In our Best Practices Webinar: Accelo & G Suite, Product experts Drew Hansen and Katie Priest shared the power of this integration and how it helps your team centralize communications and knowledge while managing the precious resource within our team - time.
A common problem businesses are constantly working to solve is managing resources, such as time, labor, and cost to produce work for their clients. One of the biggest challenges that come with managing these human resources is coordinating everyone to ensure that you're all on the same page. It's crucial to have one place where your team has full transparency, can access pivotal client and project communications in real-time while respecting your privacy and confidentiality.
Accelo and G Suite's integration helps to solve this problem, empower your business' communication and time coordination.
How the Integration Looks In Accelo
The backbone of Accelo is a CRM. You can see the companies, contacts and all the client relationships you're working with such as vendors, partners, and ongoing clients. If you have all of this in Accelo, all the work you're doing is naturally organized and rolled into the system. So, all of those interactions and communications between you and your contacts are accessible in one easy location.
In Accelo, specifically the company overview page, you can get a high-level pulse check on the relationship with this particular client. You can gather information, such as how active you are with a client and how much work is currently going on.
Touches: Locate any of the activities with the client i.e. internal notes, emails to and from, meetings booked and logged calls.
The Stream: showcases the chronological capture of all the activities and communications related to the client. This is especially helpful if one of your colleagues is out sick or out of the office and you need to pop in to see where they left off and step in to help.
Accelo and G Suite's Two-Way Sync
Go to the Sales level and you'll be able to see upcoming work such as a quote needing to be sent or a meeting coming up that syncs with your Google Calendar.
With the two-way sync, any client emails sent through Accelo get captured and any emails sent and received through Gmail get pulled into the Stream. This gives you deeper insight into email delivery status and open rate thanks to the integration.
Under Company Details locate Privacy and Add Relationship, you're able to select the particular contact along with yours, so anytime you specifically email each other you can make it Confidential - it'll show on the Stream that you two communicated but will not display the content or Secret - your interaction will remain entirely off the Stream.
To get an Activity in the Stream, add an Activity in the far left corner. You have the ability to send a Note to your internal team, or an Email, book a Meeting or log a Call. Make email communication even easier by selecting a common Activity Template. You're also able to select the privacy in the Email section. Locate the privacy option in the right corner where you can select Default Settings, All, Confidential or Secret for this particular email.
Access our Team Scheduling tool on the left. You have your Tasks and Milestones from that Project and on the right side, you have your entire team. Drag and drop the Tasks from the left side to the correct team member on the right. You can schedule a specific date and time for each task, so with the two-way sync, it'll update your Google Calendar.
Accelo's Inbox can be located in the right-hand corner. You're able to filter the messages or search by title or project. You can view when messages were opened, or reply to the thread, control privacy rules, all the while your timer is naturally ticking away to help you manage your time efficiently and automatically goes against the work you're doing.
How the Integration Looks in G Suite
Gmail
In your Gmail Inbox, click on a client-related email. With the Gmail Add-On, it'll recognize on the right-hand side which client is this email for, who is my customer for this company, what is this specific email related to, or open straight into Accelo, add a Task, or Relocate it if need be.
Google Calendar
In Google Calendar, any external events you add onto your calendar (appointments, commute), along with all the client work assigned to you (tasks, quotes, proposal reviews) you'll be able to see everything back in Accelo. You know exactly when assignments are booked out and due, making it easy to ensure you have the time to complete all your client work in a timely manner. The sync helps when your manager is assigning tasks - they can note when you're busy or offline, so they know your scheduling and capacity to assign at a time that best fits your bandwidth.
On the right side find your tasks icon and sort by your Accelo tasks. See which ones need to be prioritized, click into the tasks and action them when needed.
Setup this Integration & Optimize
How do you take advantage of the G Suite integration for your team? Below is a link that will help you learn the steps to integrate your G Suite account with your Accelo system!
Q: What is the best way to attach meetings scheduled on my Google Calendar to a Project in Accelo? Bookings sort of work for me, but if you edit the calendar event it unlinks.
A: Schedule the meeting activity against that project in Accelo, or book it in your Google Calendar - from there it will show at the company level and you can relocate it against the Project.
Q: When I need to change the time of a meeting on my Google calendar, for example, instead of 2 p.m., I push to 3 p.m. Will that reflect in Accelo?
A: Yes! Meeting edits needs to happen in Google Calendar and will sync back into Accelo. You can't edit meetings in Accelo.
Q: If I assign a task to my employee, but don't know the exact time I want them to do it, how does that show up in their calendar?
A: If Task Sync is on for that user, then every Task you assign will appear in their Google Tasks. If you schedule a Task (Task is scheduled for a specific day, not necessarily a specific timeframe on that day), then that Task appears on the calendar at the top of that day.
Q: When you reply to an email in Accelo does it show up in your Gmail sent Items?
A: Accelo does not sync outboxes - that's how we pull in sent emails.
Q: Will my clients see "via accelo. com" every time I send them an email?
A: Any emails that are sent from an individual user do not include "sent via Accelo", but anything sent from support@yourdomain.com, help@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com sales@yourdomain.com, etc. (Accelo Request Inboxes) have the option to include "sent via Support", sent via Sales", etc. when replying from those request inboxes. There is a setting option in the Activities Settings to turn the "sent via" off as well.
Q: If someone wants to work from Gmail, if they complete or delete a task in their calendar, what happens in Accelo? Does it disappear? complete?
A: Making changes to the title, due date, or status of a task (such as by marking it as complete) within your Google tasks will be pulled back into Accelo. Deletes do not sync.
Q: I have turned off my Gmail integration, but I see that my emails are still syncing into Accelo. Why?
A: Usually, it's because one of the other users in your same deployment have their email integration turned on. The system recognizes your email address from emails they have copied you on, etc. and captures those emails against your user record. The best practice is to leave all users' integrations enabled and use privacy rules to keep certain threads out of the Stream.
