Philipp Stelzer: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab podcast. I'm here together with Janis. Hello, Janis.

Janis Zech: Hey, Philipp. How are you?

Philipp Stelzer: I'm good. And we want to try a new format today. So it's just the two of us talking. Typically, we always have guests, and that's great. We want to learn from and with our guests and talk about a lot of interesting topics where they are better experts than we are. But there's also a couple of topics that are worth diving a bit deeper into where we spend some time upfront preparing these topics and where we also feel that we are quite knowledgeable on a operational and strategic level. And one of these topics is activity capture. So we thought this is one that is definitely worth diving deeply into because we're talking to many customers and people who are interested in that topic on a daily basis. We developed our own solution. We run that for a couple of years now quite successfully, work with a lot of large customers, and there's just a lot of problems and such as general foundational knowledge that is worth sharing from our point of view. So best practices, things to look out for when you think about that topic. And lastly, it's also a topic that is just universally important because activities are such a strong indicator for your sales velocity, for rep performance, for transparency. So there's lots of different use cases, and we're gonna dive into those in a second. But, yeah, that's basically it. Right? So important topic, and we wanna do a deep dive for these.

Janis Zech: Yeah. This is an experiment. Let's see how it goes. Let us know, right, if you like this format or not. But this is essentially the key topic of this episode today.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Let's kick it off. Janis, I think you've seen an interesting poll on LinkedIn recently. Do you wanna share what you've seen there?

Janis Zech: Yeah. The poll was actually launched by me, and so, basically, the question I asked was, how do you capture activities in Salesforce? And the answer was EAC. So Einstein Activity Capture, thirty percent. Third party tool, thirty five percent, Salesforce for Outlook or Gmail, thirty percent, and other, five percent. It got eighty votes, so take it with a pinch of salt. But based on our hundreds of conversations with the market, I'd say this sounds about right. And, yeah, I think it's interesting to hear what folks are using. And with that, maybe let's kick off with the question, what is Salesforce activity capture, and what isn't it? What are we actually talking about here? Because activities obviously are pretty broad. So back to you, Philipp. What is it? What is it not?

Philipp Stelzer: Sure. And so I think what is activity capture in general? Right? Like, independent from Salesforce, it really is the whole effort of trying to get all these activities where you basically have an interaction with your respective prospects or customers into your CRM. In our case, of course, that would be Salesforce. And these activities can be different kinds of activities. So I would say the most important ones are emails and meetings. This is also what we are focusing on, and that includes, of course, the video calls as well, which is also a meeting. And then you have some other activities like telephony, letters, faxes, offline, print campaigns. So, like, sending letters and stuff like this, discount vouchers, whatever your business kind of needs and requires and what works for your business as an activity channel can count as an activity. For the sake of focus today, we will focus on the email and meeting activities. For one, I would say, important reason, first of all, I would say the key thing here actually really is phone calls. That would be, like, an additional really important activity to make sure to capture. But the landscape here is so diverse that really all these telephony providers like RingCentral, eight by eight, and so on, they have their own integrations into Salesforce, and those are quite good.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Those work, and you don't need, like, another activity capture solution. They already provide that out of the box.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Aircall is another one. It has a super deep integration. For that part, I don't think we need to cover it. So for the sake of focus, we really want to focus on emails and meetings for now. Maybe next question. Why is this actually important?

