Salesloft partners with Nylas to power MS Exchange integration, unlocking new enterprise market

Sales engagement unicorn fuels explosive enterprise growth by adding Nylas-powered native email and scheduling features

How does a sales engagement platform consistently deliver category-defining features that expand its addressable market?

Salesloft chose the Nylas Email API and Nylas Calendar API early in its product journey to deliver powerful email and calendar support to its enterprise-heavy Microsoft Exchange user base. With thousands of raving customers and a robust platform that any sales team can use to drive more revenue, Salesloft has since become the leading sales engagement platform, achieving a $1 billion valuation and surpassing $100M in annual revenue.

A platform for selling smarter, not harder

Salesloft is helping its customers transform into modern sales organizations. The company’s sales engagement platform provides a centralized productivity hub where sellers execute all of their digital selling tasks, including communicating with buyers, understanding next steps, and unlocking the critical insights they need to win more.

Thousands of the world’s most successful sales teams, including those at IBM, Shopify, Square, and Cisco, use Salesloft to close more deals and drive revenue faster. Not only has the company recently become a unicorn, but it has also exceeded $100M in annual recurring revenue.

Challenges:

Helping sales teams of all sizes drive revenue

Email is a foundational element of the Salesloft platform. “We have a long history of working with email,” explains Salesloft CTO Scott Mitchell. “Our platform acts as a fully functional email client hooked up to your personal inbox, meaning you can read, compose, send, and receive messages within Salesloft. Our flagship cadence and automation features rely on tight integrations between our software and email providers.” 

The product team at Salesloft started off with a Gmail integration, but they knew they’d inevitably need to support other popular email providers. “We wanted to give any sales organization the ability to use our platform, regardless of their industry, size, security needs, or existing technology—but at the time, we didn’t have any dedicated engineering resources for email,” notes Mitchell. 

One such provider was Microsoft Exchange, an on-premise email service popular with the enterprise. “We had a massive gap in our integrations with on-premise email providers. Exchange users tend to be from larger organizations with stricter security and data control needs. To reach the level of growth we wanted, we knew we needed to move upmarket and deliver features that attract higher-value accounts.”

To make matters more difficult, connecting to on-premise email platforms can be particularly resource-intensive. “At the time, we weren’t staffed for the world of on-premise connectivity,” says Jody Rodd, Staff Software Architect. “On-premise integrations can be mired in one-off challenges, including complex security controls, firewalls, overloaded servers, and other obstacles. These roadblocks led to a lot of headaches and frustration in the team.”

Solution:

Scalable email and calendar integrations without the headache

The Salesloft product team needed a solution that could simplify their connectivity challenges and deliver an elegant user experience. But the team couldn’t run with just any lightweight email integration solution—it also had to be a scalable, reliable platform that could keep pace with their rapidly growing user base and satisfy the stringent security protocols of enterprise customers. 

“At a fast-moving product organization, there are always more features to build and complex problems to solve,” remarks Nora Ignatius, Product Manager. “We need to prioritize ruthlessly, which is why we chose to invest in an email API solution that would alleviate most of the upfront work of building an integration as well as ongoing maintenance.” 

After conducting a thorough technical evaluation, Salesloft chose Nylas to power its Microsoft Exchange integration because they needed a platform and a team with expertise in building powerful, scalable, and secure integrations. The result is a seamless user experience where Nylas operates entirely in the background to authenticate and bi-directionally sync email data from Exchange. Users can not only send and receive emails within the platform, but they can accelerate their sales cycle by accessing Salesloft’s cadence and automation features.

Bi-directional Microsoft Exchange integration with Nylas

Rather than spending countless hours on maintenance to keep the Exchange integration live and error-free, the team only needed to interface with the Nylas dashboard. “The best part of using the Nylas Microsoft Exchange integration is that we get a single consistent interface that we can build around,” said Rodd.

Not only did the Salesloft team seamlessly integrate Microsoft Exchange with their platform, but they also integrated the Nylas Calendar API to empower their exchange users to effortlessly schedule meetings with customers and prospects. After authenticating their calendar provider, users can choose to share a personal meeting link or a list of available times with customers. The integration keeps users’ calendars private while enabling them to effortlessly book sales meetings on-demand.

Results:

Fuel rapid growth with powerful integrations 

Since implementing Nylas, Salesloft has grown tremendously. “We’ve massively increased both our user base and our annual revenue in the last five years,” says Mitchell. “Our Exchange integration helped us tap into a new market of primarily enterprise customers, which has contributed to our rapid growth.”

Meanwhile, the team is enjoying more bandwidth to build and support category-defining features. And nowhere has that impact been felt more than by Salesloft’s channel health team. “Without Nylas, our channel health team—which monitors the overall health of all of the channels we support in Salesloft, including email, messaging, and calls—would need to reallocate 25% of its resources towards resolving issues with Exchange,” remarks Mitchell. 

“Additionally, we’d need almost a full year’s worth of resources from a team of developers for continual troubleshooting and maintenance. Between our channel health team and resources for maintenance, we would need an additional 10 full-time engineers working to ensure high-quality email connectivity to our users. If we had built and managed a Microsoft Exchange integration ourselves, our staffing needs would be significantly larger.”

Instead of wasting resources on maintenance and support, the product team at Salesloft can supplement the organization’s remarkable growth with valuable and differentiating new features. Ignatius adds, “We have millions of emails sent each week. Nylas frees us up to focus on other roadmap priorities, such as delivering new features to our customers and working with our data science team on exciting new projects.”

Build exceptional user experiences with a few lines of code 

Salesloft leveraged the Nylas Email and Calendar APIs to spend less time maintaining painful integrations and more time building new features that helped elevate it to the sales engagement category leader it is today. 
If you’d like to learn more, discover how innovative healthcare, sales, human resources, and legal companies are using Nylas to build exceptional user experiences.