You’ve been able to add emails you’ve received (or sent previously) to Salesforce since our initial release. But there’s never been a way for you to attach emails you’re writing to Salesforce without some annoying work-arounds that you had to discover yourself. Others have also decided that they couldn’t yet give up the Salesforce “Email to Salesforce” (aka “BCC to Salesforce”) feature that required that you go to an extra step to ensure that your personalized E2SF email address was included in the BCC field as you send the email. But even then, your emails wouldn’t be attached to cases or a specific Opportunity.

Those days are over!

Now, on the ‘Compose’ screen, or when you reply to an email you’ll now see “Send & Add” and “Quick Send!” buttons right next to the “Send” buttons. If you click the “Send & Add” button, you’ll have the chance to attach the outgoing email to any Opportunity or Case in Salesforce and then send the email. The “Quick Send!” button will simply add the email to Salesforce (related to the first recipient) and send it off – in one click.

Why are we so excited about this?

Users of Outlook have had this functionality for years. For one, we now have parity with that functionality – and it’s been a long time in coming.

But the real reason for our excitement has much more to do with your CRM. We knew that if we made it ridiculously easy to add emails to salesforce, you’d do it more often. And the more often you add those important emails, the more complete your organizational knowledge about a customer, prospect, or partner. Send & Add fills a big gap here – and it does it without changing your workflow: where you used to click ‘Send’, now you hit ‘Send & Add’ or ‘Quick Send’. You don’t have to change a thing, and the context around those customers and prospects improves.

Also, if you’re an “Inbox Zero” fan (and why wouldn’t you be), you’ve discovered the Gmail Labs feature “Send & Archive” (and if you don’t have it enabled, give it a try). When you click the “Send & Add” or “Quick Send!” buttons, we’ll (1) Send the email, (2) Add it to Salesforce, and (3) Archive it for you. You’re welcome.

Finally, to show it off, we’ve recorded a brief screencast to give you an idea of what you’ll see when you send your next email.

For the last several releases of Firefox, the Firefox Cirrus Insight extension has caused performance issues for many Firefox users. Additionally, these issues seem to have worsened with the release of Firefox 11 and 12.

Today, we’re happy to announce that the Firefox Cirrus Insight extension has been rewritten from the ground up and is faster and more reliable than ever! We apologize for the lengthy time to resolution of this issue – it was a tricky one.

To download the latest extension (version 2.4), just jump over to the install page.

But how did we come up with the name Cirrus Insight anyway?

First, we wanted a cloud and chose cirrus.  These clouds are amazing.

cir·rus     /ˈsirəs/

Noun: Cloud forming wispy filamentous tufted streaks at high altitude, usually 16,500–45,000 feet (5–13 km). Usually indicating a change in the weather.

Second, we added insight because it just made sense.

in·sight     /ˈinˌsīt/

Noun: The capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing.

Like contestants in a spelling bee, we wanted to see the words in a sentence or two:

Cirrus Insight is a light weight app that integrates Salesforce, the leading cloud CRM platform, and Gmail, the leading cloud email platform.

Cirrus Insight gives users a deep intuitive understanding of their leads and customers.

Cirrus Insight.  Perfect:-)

With Caller ID, you could decide whether or not you wanted to pick up the phone based on who was calling.  As Shakespeare would have written after BellSouth conducted the first market trial of Caller ID in Orlando, Florida in 1984: “To pick up or not to pick up [the phone], that is the question.”

The answer to that question hinges not only on who is calling but why you think they’re calling. If the who and the why compel you to take the call, you have a few very important seconds in which to prepare yourself before you answer. And, as any Boy Scout or Girl Scout will tell you, preparation is the key.

The same revolution that happened with phones in the mid-80s is happening with email.  Rapportive was a pioneer when it released its app that showed contextual information from social networks alongside emails in the Gmail inbox. Seeing a person’s LinkedIn profile and a list of recent tweets can really help to give you a sense of who that person is and a clue as to why they emailed you.

