to stay. With Affinity for Salesforce, the valuable information once stored only within individual rep’s inboxes can now be surfaced and leveraged by the entire organization to successfully achieve their revenue goals with seamless collaboration. 

Find out more about Affinity for Salesforce and adjacent functionality from their AppExchange listing – click on “Get it now” if you’d like the team to reach out to you, or request a bespoke demo here.