While a CRM is critical to B2B sales teams, it’s not where their work happens. This is the challenge faced by Salesforce Admins who are responsible for making the CRM truly valuable to sellers. The solution? Tools that extend the CRM to where teams actually work—the browser and email client they use to research, manage, and close deals.
Extensions offer a quick and easy way to improve the functionality and accessibility of Salesforce. Sellers can access critical insights where and when they need them, which increases sales productivity and reduces crossed wires. With the right extensions, they can also take actions like creating a new opportunity, adding notes, or editing an existing record, all without breaking the flow of work.
Discussing sales team productivity, one Salesforce Admin recently shared, “Everyone is aware of the struggle of getting sales professionals to adopt Salesforce, so you need to give them a reason to log in. Things like automation, time savings, and other things that let them focus on selling [will help].”
With Salesforce for Outlook sunsetting and the ongoing need to improve CRM adoption, now is an excellent time to evaluate your team’s use of extensions. Here are several ways to use extensions to streamline workflows, with particular emphasis on how Affinity’s extensions help teams save time, uncover opportunities, and close more deals.
Pro tip: These best practices relate to organizations that use Salesforce. If you’re an Affinity CRM user, learn more about the extensions that provide key deal data in your everyday tools.
7 ways to work more efficiently with Salesforce extensions
1. Update the CRM from anywhere
Sellers spend their days responding to emails and researching prospect accounts. With extensions, they can move deals forward while in the flow of this work—rather than needing to navigate to Salesforce. With tools that extend to the browser and email, sellers can update existing records and create contacts, accounts, or opportunities from anywhere.
In this example, the Affinity for Outlook extension surfaces the CRM account record alongside the email correspondence. Sellers can quickly take actions like opening a new opportunity and populating it with information gleaned from the email. If the entity doesn’t already exist in Salesforce, Affinity offers the ability to create the CRM record directly from the extension.
2. Find and connect with prospective clients
Even when a target company is identified, the work is far from over. Identifying the right prospect within that account—and the warmest introduction to them—is critical.
Extensions provide access to account data and network insights in the browser so that when a seller is researching a company, all the relevant data and insights on who knows who is at their fingertips.
In this example, when a salesperson browses a target account’s website, Affinity’s Chrome extension surfaces their own as well as their teammates’ connections to that company.
Not only this, the extension uses Affinity’s AI-driven relationship intelligence to score relationships based on factors such as recency and frequency of communication. Sellers can use this to pinpoint exactly who they should ask to make an introduction or provide context on a new opportunity.
3. Improve team collaboration
Maintaining visibility for relevant deal stakeholders improves both alignment and collaboration. Extensions allow everyone on your team to create and view new notes as well as record updates, account changes, and recent account engagement captured by Affinity for Salesforce.
Everyone can work faster with this level of transparency. It also reduces the possibility of crossed wires because everyone can view the historical communication and context of every deal. Sellers no longer run the risk of reaching out to a new prospect only to find a coworker made the same outreach a week earlier.
In this example, Affinity’s browser extension shows a log of all meetings and emails exchanged between a seller’s company and the prospect. The extension also summarizes the volume of contact, and details all the team members involved to assist with information gathering and exchange.
4. Automate data entry
When we surveyed sales and operations leaders, 73% said they believe that CRM record creation and updates take too much of their team’s time. Asked to quantify this time, 69% said their team spends four or more hours a week updating their CRM.
The right technology can significantly reduce the time sellers spend on essential but tedious manual data entry. Affinity for Salesforce automates the creation, update, and enrichment of Salesforce records so sales teams can focus on revenue-generating activities.
In addition to capturing interactions from email and calendar events, Affinity for Salesforce also enriches Salesforce records with biographic, firmographic, and experience data. Sellers can use this additional context to qualify deals and personalize outreach without scouring the web to find it.
In this example, a prospect company’s record has been enriched with information about the industry they operate in, investors, and employee count. When sellers can access this information via an extension in their flow of work, they are able to make data-driven decisions more quickly.
5. Add relevant notes
Notes can add valuable context to deals. But when the process to enter them into the CRM isn’t seamless, sellers may neglect this task—or use their own tool, which silos information.
Inbox and browser extensions allow sellers to add useful notes to Salesforce while they’re in the process of scheduling a follow-up, sending an email, or browsing websites and LinkedIn profiles.
In this example, a seller uses Affinity’s extension to summarize action items out of a meeting. They do this from their email or web browser and it automatically logs in Salesforce.
6. Access deal context
Extensions provide quick access to interaction history, relationship insights, and enriched contact and account data, meaning that salespeople and their managers can stay more informed about opportunities in their pipeline—and build more comprehensive account plans.
At a glance, sellers can see what meetings have taken place with a prospect and what kind of emails have been exchanged. They can use this to craft more specific and relevant outreach, all using the communication data that’s automatically uploaded to the CRM.
In this example, Affinity’s extension showcases the history of notes related to a specific opportunity. Sellers can access this information while browsing a prospect’s website, reducing context switching and allowing them to qualify or disqualify opportunities faster.
7. Close sales faster
CRM data (especially when it’s automatically logged and enriched) contains the kind of valuable relationship insights that can help sellers more quickly close their next big deal.
Affinity for Salesforce maps and assesses your organization’s network so your sales team can better understand the strength and nature of every relationship across the organization. Additionally, the technology can process enriched biographic information alongside relationship intelligence to reveal a deeper network of connections. Colleagues and contacts who have overlapping career experience at previous companies will appear as inferred connections, giving your team more opportunities for warm introductions.
Extensions carry this information through to the tools sellers use every day—browser, LinkedIn, email—so they can identify high-priority deals where a mutual connection can increase the likelihood of closing by 25%.
In this example, a seller assesses their company’s collective network for connections to a prospect. Affinity’s relationship intelligence uses email and calendar data, combined with ‘inferred connection’ data from previous career experiences, to provide an accurate relationship score and recommendation about the best source of introduction.
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Extending the CRM to where your team works
CRM adoption is a problem across industries, but it doesn’t need to be. Get your sales team to engage with the CRM by extending it directly to the tools they use every day—their email inbox, web browser, and LinkedIn.
Affinity for Salesforce provides extensions, automation, data enrichment, and relationship intelligence all in one application. It is the ideal solution for teams that want to improve data quality, easily capture and understand inbox and calendar data, and increase Salesforce engagement without burdening sellers.
* Data from Affinity’s 2024 survey of 250+ business leaders across investment banking, media and communications, real estate, professional services, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and enterprise technology.
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