Here at RingDNA, we have tried numerous email acceleration products over the past year. We found a lot of great options, but with Gmail as our primary email solution and Salesforce as our CRM, we employed multiple apps to handle tasks such as appointment setting, syncing email contacts to Salesforce and sending customized email templates.

With SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud, we were finally able to land upon a single solution that did all these things — and many more — well. As early adopters (so early, in fact, that it was called RelateIQ when we started using it), we’ve had some time to figure out what works best for us.

Quick highlights are below, followed by a two-minute video video we made illustrating how we get it done.

Setting Up Appointments by Email

If you’re a busy person, you probably send lots of emails trying to schedule meetings (“Sorry, Tuesday is booked up — how about 3:30pm Eastern on the 22nd?”). SalesforceIQ solves that problem with a simple tool that inserts available times from your Gmail calendar into the body of your email, and then lets prospects confirm a time with one click.

Using Customizable Email Templates

SalesforceIQ has a feature called Shortcuts that enables reps to quickly select outbound sales email templates. By selecting a prospecting template and then quickly personalizing it, reps can save several minutes every time they send a sales email.

Timing your Follow Up with Read Receipts

Sometimes, it’s helpful to know for sure that someone has read your email. If you’re a rep, for example, you may want to call a prospect when you know they’ve had a chance to read the case study or proposal you’ve sent them. That’s why SalesforceIQ’s read receipts are such a good idea. With the read receipt option switched on, reps are alerted the second that prospects open a sales email.

For those who aren’t in the know, SalesforceIQ for Sales Cloud is a chrome extension that offers a lot of features that enhance productivity when sending emails. It’s extremely easy to download and get going. Here’s a video showing how we use it in tandem with Gmail and our own product, RingDNA:

About the Author

William Tyree is CMO of RingDNA, a sales acceleration company. His articles about strategy, technology and data have appeared in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Moz, the Salesforce Blog, ProBlogger, CMO Essentials and elsewhere. Connect with William on Twitter at @williamtyree or on LinkedIn.

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