Salesforce activity capture: Why your CRM is missing 72% of sales activity data

Your CRM Is Missing 72% of Your Sales Activity Data

Over the past few months, I've had conversations with a number of VPs of Sales, RevOps leaders, and Sales Ops managers — and I kept hearing some version of the same frustration.

One VP of Sales told me:

I go into our pipeline review every week and I genuinely don't know what to trust. My reps say a deal is active, but there's nothing in Salesforce to back it up. No emails logged, no meetings recorded. I'm forecasting on gut feel and it's killing me.

A RevOps leader at a mid-market SaaS company shared something similar:

We turned on Einstein Activity Capture thinking it would solve our data problem. Months later, we realized we still couldn't run a single standard report on it. We had activity data sitting somewhere we couldn't actually use it.

And a Sales Ops manager put it most bluntly:

Our reps just don't log. We've tried training, we've tried enforcement, we've tried making it easier. It doesn't matter — the moment things get busy, logging is the first thing that goes. Our CRM reflects maybe a quarter of what's actually happening.

These weren't isolated complaints. They were the same problem showing up across different companies, different team sizes, different tech stacks. So I decided to write this up — because if you're running into any of these challenges, you're not alone, and there are clear, fixable reasons why this keeps happening.

To validate how widespread this really is, we ran a LinkedIn poll asking revenue leaders how they sync activities to Salesforce. Here's what came back from 80 respondents:

Roughly 60% of teams are still relying on either Einstein Activity Capture or the native Gmail/Outlook add-in. And as you'll see below, both of those approaches leave significant gaps — gaps that quietly undermine your forecast, your coaching, and your pipeline visibility every single day.

Here's what's really going on, and what to do about it.

What is Salesforce activity capture (and why revenue leaders should care)

Activity capture is the process of automatically logging customer and employee emails and meetings to Salesforce and syncing them to the related records — contacts, leads, accounts, and opportunities.

Every call your rep makes. Every email thread with a prospect. Every meeting on the calendar. Activity capture ensures those interactions don't exist only in an inbox or a memory — they become structured, reportable, actionable data inside your CRM.

While it's technically possible to rely entirely on manual activity logging, in practice it has proven to leave enormous data gaps. And as you'll see, those gaps have a direct impact on your revenue.

Why activity data is a leading indicator of revenue, not just a logging exercise

Here's what the research actually shows about sales activities and win rates (Sources: HBR 2021, HBR 2011, Avoma Internal Data 2025):

• ‍2x likelihood of closed/won if reply rate is >50% ‍
• 3x likelihood of closed/won if time-to-reply is <24 hours ‍
• 5x likelihood of closed/won if the deal is multi-threaded

These aren't vanity metrics. Reply rate, response time, and multi-threading are leading indicators of deal health. You can only track them reliably if your activity data is complete.

Once you have reliable activity data in Salesforce, here's what you can actually surface and act on at the deal and rep level:

• ‍Deal-Level Signals: Reply rate, time-to-reply, last email date, next meeting scheduled, multi-threading score, engagement score (ML-powered)‍
• Rep Performance Signals: # of outgoing emails, # of incoming replies, average response time, meeting volume and conversion rates

These are the inputs to better pipeline reviews, sharper coaching conversations, and more accurate forecast calls. But none of it is possible without complete, trustworthy activity data flowing into your CRM.

Manual vs. automated Salesforce activity capture: The 28% vs. 98% gap

Manual activity logging — whether through the Salesforce Gmail extension or reps doing it themselves — captures less than 28% of actual emails and meetings.

That means for every 10 customer conversations your team has, more than 7 never make it into Salesforce. No record. No visibility. No signal for your forecast.

Automated activity capture, by contrast, logs 98% or more of all emails and meetings — correctly attributed to the right contact, account, and opportunity.

The gap between 28% and 98% isn't a reporting inconvenience. It's the difference between a CRM you can trust and one that gives you a false picture of pipeline health. Bad data in early-stage deals becomes a bad forecast, becomes a missed quarter.

Sales activity metrics vs. marketing email metrics: Know the difference

One of the most common mistakes revenue teams make is conflating sales activity tracking with marketing email tracking. They are fundamentally different disciplines — and mixing them up leads to the wrong insights and the wrong decisions.

Sales activity metrics are about the quality and velocity of two-way conversations. A rep with a high email send volume but a low reply rate isn't building pipeline — and only sales-specific activity data will surface that. If your sales reporting is built on marketing-style metrics, you're optimizing for the wrong thing.

Native Salesforce activity capture options (and their limitations)

Salesforce offers two built-in approaches. Both have meaningful limitations that revenue teams need to understand before relying on them.

