Engineering and product teams who build CRM applications face an increasingly crowded technology marketplace. In order to differentiate their products from the competition, leading sales and marketing software providers must give their end users timely, contextual insight that accelerates the sales cycle and generates more revenue.
With customer demand for intelligent, automated features at an all-time high, developers and product managers are relying on Productivity Infrastructure Platforms to help them bring new features to market faster. As a result, companies like Pipedrive and Dialpad realize significant ROI gains by working with productivity infrastructure partners like Nylas.
Engineering resources are spread painfully thin when it comes to building CRM infrastructure, integrating with and managing a variety of unstructured data sources, adding new features, managing bug fixes, and curating a compelling user experience. As a result, developers have little to no time to build features that meet CRM user demand for optimized efficiency.
Effective CRM product teams know that to remain competitive, they must offer unique features that add value by making end users more productive. With their engineering counterparts already strapped for time and resources, Product Managers are often forced to make painful product roadmap trade-offs that backlog or eliminate high-value intelligence and automation features. This often results in decreased NPS scores, customer churn, and loss of market share.
As for CRM end users, the average salesperson spends just one-third of their time selling. With over 50 percent of the workday dedicated to administrative tasks, there’s considerable opportunity for CRM providers to add value by increasing reps’ efficiency. Slow sales response times present another costly challenge. With 35-50% of deals won by the vendor who connects first but the average lead response time nearing two days, sales teams prefer a CRM platform with built-in lead triaging.
Productivity Infrastructure platforms give developers API-centric solutions for connecting to a variety of unstructured data sources, as well as extracting key business intelligence, automating workflows, and delivering a deeply contextual user experience via configurable front-end components. Productivity Infrastructure eliminates the need to build from scratch and maintain complex integrations, allowing engineering teams to reallocate time to other strategic initiatives.
Product teams leverage Productivity Infrastructure to quickly bring high-value intelligence, automation, and user experience features to market. They know advanced data extraction, processing, and security, as well as workflow automations, make it easy to differentiate their CRM from competitors.
Additionally, Productivity Infrastructure capabilities like automated scheduling and intelligent lead routing are quickly becoming must-haves for sales and marketing end users as they see their revenues (and commissions) trend upward. As a result, Productivity Infrastructure adoption grew by 100% in 2020.
Productivity Infrastructure platforms support a variety of CRM use cases, including:
Nylas is a leading Productivity Infrastructure platform that helps product and engineering teams launch and scale high-impact features without sacrificing performance, reliability, security, or velocity. We’ve worked with customers like Pipedrive, Dialpad, LionDesk, and more to build industry-leading CRMs.
Pipedrive is a leading CRM designed to help small sales teams manage intricate or lengthy sales processes with the philosophy of activity-based selling. Serving over 30,000 companies worldwide, they needed a scalable multi-provider email integration that extended beyond basic BCC capabilities. By leveraging the Nylas Email API to integrate with Office 365, Outlook, Exchange, and IMAP at scale, Pipedrive added millions in revenue to their bottom line and saved months of engineering time.
Dialpad is an AI-powered cloud communications platform that enables smarter business communications for sales reps, support agents, and more. With more than 70,000 customers, they needed a secure, reliable way to integrate with all of the email, calendar, and contacts providers their customers use. It took a single Dialpad Engineer just two days to integrate with the Nylas Email API, Calendar API, and Contacts API. With all the engineering tine saved, Dialpad was able to focus on building voice intelligence and AI capabilities, significantly strengthening its competitive position in the market.
Administrative tasks cost the United States economy approximately $2.87 trillion in lost productivity, part of an estimated $5 trillion globally. CRM platforms have a massive market opportunity to reduce this task load by adding productivity features that contextualize and automate scheduling, email, and other functions.
Productivity Infrastructure offers engineering and product teams a lean-code alternative to building new features from scratch, accelerating product roadmaps and time-to-market. By eliminating complex, one-off integrations and their ongoing maintenance, developers and product managers are free to build features that give their platform a competitive advantage. As a result, CRM end users benefit from increased productivity and revenue generation.
Nylas is a proven Productivity Infrastructure platform with products that accelerate development at every stage of the software supply chain. From multi-provider connectivity to enhanced security features, intelligent automation capabilities to configurable front-end solutions, the Nylas Platform securely connects to every email, calendar, and contacts provider in the world, empowering sales teams to communicate with confidence. Automatically extract key information from emails and calendar invites to deliver contextual sales insight, automated workflows, and frictionless user experiences that make your CRM the MVP of the sales team.
Explore the transformative impact of AI, the evolution of global connectivity, and the reshaping of workplace culture in the digital era in Nylas’ 2024 predictions.
Use the Nylas Email API and Ruby to group email threads into a single view, and easily access complete conversations within your app.
Saylor is a sales veteran turned Senior Product Marketing Manager. At Nylas, she leads the enterprise product marketing strategy and execution. In her free time, you’ll find her adventuring around Colorado and beyond with her yellow Lab.
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