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Concept — background and overview.
Leverage Affinity’s relationship intelligence within your Salesforce instance by setting up Affinity for Salesforce. Overview
  • Getting started with Affinity for Salesforce
  • Frequently Asked Questions
    • Using Affinity extensions in Salesforce
    • Syncing Affinity Relationship Intelligence to Salesforce
    • Set up and Configuration

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Getting started with Affinity for Salesforce

Follow these articles in chronological order to get Affinity for Salesforce up-and-running:
  1. How to install Affinity for Salesforce
  2. How to set up Affinity for Salesforce
    1. Creating custom Salesforce fields based on Affinity Data fields
    2. How to block emails from surfacing for Affinity for Salesforce
  3. How to use Affinity for Salesforce

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Frequently Asked Questions

Once you’re done with installation, set up, and use, check out the FAQs below.

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Using Affinity extensions for Salesforce

What capabilities are available with Pathfinder and the Outlook extensions with A4S?
  • With our initial launch for Affinity for Salesforce, users can access the following capabilities in the Affinity Pathfinder Chrome extension and Affinity for Outlook add-in:
    • View profiles for Accounts, Opportunities (associated with Accounts), and Contacts related to the Email/Website/LinkedIn profile being viewed.
    • View data about your Salesforce Accounts, Opportunities (associated with Accounts), and Contacts.
    • View Affinity Data for companies not in your Salesforce instance.
    • View all Connections between your network and the Account/Opportunity/Contact being viewed.
    • View all Activities (emails and meetings) related to the Account/Contact being viewed.
    • View and capture notes related to the Account/Contact being viewed.
    • The ability to edit field values for Accounts and Contacts.
What capabilities are available with Affinity Salesforce VisualForce components within Salesforce?
  • Users can add the following components to their Salesforce Account and Contact profiles:
    • Connections : View all Connections between your network and the Account/Contact.
    • Activities : View all Activities (emails and meetings) related to the Account/Contact.
    • Notes : View and capture Notes related to the Account/Contact.
How do users sign into the Pathfinder extension? Will Salesforce permissions be honored when users view data in Pathfinder/Outlook extension?
  • Salesforce permissions are honored when users view data in the extensions.
    • If the user does not have access to a Salesforce Account/Contact record, they’ll will see the Affinity data for that entity. The record will be clearly marked with an “Affinity Data” header.
    • If the user does have access to a Salesforce Account/Contact record but does not have access to one or more fields on the record, they will see the Salesforce data but not the fields they don’t have access to.
Does the extensions allow you to interact with Salesforce data?
  • Yes, you can edit the field values associated with Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities.
  • Notes can also be replied to. These replies will also be reflected in Salesforce.
Can we control the fields which are displayed from accounts and contacts in the extension?
  • At this time, you will not be able to specify a page layout specifically for extensions. We honor the default Account and Contact Salesforce Layouts for each profile and only show the fields from the layout.
Do notes in the Salesforce visualization scale for full page long notes? How are permissions handled with respect to creation or viewing of notes in extensions?
  • We honor Salesforce permissions when creating and viewing notes. Users will only be able to create or view notes on accounts/contacts that they have access to in Salesforce.

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Syncing Affinity Relationship Intelligence to Salesforce

How long does it take to populate the Relationship Intelligence custom object to get populated?
  • Relationship Intelligence calculations run every 6 hours in Affinity. The outbound sync to Salesforce will happen within the hour after strengths are calculated in Affinity.
How frequently does Affinity sync emails and meetings with Salesforce?
  • While syncing for runs every 4-6 minutes on average, the frequency of ingesting, synthesizing, and surfacing email/calendar data takes longer.
  • Please wait up to 30-60 minutes to see these interactions appear in Salesforce - if it takes longer, please reach out to support@affinity.co and we’d be happy to take a deeper look.
How frequently does Affinity Data get updated in Salesforce?
  • Affinity Data fields are updated every 24 hours.
How long does it take to populate the enrichment data in Salesforce once the new account or contact is in Affinity?
  • If the Salesforce account or contact is newly added to the Salesforce list view, then it will be synced to Affinity within the next 24 hours. After the inbound sync, Affinity will run a backfill outbound sync for the contact/account which will include activity, relationship intelligence, and enrichment data - this will happen within the hour after the inbound sync completes.
  • In steady-state, the outbound sync for activities and enrichment data runs hourly, and relationship intelligence syncs run every 6 hours.
Where does Affinity source the data that is provided as enrichments for accounts and contacts?
  • Affinity sources data from dozens of different providers and leverages its proprietary algorithms to aggregate that data to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information possible.
What happens if Affinity Data includes fields that are identical to or similar to Salesforce fields?
  • The Salesforce admin will determine which fields to sync to Salesforce.
  • For example, Affinity provides an “Industry” field, which is also a standard Salesforce field. The admin can choose to map the Affinity field to Salesforce and may choose either give it a unique name or hide the Salesforce field.
Is the relationship score theoretically adjustable based on criteria we may want to add? Are we able to select which emails, meetings and activities are used to calculate the Relationship Intelligence score?
  • Currently, no. The relationship score is created from all of the email and events data Affinity automatically collects from Gmail/Outlook, combined with the data in your Salesforce Activities timeline (tasks, events, phone calls, etc). We leverage our relationship intelligence engine to arrive at the relationship score and sync them with your Salesforce instance.

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Set up and Configuration

Can one Affinity instance can be connected to a Salesforce Sandbox instance and Salesforce Production instance at the same time?
  • Yes.
Can we have multiple lists from Salesforce that can be synced?
  • We allow users to sync one Account list and one Contact list from Salesforce. Salesforce admins can use a number of filtering mechanisms to ensure the list has all of the accounts and contacts that the org wants to sync.
Do we get notified in case the API calls exceed?
  • Not at the moment, but this is something Affinity will set up internal alarms for from our end. We also spread API calls out over time when we detect that a customer is approaching their Salesforce API limits.