Janis Zech: Philipp, you already alluded to this in your intro speech, but I think we typically see a few reasons why people want to improve their activity capture setup. Number one being reporting on the full funnel. Right? So, typically, many sales processes, whether you even if you're a PLG, start with the meeting. Right? So, yes, you have the sales checkout, but then in your mid market enterprise accounts, you start with a meeting. And then you have a type of meeting. Right? So you might have a discovery, then you might have another discovery, demonstration of value, negotiation, procurement meetings. Right? So a bunch of different type of meetings. And, obviously, you wanna make sure that you track all these meetings properly in your CRM to be able to look at your full funnel. And this doesn't stop. Right? This doesn't stop on the left side of the bow tie. It continues with onboardings, QBRs, renewal discussions, expansion discussions. Right? There's probably multiple funnels you want to track, and for that, the meeting object is really crucial. The second reason is rep activities. Right? So really understanding by rep. And, again, this can be AEs. It can be CSMs. It can be AMs or SDRs. I think in the SDR world, this is very common. There's a lot of activity goals tracking, but clearly, what we're seeing is people being interested in rep activities, so AEs, AMs, CSMs as well, understanding how many meetings per week do they have. Are they at capacity? This is one crucial question. And what does it actually mean to be at capacity? Right? There's a rule of eight meetings per week. Is this still true if AI automates a lot of the repetitive workflows? That's a different discussion, but generally, right, are you at capacity or not to make a decision whether you wanna hire someone new or not? And then how many emails being sent back and forth, how many replies do you get, and then, obviously, looking at that in leaderboards. Right? So comparing what's actually happening on the activity front as well. The third one is opportunity and account activity. Right? Activity capture solutions map activities to the right records in Salesforce, obviously, including opportunities — the challenge we'll get to when we go through the common pitfalls. And opportunity activities are crucial to understand, similar to rep activity, like how many meetings do you typically need to close an opportunity. Now is there a difference between closed won and closed lost opportunities? What is a strong indicator of success? Is it email reply rate? Is it the velocity of email? Is it the time to follow-up after a meeting? So you can do a lot of interesting things when you have the activities in your CRM. You can really dive deep and try to understand the customer journey. And whether that's your new logo, expansion, or renewal funnel, they obviously have very different characteristics. But, again, you need the activities to take into consideration as one leading indicator of success. And then last one, Philipp, what's the fourth one that you are often seeing?

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. The fourth one often evolves around the topic of automations. So you mentioned, right, the poll in the beginning, and, essentially, the result of the poll is that, I think, thirty five percent or thirty percent were using Einstein Activity Capture. And a big problem with this is that you actually don't have those records stored into the core Salesforce database. And if you haven't stored an object or record into the core Salesforce database, then you cannot do automations with it. You cannot trigger automations or flows, and you cannot retrieve any information from that within flows. So you're completely, yeah, left out of a very important feature that Salesforce has. It's amazing. Right? Like, building automations right directly in your CRM is so powerful. This is, I think, one of the big benefits that Salesforce has at the moment and one of the key advantages over solutions like HubSpot. But with Einstein, you're completely left out of it. And emails and meetings in particular actually are good indicators. So let me make it a bit more tangible and less abstract. So one example here would be you have a new lead coming in, and then that lead — and you are able to schedule, like, a successful meeting with that lead. That might be a good automation to move the status of the lead to the next stage automatically. So you basically take away admin work from the SDR, from the BDR by using the meeting object to automate the status of the lead. And you can do similar things, for example, with an account. So when was the last email sent? When was the last meeting scheduled with a major account that you have that has, like, a high annual recurring revenue, hopefully. Right? You wanna keep that. It's important to focus on net dollar retention at the moment. So, obviously, you wanna make sure that you have quarterly check ins. Right? So you can build automations with this. If the last meeting is x weeks or days or months ago, then, yeah, build an automation for that, create a task that automatically is pushed into the account manager's user, and then they have to take care of that and complete that task within, like, a specific time frame. Otherwise, you trigger another warning or a Slack message and so on. I could go on. So automations is just extremely powerful, especially with something like an email or a meeting activity, and they can really take a lot of work away from the seller. And I think this should always be a goal or, like, a valuable goal to work towards if you work in revenue operations.

Janis Zech: Awesome. Yeah. So let's maybe move to some common pitfalls we've been observing. So we wanna go through seven pitfalls to avoid and then also give some recommendation on how to fix them.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Let's start with the first one, only manually logging emails and meetings. So relying on manual logging via most often what is called Salesforce for Outlook or Gmail, which is a Chrome extension or Outlook add in, which sits on the right side. And there's, I'd say, three main problems. It's very unreliable, and it's unreliable because it's completely manual. So after the email, you need to basically search the record, attribute it to the right record, and then click log to Salesforce. And this just often doesn't happen. Right? We have seen everything from twenty four to fifty two percent of activities overall being logged with this method. So meaning sometimes up to seventy five percent not being logged, which is massive. And often, these solutions then also require the users to constantly reauthenticate, which is very annoying. You probably get approached in RevOps from the users asking whether this is actually working. So there's also very limited reliability then you need to look into. You don't know which users are actually doing it, which users are not doing it, so there's no central way of managing all this. For the reps, it's actually time consuming. It's another thing on their plate to do out of already too many things. And then a really big one that is actually often overlooked is that it's actually just syncing outgoing emails. Right? So it doesn't sync the incoming emails, and the incoming emails are what you actually wanna get. Right? These are very important indicators whether you're having real customer interactions or not because, obviously, I haven't seen many deals that happen without people replying to emails. Probably none. And so this is quite important to know. I'd say those are the three main ones. Philipp, anything to add from your experience?

