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Self-Service Calendaring

The dream for every sales rep is to open their calendar each morning to find their calendar already filled with appointments from interested prospects or customers. With new self-service calendaring, reps can now send emails via Playbooks that contain personal calendaring links, enabling their prospects to self-select times to meet with reps.

Adding Calendar Link to Emails
Reps can easily insert links to their calendar into emails with a single click. While editing an email, simply click the calendar icon and their unique calendar link is automatically inserted into emails.

In addition to adding the calendar link into emails, we suggest putting the calendar link in your email signature. A convenient calendar link has been added to the signature editor page.

Prospect Self-Service Calendaring
When a prospect or customer clicks on the calendar link from an email, they are brought to the rep’s calendar where they can find a time when they are both available to meet.

Only times where the rep has availability and within the configured business hours are displayed as available times to the prospect. Once an individual clicks schedule, a meeting appears on the rep’s calendar and an invite is sent to the prospect.

Configuring Self-Service Calendar
Before being able to add calendar links to emails, each rep will need to go and configure their calendar to work with Playbooks. Reps can configure their calendar by going to Settings in Playbooks and clicking the Calendar menu option. If Calendar is not displayed, an administrator will need to give them permission for the feature in permission groups.

Implementation Details:

  • Self-Service Calendaring is only available for customers using O365. Support for Gmail will be available in the future.
  • This feature will be default ON for all customers configured to use O365 upon release. Administrators can disable this feature by disabling “Calendar Integration” in permission groups.

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Opportunities in Playbooks

Reps work their prospects and customers using many different objects from the CRM. With this update, reps can now enroll opportunities directly into Plays just like they can accounts, contacts, or leads.

By enrolling opportunities into Plays, reps have more flexibility with how they engage with their prospects and customers.

Example Use Cases:

  • A key account is up for renewal in a few months. Playbooks can automatically enroll the renewal opportunity into a Play for the rep to start engaging with their account.
  • An organization creates opportunities as part of prospecting, and still needs to get ahold of the contacts on the opportunity to qualify the deal.

How it Works
Opportunities in Playbooks works almost identically to accounts in Plays. Reps can import opportunities via list view import, single import, or through automated Robots, etc. A list of opportunities a rep is working can be found in the new Opportunities tab in Playbooks.

When an opportunity is imported into Playbooks all contact roles (up to 25) associated to the opportunity are also imported and can be worked on each step in the opportunity Play.


Implementation Details:

  • The ability to import opportunities into Plays is being added as standard functionality and cannot be disabled. There are no permissions for opportunities.
  • Administrators will need to optionally configure Robots or other features to start working with opportunities.

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Email Bounce Rate Reporting in CRM

Playbooks makes it easy for reps to send more personalized emails than they are otherwise able to send. While sending emails is important, it is equally important to understand and monitor bounce rates to ensure delivery is not impacted.

Playbooks has features such as intelligent bounce prevention to prevent invalid sending, but managers need insight into the actual bounce rates. With this update, managers can run reports natively in the CRM and see bounce rates.

Using the new bounce data natively in the CRM gives managers the ability to run reports such as:

  • What templates have the highest bounce rate.
  • Which reps have the highest bounce rate.
  • What is the overall bounce rate of emails sent from Playbooks.
  • Which prospects need new email addresses.
  • What is the quality of data Marketing is sending into Sales?


Implementation Details:

  • To begin collecting and running reports on bounce rates, CRM administrators will need to create a custom field on the task object in the CRM with the API name of Playbooks_Step_Email_Bounced. This should be a checkbox type field.
  • Email bounce data that occurred before the field is created in the CRM is not available.
  • This functionality is only available for customers using Salesforce or SAP as their CRM. It is not available for customers using Microsoft Dynamics.

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Email Bounce Notification

Reps need to know if the email they’ve sent has successfully made it to the inbox of the recipient. Now with the new email bounce notification, when Playbooks detects an email bounce has occurred the rep is immediately notified in Playbooks. A rep can click on the notification to be brought to the record to update the email address.

While editing a record, Playbooks will suggest alternative email addresses that may be a better email address. Furthermore, reps can leverage NeuralMap to discover alternative contacts they may want to consider reaching out to instead.

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Placeholder Merge Field Improvements

A handful of improvements have been made to Placeholder merge fields to give them more flexibility and make it easy for users to leverage in their emails. These changes include:

  • Increased the limit on number of drop-down options that can exist in a single placeholder merge field to 30.
  • Removed character limits in placeholder merge fields.
  • Reps can now tab through placeholder merge fields that are in an email body.

Learn more about placeholder merge fields.


Implementation Details:

  • This functionality change is applied without any configuration or implementation required.

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Faster Immediate Response

Responding in near real-time to new inquiries can make the difference between getting a hold of an interested prospect or talking to their answering machine. Most organizations don’t respond quickly to new inquiries, but leveraging Playbooks immediate response you can respond within seconds.

Prior to this update, Playbooks immediate response ran every 10 minutes. With this update, Playbooks can run immediate response in near real-time.


How to Enable Faster Immediate Response:
To enable faster immediate response, administrators in Salesforce will need to create Salesforce workflow rules that send qualified records to Playbooks when immediate response is needed.

As part of the Salesforce workflow rule, an administrator will create an outbound message action that sends the contact to the appropriate Robot in Playbooks to trigger immediate response for a rep. Administrators can find the URL needed for the outbound message at the top of the Robots page.

Learn more about immediate response and why it matters.


Implementation Details:

  • To begin leveraging faster immediate response please contact InsideSales.com.

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Other Product Updates

  • Resolved an issue where placeholder merge fields would disappear from email subject lines.
  • Resolved a handful of issues around automatically sent emails.
  • Resolved issues where click-to-call and click-to-email were not displayed on certain Dynamics Unified pages.
  • Scheduled Send and NeuralSend now support accounts.
  • Person Accounts from Salesforce are now fully supported in Playbooks.