What does SalesforceIQ mean for Cirrus Insight?
This year was my third Dreamforce. With every passing year, the crowd of blue backpacks becomes a little less intimidating, and I find I’m most interested in the conversations in line at Starbucks or on the lawns outside Moscone. After Benioff’s keynote, one of the comments I kept hearing was, “Salesforce IQ looks an awful lot like Cirrus Insight...wonder what that means for me [as a Cirrus user]”?
Indeed, they have similarities, on the surface at least. Here’s Salesforce IQ:
image credit: Salesforce
and here’s Cirrus Insight for Gmail:
image credit: Cirrus Insight
We caught up with our friends at Cirrus Insight to chat about what the differences are between Salesforce IQ and Cirrus Insight, what impact this announcement has for current Cirrus customers, and what else is brewing over in Cirrus-land.
First off, what are the differences between SalesforceIQ and Cirrus Insight?
Cirrus Insight and SalesforceIQ are very different. SalesforceIQ is the re-branded RelateIQ and is primarily a CRM for small and medium sized business. It competes with free CRM offerings like HubSpot or Insightly. It’s important to note that RelateIQ isn’t a lite version of Salesforce; it runs on a separate cloud on Amazon Web Services and includes an email connector app.
Cirrus Insight, on the other hand, provides anintegration between all the major email platforms (Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, iOS, Android) and every edition of Salesforce.
What does SalesforceIQ/new Gmail plugin announcement mean for Cirrus customers?
For the end user, Cirrus Insight is much more robust than SalesforceIQ in its email integration features, including custom objects, calendar sync, and more [see Cirrus Insight’s recent blog post for a full feature rundown and comparison]. Cirrus Insight has been developing and improving it’s product for years with the goal to let users update Salesforce as you work, keeping the focus on your constituents.
The SalesforceIQ announcement is great publicity for the message we’ve been touting for years that CRM is better in your inbox. It’s the Spotify effect: Apple Music’s release created a lot of buzz around online streaming that ended up boosting Spotify’s business, and we predict the same thing happening for email-CRM integration. Now our challenge is staying in front of the hype.
How do SalesforceIQ and Cirrus Insight compare to other email plugin products like HubSpot Sidekick?
SalesforceIQ looks like a direct response to Hubspot Sidekick...both are aimed at bringing CRM and email closer together. Sidekick connects to Salesforce, but is primarily focused on using HubSpot as the system of record. Therefore, Cirrus still is a preferable choice for most Salesforce-HubSpot customers who treat Salesforce as their main system of record.
How does SalesforceIQ pricing compare to Cirrus Insight?
Right now SalesforceIQ is still in beta and is presently free (with pricing expected to be announced in 2016) so it’s hard to say how it will compare. It’s possible that it could be similar to Salesforce Wave (announced at last year’s Dreamforce) which has a relatively expensive list price but is not yet publicly available.
What else is new for Cirrus Insight?
We’re pretty proud of our new Outlook connector which was recently released and has been getting great feedback so far. We envision this being a great alternative to Salesforce for Outlook, which has stability issues for many users. Soon we want Cirrus Insight for Outlook to be able to do as much as our Google Apps integration. Our ultimate goal is to be Microsoft/Google agnostic and have an integration app for you no matter what email platform and email client you use.
Interested in chatting with us about how to integrate Cirrus Insight and other apps with your Salesforce instance?
