MOBILITY SPOTLIGHT:Absolute Automation Keeps Your Email from Getting Out of Control

The modern sales team uses email more than any other sales tool. However, while email has increased the sales team’s ability to communicate with customers, it’s also created problems.

In many sales environments, important project-related emails are created and stored across the individual inboxes of project participants. This makes it difficult (or even impossible) for team members to find the right email needed at the right time to move the sales cycle forward. In addition, as personnel changes occur, important project data can be lost altogether when email accounts are abandoned and deleted.

Absolute Automation allows a sales team to track emails, regardless of the client application (like Outlook, Gmail, BlackBerry, etc.). It automates the logging of all inbound and outbound emails, and makes it more convenient for sales personnel to locate emails that are important to their sales activities.

What We Like about It:
The feature that excites us about this product is that, unlike salesforce’s Outlook plug-in, Absolute Automation handles all those other email clients that are scattered around in customer land. Without that comprehensive message handling, there are always going to be some customers whose communications fall through cracks. And that’s simply not acceptable.

The benefits of email logging are enormous from a sales process standpoint. Because email is now used for so many different sales activities (qualifying prospects, setting appointments, negotiating, etc.), improving a sales teams’ ability to use email inevitably results in faster sales cycles, satisfied customers, and (ultimately) a greater number of closes.

That being said, this is not an email marketing package, nor does it have the kind of muscle that one finds in some kinds of enterprise-level email logging facilities. However, the monthly expense to run Absolute Automation is so low that it would pay for itself the first time somebody used it to retrieve a key customer email that otherwise might be lost.

One word of warning: email logging can also be used to track employees personal emails. You should therefore counsel your employees to move all their personal email to a non-business address if they don’t want other people to be able to view the contents.

Profile:
Partner: iHance
Application: Absolute Automation
Application Published: July 2007
Average User Rating: Five out of five stars
Pricing Plan: Free for 15 days, then $10 per user per month
More Info: www.iHance.com