For many of us, the most relevant contextual information is in Salesforce. We have rich profiles of prospects and customers including contact information, activity history, cases, and opportunities.  Cirrus Insight utilizes Salesforce as a phonebook to provide Caller ID inside Gmail. Just open an email and Cirrus Insight instantly shows you who sent the email.

It can also give you a great idea as to why they sent the email and how you might respond. For example, let’s say you’re in customer support and you receive a question by email from a contact with a big opportunity. You didn’t know about the opportunity until you see it in Cirrus Insight, but it’s great to be able to craft a response that takes into account the sales context.  Similarly, let’s say you’re in sales and you receive a question by email from a prospect. You notice in Cirrus Insight that the prospect has an unresolved case. You’d be smart to resolve that case before trying to close a deal.

We believe customer relationship management is all about context — meeting the customer where they are and taking care of them. Cirrus Insight brings context from Salesforce into Gmail to help you understand and delight your customers with efficient, effective communications. We all take Caller ID for granted on our phones, but it’s opening up a new world of opportunity in our inboxes.

User adoption is a necessary and important stage in any Salesforce implementation project. Yet it’s a road that is sometimes rife with anxiety. The only time Salesforce adoption went smoothly, in my experience, is when the current system is so broken everyone was ready to leave it in a pile of embers and ash. Planning is supposed to help alleviate adoption pains, but even the best planned implementation phases can go sideways.

Sometimes inertia can be a force all its own.

Though I’m typically on the side driving adoption, I understand the initial resistance to a new business system. After all, no one likes their cheese moved. Unless, of course, the cheese is moved right under your nose.

That’s where Cirrus Insight comes in.

The cool features of Salesforce are only worth what users put in it. By presenting an interface that’s intuitive and convenient (it’s right there alongside emails in Gmail), Cirrus Insight makes it easy for users to do just that. While you can always make users constantly toggle to and from Salesforce to log their email, call, and meeting activity, putting a Salesforce interface in the window they use most (their Gmail inbox) eliminates the inconvenience and increases adoption.

The benefits of adopting Salesforce should extend to both executives and users. Executives get real-time metrics and users get real-time intelligence and collaboration. Typically implemented from the top down, users don’t always see these benefits immediately.

Yet with Cirrus Insight users have immediate access to intelligence regarding cases, leads, and sales. With the data that Salesforce provides right in their inbox, sales reps can close deals faster and customer service reps can quickly prepare before replying to a customer.

Typically we talk about using a “stick” and a “carrot” when driving user adoption. It’s always nice to find a tool that turns the system being adopted into the carrot. When that happens, sticks aren’t necessary.

Back in 2010, an application for Gmail called Rapportive burst onto the scene. Rapportive brought an amazingly useful and intuitive tool to Gmail users, allowing them to connect more closely and quickly with people they correspond with in Gmail. I personally started using Rapportive a few months after its launch and it inspired us to launch Cirrus Insight.

Early on in the ideation phase of Cirrus Insight, we had to make a decision. We loved how Rapportive gave people useful information quickly and did it without getting in the way. Frankly, we’d become hooked on Rapportive ourselves. We knew that we wanted Salesforce users to have a similar experience with Cirrus Insight. We made a decision that as Salesforce users, we would choose the CRM over our social networks – and turned off Rapportive in favor of Cirrus Insight.

Since our launch in December, we’ve been humbled by the great feedback we’ve received from our users. But a lot of users quickly said that they missed Rapportive because Cirrus Insight and Rapportive just didn’t get along in the browser. A number of people even said outright that it was a deal-killer for them. And we completely understood – Rapportive is a great app, and we wanted to be able to use it, too.

We heard the feedback, and with the help of the great team at Rapportive, we are finally giving our users the ability to use both Cirrus Insight and Rapportive easily.