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Just actually from yesterday, basically, where, like, someone I met with showed me how they currently use the Outlook add in from Salesforce, which, by the way, is being sunset, so they're not continuing working on that. That's a big problem. Part of their move to move everyone to Einstein Activity Capture over time, I assume. But, basically, it was showing me how they do it at the moment. And for each email, it required four clicks for the seller because they were logging to a custom object. So it was even more complicated than just logging to a contact. I think with a contact, it's more like two or three clicks, but the custom object was even more. So for each email, four clicks, and then only the outgoing emails. And then imagine you have thirty, forty emails, right, per week. Some people have that per day easily as well. Right? So how many clicks is that? It's completely insane. So, obviously, no one is gonna do that all the time. Right? They might have a good day, and they do it a few times, but they're not gonna do it all the time. And you can also log emails after the fact, so after they were sent. So, also, incoming emails can be logged theoretically, but you would need to go into the thread of that email, select that email, and then open up the add in and then do the logging. So it's even worse. So I think, like you said, I think it's completely fair to say, really, the flow is optimized for outgoing emails and not for incoming emails, which, yeah, is a problem. And maybe to continue with that, so I think the second pitfall that we have on our list is using BCC for the email sync. This is also something that is used with the Outlook add in, and particularly from Salesforce. So they add in a Salesforce email address into the BCC field. So it's hidden from the recipients, but it's then used to store that email in Salesforce to the correct object. And, like, generally, it works. Right? So it's a flow that definitely works. But, again, it only works for the outgoing emails automatically. When you get a reply, it doesn't automatically map it properly. And, of course, this flow also doesn't work for meeting logging. And, generally, I would say it's just like that's not really the intention of the BCC field so much. So I think, yeah, it's a bit of a misuse, and I think over time, it will, yeah, just generally disappear as one of the feasible technical solutions out there. I think it's a bit more stable if you inject code into the HTML of the email, generally. If you add a pixel or something like this, if you add a unique identifier in there, this is a more stable, more scalable approach overall.

Janis Zech: Yeah. So little story. When I was twenty three and started my previous company, we used SugarCRM, and we were very cheap, and we also used BCC and then migrated to Salesforce and used third party tools. Yeah. It's often something that people start with. If you look at the poll, this would probably fall in the five percent other, but it's not used widely.

Philipp Stelzer: No. Okay. Let's come to a big elephant in the room that is used thirty percent of the time, if not sometimes more, Einstein Activity Capture. Janis, you've become really an expert in this. You even had a webinar with Matt from RevOps Co-op on it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. We put that into the show notes.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Let's talk about Einstein Activity Capture.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Einstein Activity Capture — how do you call it if you trash someone? That's what I mean. So not treasure, like a pirate treasure.

