Challenge

Data comes in from many sources, and one of the most common is through email. Whether it’s customer data, technical or sales data, or operational data, storing it in an accessible, easily-shareable way should be the first step. Whether it’s a sales team updating a customer profile, a proposal team tracking an RFP or an engineering team managing tickets and requests, having the most up-to-date data increases efficiency and collaborative possibilities while removing the need for constant manual updates.

Salesforce is a leading CRM platform that provides softwares and applications including customer service, sales, marketing automation, and more, providing cloud-based, out-of-box tools that host all aspects of commerce for businesses of all sizes, both online and offline. However, despite the built-in analytics applications, Salesforce has multiple features that need to work in sync to provide business insights, which can cause slowdowns. Users only get a partial look into their business because the data Salesforce provides doesn’t cover every aspect of customer journeys. The way data is structured and reported in Salesforce does not allow for easy integration from a variety of data sources, and the bottleneck created by waiting for data to be ingested can cause delays to everyone from business development, sales, and analysts to procurement specialists and warehouse managers.

There’s a better way to automate data integration into Salesforce, and it’s as simple as sending an email. Follow the step-by-step guide below to be able to send data in emails directly into Salesforce without code or technical expertise.

Solution

Being able to automatically send data from emails into Salesforce removes the bottleneck and makes loading data more efficient and timely.

Connect Your Source – Setting up the email

1. Select the source and authenticate your Salesforce credential. Begin by going to “Flows” and clicking “Create New Source.”

2. Search for email and add it as your data source. Name the source and authenticate the email account.

3. Enter a name for the email source and click on “Create Email Source” and then “Save”.

On the next screen, note the email address listed and save it somewhere safe. This is the email address you will forward the data to in the next step.

You’ll see a confirmation screen where you can change the name, view the source directly, or view detected datasets. Once you’re ready, click “Done”.

Send to Salesforce

1. Go to “My Flows” and find the email source you previously set up, then click the “Deliver” icon to set up the transfer.

Once your credentials are authenticated, you can configure the Salesforce source template that you want to draw data from. You can choose from a list of endpoints in a drop-down menu. There are built-in endpoints, but you can also select to check the metadata of each attribute, then specify the attribute names in the SQL query. You can test the endpoint after entering the SQL query, and an overview of the customer data will be shown on the right, allowing you to confirm that the query produces the desired result.

Hit “Create” on the upper right corner, and you will see the Nexsets that Nexla automatically detected.

“Save & Close” the transformation, then click on “Activate” to get the data feed URL.

Conclusion

Nexla provides both highly flexible configurability and simplicity. You can customize your field selection by creating advanced data flows. Basically, you can put in your own “WHERE” clause at the point of setting up the source.

With Nexla, getting Salesforce data to anywhere is extremely simple and can be done in minutes with just a few clicks, meaning that any data user can self-service any time with little to no technical knowledge. This way, the sales manager, marketing analyst, procurement specialist, warehouse manager, or anyone that uses Salesforce can get data independently and apply it to their use cases. Our e-commerce/retail customers see a significant improvement in efficiency while enjoying the customizability.

If you’re ready to integrate your data and put it in the hands of the people who use it, get a demo or book your free data mesh consultation today and learn how much more your data can do when everyone has access. For more on data, check out the other articles on Nexla’s blog.