If you have Rapportive and Cirrus Insight installed, you’ll now see a “Switch” link in the upper-right corner of Gmail. When you click either “Cirrus Insight” or “Rapportive”, you’ll be able to easily switch between them as much as you want:

With the ability to toggle between Cirrus Insight and Rapportive, you can now have contextual information from Salesforce as well as from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+,  and more, right alongside your emails in Gmail!

by Jake Faris, Salesforce expert at MB Consulting

If Salesforce is an automobile, I guess that makes me the mechanic. As the mechanic, I’m the one who sometimes has to tell a client that those new shiny wheels – an AppExchange app, let’s say – they want to buy for their org isn’t compatible with their drive train. Sometimes these are obvious conflicts, like the lack of Data Loader access when migrating data into a new Salesforce Professional edition. Sometimes these are conflicts only unearthed when perusing the configuration documents or, worse, after installation.

The great thing about Cirrus Insight is that the Salesforce version you’re currently subscribed to doesn’t matter.  It works with Unlimited, Enterprise, Professional, Group, Developer, and Contact Manager editions of Salesforce. Not only that, but it doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person company with a single Gmail account or if you’re a user in an enterprise-wide Google Apps deployment. To use the car metaphor, Cirrus Insight is like a pair of fuzzy dice: they’re compatible with any make, any model, and any year.

Like many users of technology, I have a justifiably healthy respect for the way technology works. Though I’ve been trained to monkey under Salesforce’s hood, I know where my abilities end and others need to take over. Most Salesforce users, respectful of their time and the potential for causing an expensive mess, don’t go poking around under the the hood, or if they do, the administrative task they perform is comparable to performing a quarterly oil change.

Thankfully, installing Cirrus Insight is as simple as fastening your seat belt.  You don’t have to be a Salesforce admin or a Google Apps admin to get started with Cirrus Insight.  You just have to be a user of both, and be able to click a button to install the browser extension for Chrome or Firefox.  The car insurance company GEICO would say that even a caveman can do it.  In terms of setup…no setup required!  You install it, and it just works.  Cirrus Insight is also easy to use (and keep in mind my best practices). Basically, you can go 0-60 with Cirrus Insight in just a few seconds.

Eventually, the automobile metaphor breaks down. As easy as it is to install and use, Cirrus Insight isn’t just kitsch, like a hula dancer on the dashboard. Quite the contrary. It improves the usefulness of both your Gmail inbox and Salesforce – and it leaves your dashboard free for other knickknacks.

• We released several miscellaneous fixes, including a fix for issues with Activity times being set incorrectly for some users.

Read the full article on TMCnet.

Continuing from last week, where I talked about checking contextual details, logging calls, and ensuring changes are being logged in Salesforce, here are some more tips to help you get the most out of Salesforce and Cirrus Insight.

Search Before Creating

It’s a simple feature, but one of my favorites: creating a lead or a contact from just an email address. The address doesn’t even have to be in the email header. You click the blue Cirrus Insight icon next to an email address from anywhere in the text and Cirrus Insight checks Salesforce and displays the contact or lead information it finds. If it can’t find an email address in Salesforce, the sidebar displays an option to create a new Lead or Contact.

This is where some discretion is needed. If you’re a one-person company or you have a pretty good idea what contacts and leads are in your org, take advantage of the sidebar buttons to create a new lead or contact. However, because data integrity is a frequent headache of mine, if you’re rep in a larger org, use the little blue magnifying glass in the upper right of the sidebar to double check. The contact or lead could be in Salesforce without – or with a different – email address. It’s an extra step, made convenient by Cirrus Insight, for which your Salesforce Administrator will thank you.

Highlights vs. Background Noise

Email takes many forms, from formal letters to simple back-and-forth conversations. Be sure to send the important stuff to Salesforce and keep the mundane missives in Gmail. If an email contains an “action item,” marks progress, or contains notable language, I add it to Salesforce. Sometimes those mundane back-and-forths become notable back-and-forths, which I add to Salesforce once they’ve reached a resolution. This keeps the Completed Tasks related list in Salesforce populated with relevant information.