Philipp Stelzer: Alright. Okay. Yeah. Einstein Activity Capture, I think, as mentioned also in the webinar, and I think you can still find that if you search for it, common pitfalls with activity capture in Salesforce, I think was the title. So you can find it on the RevOps Co-op website and also, I think, in our resources, getweflow.com/resources. You'll find it there as well. Einstein Activity Capture generally, I think, built with good intent, but not so well executed. I think, basically, past the actual requirements and use cases that customers and Salesforce have. So it feels a bit like an upselling motion by Salesforce to push you into their Einstein suite, which is quite expensive, which is not easy to calculate in terms of costs, especially if you do see more advanced analytics features of it. And Einstein Activity Capture is like a way to push people into that motion there with a free solution, I think, for up to one hundred users per Salesforce account to get started with activity capture. And if you're just interested in reading the email exchange on contacts and leads, I think, sure, that's, like, a way to start. But then you very quickly will hit the wall because here are, like, all the things that you cannot do. Right? So the activities are not stored as actual records in Salesforce core database. I mentioned that before. So, basically, you cannot run any automations because of this, any flows. Right? Completely prohibited from that, which is a huge downside if you wanna optimize the selling time for your team. Right? So especially if you don't have the budget to maybe hire a lot of people, maybe it's better to at least invest into, like, an activity capture solution so you can actually build proper automations then and save time for your selling team. So that's just something to be aware of. And you cannot build flexible reporting. You get, like, one basically out of the box report from Salesforce that they will just create for you. You cannot adjust and customize it, and you can also not build your own reports because, again, the data is not stored in the core Salesforce database. That's a huge downside, and this will also affect you if you use other third party BI tools if you have, I don't know, any other BI platform. Looker. Tableau. Power BI. If you wanna use any of these tools, then you can't, right, because you cannot export it. You don't have access to the core raw data here. So I would say you actually don't own your activity data in that case, which, yeah, is a big red flag for me if activities are a key aspect of your selling motion. Then two more I wanna mention here is, first, mapping to opportunities is quite unreliable. I would say it works more or less if you have just one opportunity per account. But let's face it, like, you typically have more than one. So many companies use renewal opportunities, new business opportunities, existing business opportunities, upselling opportunities, whatever. And right? So you have different record types of opportunities. They are all assigned to the parent account, and the contacts under that parent account, they might be on multiple of these opportunities. So there is no clear one to one link that Einstein could follow. So, yeah, it basically just fails if you have more than one opportunity per account. And the other downside here is that you actually cannot log to custom objects, and you cannot create any custom logging rules either.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That's a problem. Many companies use custom objects. I would say in our case, it's like twenty to thirty percent of our customers log to custom objects as well. And that's an important part of their business. That's an important part of the flexibility that Salesforce gives you. But then if their own activity capture solution cannot cover that, yeah, I think that's another problem that is good to be aware of. Maybe one thing to add on the mapping to opportunities because this comes up sometimes and it's maybe not clear. So Salesforce has the Salesforce for Outlook or Gmail add in slash extension, but this is not connected to EAC. So these are two completely different services. So EAC completely runs in the background as background logging. We call it background logging. So there's no interface for users to adjust the suggested mapping to the record. And the problem with this mapping to opportunities, right, if you don't have good contact roles, which is the link between the contact and the opportunity, then Einstein doesn't know which opportunity to log it to, and so you don't have good opportunity activity data on the opportunity layer and the opportunity object. So this is really important to remember. I think most of you probably know this, but still just wanted to point it out.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Great point. You already hear that activity capture looks really easy from the outside, but it's a lot more complicated when you dive in. And I think when you look at the landscape in go to market tech, a lot of tools can sync activities to Salesforce. Right? So you have your routing tool. Right? You might have a sales engagement platform. You might have a revenue intelligence platform. You might have a CS platform. Right? And they all sync activities to Salesforce. The problem is that often creates duplicates because it is not clear who actually syncs what activities, how, to Salesforce. Most of these activity capture solutions are not advanced activity capture solutions. They basically do it because it's a checkbox item on their roadmap, but they don't, for example, combine a background logging with an Outlook add in or a Gmail extension and Google Calendar extension so that you have the reliability of automated background logging that is making sure that everything happens, but then also the ability for users to see and adjust suggested mapping. This often then also goes into the algorithm. Right? So there's a lot of details to solve this well. And if you have five tools syncing activities, and, yeah, you have duplicates, and very often you have challenges in reconciliation on the reporting side, so reporting often becomes very chaotic. And then also the mapping logic of these tools are often very different in terms of what they map to. Most then map to leads and contacts because you have a unique email address that is used as an identifier, so that's easy to map to those. But then if you wanna map to the opportunities or custom objects, that's not possible or often not done in the end. And then sometimes you even have some tools logging activities or emails as tasks. Others do it as email messages, which is another object in Salesforce for email logging and email storing. Yeah. I think the takeaway is this is something that is a problem, especially if you become a lot larger company. Right? So I think what we are seeing, there's a trend towards consolidation, basically treating this almost like your VoIP provider. You have an infrastructure layer that basically consolidates activity capture via one advanced solution.

