A few months ago, I was speaking with a friend who is also a real estate agent about a new job I was starting. I was explaining to her how the company I would be working for (you guessed it, BrainSell), has been around for almost 25 years helping companies analyze their internal processes and challenges, and providing advice on how to implement technologies like customer relationship management (CRM) to optimize and grow their business.

Her response to this was something to the effect of, “you know, I understand the value of using my CRM, but it is so annoying to have to go back and forth from my email. Why can’t it all happen right from there? Is there a solution for that?”

At the time, I was still a week away from starting at BrainSell, so my response was, “I don’t know, but there must be. You can’t be the only person who feels this way.” Fast forward to today, and I can say for certain there are definitely tools that will help make working between Outlook and your CRM easier and more productive through integration of the two platforms.

In fact, SugarCRM offers their own native plug-in for Outlook. And while it is a good integration and the out-of-the-box functionality is convenient – the mostly view-only and email archiving support may leave you wanting more.

At $12 per user/month, Implicit FrontEnd is a great example of a low-cost CRM Outlook integration tool that actually has the potential to boost the ROI of your CRM investment through increased adoption and reduced data entry. With FrontEnd, users are able to stay within Outlook to do almost all of their CRM work.

This short video, although it only scrapes the surface in terms of benefits, shows a side-by-side of both of these integrations in action and provides a basic understanding of how they work.

Ready to take a deeper dive into both of these CRM Outlook integration tools? Watch this on-demand webinar learn more about how you can increase sales team productivity, drive CRM user adoption, and see a side-by-side comparison of Implicit FrontEnd and Sugar’s out-of-the-box Outlook plug-in.