Salesforce-Microsoft love grows with SalesforceIQ-Outlook integration

Salesforce announced today that its SalesforceIQ intelligence product now integrates with Microsoft Outlook, which happens to be the most used business email program on the planet with over 400 million users on Outlook.com alone.

The product being released today is called SalesforceIQ Inbox for Outlook. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but the point is that it takes that existing Inbox product and extends it to Outlook.

SalesforceIQ is the product that was born as RelateIQ, which Salesforce bought in July, 2014 for $390 million. It became SalesforceIQ last year at Dreamforce and the company founders, who have remained with Salesforce have been adding onto the product ever since, Steve Loughlin, CEO and co-founder at the company told TechCrunch.

Since the SalesforceIQ team came on board, they have been working to bring the functionality to a range of platforms including iOS, Android and a Chrome browser extension.

All of this is good, but up until today, it didn’t integrate with Outlook. Given the popularity of Outlook, and the on-going love fest between Salesforce and Microsoft, it seems like this kind of integration was inevitable.

“This is an important milestone, given size of Outlook,” Loughlin said. “With many customers using both products, and the companies working well together, it’s really a no-brainer and this is a great way to create value,” he explained.

SalesforceIQ was a natural match for Salesforce because it provides a link between CRM, email and the customer’s social data, pulling all of this information together inside the inbox where reps tend to be working anyway. What’s more, it doesn’t force them to switch between programs and manually compile the data or make connections themselves.

Alan Lepofsky, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research says SalesforceIQ is part of a new generation of tools using algorithms and machine intelligence to help people discover content relevant to the context they are working in. This type of integration can be tremendously efficient for busy sales people.

“When working in email sales reps can now discover everything they need to know about a prospect or customer without leaving their inbox. Even better, their email can begin to make suggestions to them about who to contact, when to schedule meetings, and even how to respond to questions,” Lepofsky explained.

The SalesforceIQ Inbox for Outlook product is available today for Outlook.com users for $25 per user per month. Outlook desktop integration is coming later this year.