The Challenge

At first, Blacklane’s sales team manually logged emails and meetings from Google Workspace, leaving around 20% of activities unrecorded. 

Blacklane decided to roll out Einstein Activity Capture but struggled with the data not being permanently stored, not reportable, and missing custom logging rules:

“We tried Einstein Activity Capture but faced several problems. As activities are not stored as records in Salesforce, we couldn’t properly report on activities or use activities for automations,” reported Irina Smirnova, Senior Sales Operations Manager at Blacklane.

It became clear that Blacklane needed a solution that reliably captures data and allows for Salesforce’s standard reporting.

Without full visibility into activities, Blacklane couldn’t properly analyze sales efforts by account or rep. Reporting on sales efficiency, such as tracking the number of emails sent by each rep, was challenging. 

Making things worse, the further use of EAC would mean that more and more activity data won’t be permanently stored in their own CRM - virtually locking in Blacklane on EAC.

“That's why Einstein Activity Capture can be very problematic. Activities are not stored as Salesforce records but sit on a different AWS server,” said Jaya Prakash, Salesforce Product Owner at Blacklane.

Adding to the complexity, Blacklane stored both B2C and B2B contacts in Salesforce and needed to ensure that only B2B activities were logged. 

Different teams — such as sales and account management — had specific logging requirements, adding further requirements to the set-up that EAC didn’t provide.

Irina started looking for a better alternative - and found it in Weflow.

The Solution

Prior to kicking things off, Weflow advised Blacklane to create a list of requirements. Together, the two companies devised a structured plan for solving Blacklane’s activity capture problems.

Legal & Security Review

Handling sensitive information, Blacklane required a legal and security review.

Using Weflow’s security center, Blacklane had everything they needed in one place.

With annual audits from Google and PwC, Weflow’s SOC 2 - Type II certification, and regular third-party pen tests in place, the legal process was ticked off quickly.

Technical Implementation

“How much effort do we have to do from our side?,” Blacklane’s Salesforce team asked upfront.

Weflow Activity Capture is extremely easy to implement - and while we can claim a lot, we walked the talk. 

After a 30-minute session, Weflow’s easy, low-lift technical implementation was virtually done, and Blacklane’s team was on board.

Given that Weflow has seen hundreds of activity capture set-ups, Blacklane used Weflow’s best practices to create a robust setup.

Blacklane opted to automatically sync emails and meetings in the background. This way, Weflow auto-attributes activities to leads, contacts, opportunities, and accounts.

In addition, Blacklane asked its team to use Weflow’s Chrome Extension. Reps can see how Weflow attributes emails and, if necessary, make changes with one click right in Gmail. To grant even more flexibility, each rep and Key Account Manager (KAM) can choose to sync only emails or both emails and meetings. 

This flexibility helped meet each rep’s and team’s unique needs without requiring heavy involvement from RevOps.

As a result, Blacklane combined higher productivity with complete control for perfect data quality and completeness.

With the basic setup in place, Blacklane moved on to fine-tune the settings.

Fine-tuning activity capture settings

Given the B2B2C Go-To-Market motion, Blacklane had specific logging requirements. As Irina explains:

“We want to make sure that emails are not captured on the B2C side. Excluding certain activities based on record types is something we’re looking for.”

Using Weflow’s flexible condition builder, Blacklane configured custom exclusion rules to avoid logging activities to B2C contacts. This eliminated the issue of wrongly allocating activities to the B2C side of the business, which should be excluded from the B2B sales communication. 

Adding further requirements, Irina noted:

“We want to be in control of assigning and swapping user licenses. Only certain users should be able to use Activity Capture.”

With Weflow’s central admin console, Blacklane’s RevOps team manages users centrally - enrolling new joiners and removing leavers with just one click.

To round it off, Blacklane excluded various email domains to prevent internal emails and events from logging into Salesforce.

Lastly, Weflow monitored Blacklane’s activity logs closely for 14 days to ensure everything worked without errors or issues.

Syncing historic activities for complete data

Before moving on to the report set-up, we had to solve for the missing, non-reportable data from Einstein Activity Capture.

“I heard you can also track down older activity data and make it available for reporting,” Irina said.v

As requested, Weflow synced 4 months of Blacklane’s historic emails and meetings.

To protect daily Salesforce API call limits, Weflow synced back in batches over the course of one week.

With perfect activity data in place, Blacklane could move on to reporting.

Creating activity reports

Once everything was up and running, it was time to put the clean activity data to use.

“Einstein Activity Capture activities don't update the standard "Last Activity Date" field because they are stored externally and aren't recognized as native Salesforce activities. This was a huge issue for our reports,” Irina explained.

Blacklane’s RevOps team quickly set up different views to report on activities. 

Since Blacklane now owns the activity data in its Salesforce instance, it stays there - even when users stop using Salesforce (or Weflow).

The Outcome

Blacklane implemented Weflow to log activities from Google Workspace into Salesforce automatically. 

Since adopting Weflow, Blacklane has significantly improved data quality and efficiency. 

Now, 96% of leads, accounts and opportunities have emails, meetings, and key contacts logged, providing a complete timeline of interactions for B2B accounts. 

Sales reps save time by no longer needing to manually log activities, which also improved overall Salesforce adoption.

“The records are now only stored in Salesforce. This way it's secure,” Arnold Kemoli, Salesforce Team Lead & Engineering Manager, noted.

Irina and Jaya confirm: “That's the best way.”

This not only gave Blacklane complete control over their data, but enabled the tech company to finally run accurate activity reports in Salesforce.

"Now, we have full transparency into the performance of each sales rep and KAM, allowing us to track activity-related KPIs and make data-driven decisions to improve sales strategies."

Blacklane can now generate accurate reports on sales activities by rep, account, or opportunity. This has given them the ability to assess sales capacity, deal velocity, and meeting activity by rep, as Irina concludes:

"With Weflow, we’re now capturing nearly all relevant activities. It’s a game changer compared to our previous setup."