Janis Zech: Okay. Yeah. Moving on. Mapping to opportunities, custom objects, that's often not covered properly by most solutions out there. We mentioned this specifically for Einstein Activity Capture, but it's also something to be aware of when you just go shopping for third party solutions. Many solutions out there for opportunities, they basically just look, hey, is there a contact set as contact role to opportunity? If yes, then we're gonna log to that. But that's not enough. Right? So a more advanced solution, they look for more, like, strong links that give you, like, a good idea of whether there is a connection, like past communication, for example, checking the stage of the opportunity, checking the creation date of the opportunity. There's lots of different variables that could go into that. So more advanced solutions, they have a proper algorithm for that, I think, is fair to say. And then the same is true for custom objects. Right? So I think manually logging to a custom object is pretty straightforward, of course. You just select it and you manually log to it. But then I think the tricky thing is here, do you have a tool that actually gives you, like, a way to automate that as well? So that is always something to look out for. Yeah. And then I think just to move on, another issue here is to use — and this is the sixth one — to use sales engagement solutions for activity capture. It's also something we commonly see. Right? I have nothing against sales engagement solutions, just to be very clear. Right? I think many people use them. They are great. No problem here. Right? If you wanna automate or save time, sending a lot of email sequences, doing follow ups, and so on, they are great. So the solutions I am talking about here is, like, Salesloft, Outreach, Apollo, and so on. However, if you're using them only for activity capture, then you are massively overpaying because they are solutions that can do a lot of things. Their purpose is not the activity capture piece of it, but this is actually something we commonly see during discovery with some of the customers that we now work with is that, yeah, they basically come from a place where they have all these different solutions. And somehow over time, it happens that — let's just pick one — Outreach became their activity capture solution for the entire company. So they're paying, like, thirty licenses of Outreach, but, actually, for twenty five of those, they are just using it for activity capture because only the BDRs in the company use it for sequencing and maybe one or two AEs, but the rest is actually not using it for sequencing. So just for activity capture. Wow. That's a lot of money that you're paying for basically using just, I don't know, two or three percent of the capabilities of that solution. That is something to definitely look out for. And the other part here on that is that these sales engagement solutions often use the task object to log to, which is fine. Right? You can do that. It's okay for reporting, but I think it is actually better to use the email message object and also the event object properly. So make good use of the standard objects that Salesforce gives you. This puts you in a better position moving forward. It gives you better reporting. It makes it more readable in the CRM. You have the from information in there so that you can understand how many emails were received, sent. You can do things like calculate reply rate. There's a bunch of benefits to that, and most sales engagement solutions don't do that, because that's not their focus. That's not the product that they are building and offering. So not blaming anyone. Right? So it's totally fine that they don't do that. But if you wanna do proper activity capture, you should.

Philipp Stelzer: And this one is then related to our seventh pitfall, not tracking activities for all customer facing teams. So I think, Janis, you mentioned this. Right? Stay with this example, right, Outreach being used for the BDRs, SDRs, and then sometimes you have AE licenses because in the last couple of years, it's been in vogue that AE full cycle AE, but then CSMs didn't get one. Right? And so you suddenly have the CSMs not tracking activities or using yet another different tool for activity capture. And, yeah, I think that's another thing we're seeing.

Janis Zech: Yeah. So these are our seven pitfalls. And in the interest of time, because we also have to jump to many more customer meetings soon, how do you fix it? These were now a bunch of pitfalls and challenges we're seeing. And look. I mean, I think, quite honestly, right, like, always try to fix it yourself. Right? I think the first step here would be to really understand your requirements and look. And do you actually have a problem or not? Right? Is this actually important to leadership to track things like sales capacity, full funnel analytics, right, and deeper analysis of leading indicators for success for both new logo and renewal expansion pipeline. If it is, right, write down your requirements. Okay. Let's make some examples. Right? This should be reportable. I should be able to sync both incoming and outgoing emails, and they should be permanently stored in Salesforce so I can analyze them via Looker. And, also, I wanna have them mapped to the right Salesforce object. And if your current setup doesn't check the boxes, then I think it would make sense to just look at different solutions out there. Right? Schedule, like, two or three calls with different providers. Look at them. Share your requirement lists with them. Go through it. And after that, you can decide, is it worth going down that road or not and actually trying to change this? Maybe one thing to recommend here, like, we're big fans of trying those solutions before you buy them. Right? Like, typical onboarding for Weflow activity capture takes thirty to forty five minutes, all done centrally. So there's very limited change management actually needed to go out and try it. And before you invest in it, schedule the demos, you know, make a shortlist, run a quick pilot two weeks, and then make a decision whether this is really what you need or not. That's typically how we would recommend to go about it. We could obviously now go about what is the core requirements to the solution. Right? Maybe that's another episode at some point. Right? Like, how does advanced activity capture look like? If you want us to record something like that, please ping us. Let us know. We always love to hear from you. And, also, if you hated this, please let us know as much as, you know, when you loved it.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Really appreciate you listening to this. I hope it wasn't too dull and too tactical, but, yeah, that's what we've always tried to do here. And, yeah, we'll work on the next topic, and thank you so much for listening.

Janis Zech: Thank you. And go check out getweflow.com/resources because I think there's also some nice cheat sheets around activity capture that can help you find the right approach and right solution for your use cases, for your problems. Just keep that in mind. We put a lot of resources on there for RevOps professionals like you. Thank you.