Today Boston-based Sanebox announced Salesforce integration to help make messages from Salesforce a priority in a user’s inbox. The company, which bills itself as the cure to email overload, is an email inbox filtering tool which attempts to separate out the emails that need immediate attention. Today’s Salesforce integration aims to make it easier for salespeople to see and respond to emails from contacts and leads.
We covered SaneBox earlier this year, outlining their Priority Inbox-like tool with features like email filtering, prioritization, and automatic unsubscribes. The company launched its enterprise product, Sanebox for Business, in June 2012, and this seems to be another step in the direction of providing support for businesses.
Sanebox VP of Growth Dmitri Leonov said they started developing Salesforce integration earlier this year, and decided to announce its official launch during Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference this week. Existing users can add Salesforce via their Sanebox dashboard, and Salesforce users can add Sanebox through the company’s AppExchange. “The only difference is your Salesforce leads and contacts will always be treated as top priority in SaneBox, and this is just the feedback that we’ve gotten from a lot of our users who are sales or business development professionals,” Leonov said.
Sanebox launched in private beta two years ago, and Leonov said they’ve really grown this year, thanks in part to their new enterprise accounts. Salesforce integration is only available for enterprise customers right now (plans for individuals start at $2.04 per month, with custom pricing available for enterprise users). “We’re really trying to position this as an enterprise feature, because that’s primarily where the feedback has come from,” Leonov said. Since launching enterprise accounts earlier this year, Leonov said they’ve been taking a bottom-up approach to selling it, approaching business users instead of IT managers.
In addition to debuting their business accounts, the company added Dropbox integration in August, allowing users to automatically add email attachments to their accounts, and makes those files shareable via a Dropbox link. Leonov said they’re looking to integrate with other contact management systems, and will be looking to integrate with Box and Google Drive. Leonov said they’re also looking at how they add other Salesforce-related upgrades.
The Dropbox integration made the company a competitor to startup Attachments.me, which aims to make email attachments easily searchable, and which also has Dropbox integration. But Leonov said it’s not other startups he’s worried about, it’s getting people to think about their email in a more productive way. “I don’t view every startup in our space as competition, even if they have competing features. Our biggest challenge is displacing the 10,000 pound gorilla,” he said. “The biggest challenge for all of us in the space is the inertia, and the fact that most consumers and enterprise users…don’t think of email as a platform.”
Back in May, the company also introduced new reminders features, as well as an email snooze button to let users file things away for later but not forget about them. Leonov said that despite the new enterprise accounts and Salesforce integration, they view themselves as a consumer company, and aren’t moving away from their services for individuals. “I don’t think we’re moving away from an individual consumer focus,” he said. “I would say the enterprise is a branch of what we’re focused on.”
Leonov said they’re working on an iPhone app, and they’ll focus on email for the foreseeable future, rather than getting into other areas like contact management and calendar features. They’re also looking to publish some of their user metrics to show stats about how much email people receive, the most popular time of day, and other inbox stats. Ultimately he said the biggest challenge going forward won’t be getting users, it will educating them after they sign up. “Our biggest problem isn’t convincing people to try Sanebox, it’s getting them to understand things they can do to make their email life better.”