Option 1: Salesforce Integration for Gmail (Chrome Extension) & Outlook (Add-in)

Pros

• Track activities directly in Google Workspace or Outlook without switching tabs
• Free with certain Salesforce versions

Cons

• Time-consuming — requires multiple clicks to log each activity
• People forget to log, especially during busy periods
• Frequent re-authentication with Salesforce results in reps abandoning the tool altogether
• No central admin controls to enforce consistency or monitor gaps
• Reportedly slow and unreliable — a recurring theme in Chrome Store and Microsoft AppSource reviews

The core problem is structural: any solution that depends on rep discipline to log activities will fail at scale. Reps are focused on selling, not data entry. The result is that <28% capture rate — and a CRM that reflects only a fraction of what's actually happening in your pipeline.

Option 2: Einstein Activity Capture (EAC)

EAC automates the logging, which sounds like the fix. And it has genuine strengths worth acknowledging:

Pros

• Tracks activities automatically in the background
• Works with both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365
• Easy to set up — basic version is included in Salesforce for free
• Bi-directional sync between Salesforce and your calendar/email workspace

But EAC's underlying architecture creates problems most teams only discover after fully committing to it.

Cons

• Activities are not stored as records in Salesforce — they cannot be queried or reported on natively
• Does not allow standard Salesforce reporting
• No option to build automations or Flows triggered by EAC activities
• No support for email aliases
• Does not work with Salesforce for Gmail or Outlook add-in
• No option to migrate data if you switch tools — since it's not stored in Salesforce, there's nothing to export
• Logging to Opportunities can be challenging and unreliable
• Pre-built dashboards cannot be customized

How Einstein activity capture stores your data (and why it limits reporting)

Most teams don't realize how EAC stores their data until they try to report on it or migrate away from it. Here's exactly what's happening under the hood:

1. Activities are stored on Hyperforce servers — not in Salesforce core. Your activity records live outside of Salesforce's standard data architecture.
2. Core Salesforce servers fetch activities to display in the activity timeline — so it looks like the data is in Salesforce, but it's being pulled from an external store every time you view it.
3. Only some metadata is stored in Salesforce core — not the full activity record. This is why you can see activities in the timeline but cannot report on them with standard Salesforce reports.
4. Contact data is captured and stored on Hyperforce to power other features like Einstein Email Insights — meaning your data is being used beyond just activity logging, often without teams fully realizing it.

The practical consequences: if you switch away from EAC, there is no data to migrate. You cannot trigger Salesforce automations from EAC data. Any reporting requires workarounds or paying for additional Salesforce products. The data your team assumes is "in Salesforce" is, architecturally speaking, not really in Salesforce at all.

EAC works well for calendar and contact sync. For activity data you want to report on, forecast from, or build automations on top of — its architecture works against you.

If you’re realizing your activity data isn’t actually stored in Salesforce core, you’re not alone. Many revenue teams discover this only when they try to run reports, trigger automations, or migrate tools — and realize the data isn’t truly in Salesforce.

This is exactly what teams come to Avoma to fix.

Schedule an Avoma demo to see how activity records are written directly into standard Salesforce objects — fully reportable, workflow-ready, and portable.

How Salesforce activity capture actually works (logging logic explained)

Understanding how emails and meetings get matched and attributed to the right Salesforce records is critical — because if the logic is wrong, your data is wrong regardless of how much you're capturing.

Simple logic (Most common)

Email/Meeting comes in → the system reads the email addresses on the record.

• Matches those addresses to a Contact or Lead in Salesforce
• From the Contact, looks up the related Account
• Checks for a URL field match to associate to the right Account directly
• Logs and attributes the activity to the matched Contact/Lead and their related Account

This works well for most standard sales motions where contacts are already in Salesforce and clearly linked to accounts.

Advanced logic

Email/Meeting comes in → the system applies richer matching rules on top of simple logic.

• Matches to a Contact or Lead by email address
• Looks up a shared parent Account to correctly attribute the activity even when contact-to-account relationships are indirect
• Uses Opportunity Contact Roles to associate activities directly to the right Opportunity — not just the account
• Supports custom fields for more precise matching
• Allows manual adjustment — reps or admins can override automated attribution when needed
• Supports logging to custom objects beyond standard Salesforce records
• Handles multiple internal meeting attendees using parent/child event structure to avoid duplicate records

Getting the logic wrong has real consequences: activities logged to the wrong opportunity corrupt your pipeline data, missing contact role associations make deal engagement invisible at the opportunity level, and duplicate records from poorly handled multi-attendee meetings pollute your CRM over time.

The best setups combine automated background logging with granular manual controls — giving you automation reliability while allowing reps to handle exceptions without it becoming a data entry burden.

Where Salesforce activity data is stored: Tasks vs. EmailMessage vs. events

The foundation of reliable activity data is storing it where Salesforce can actually work with it natively.

For Emails

• ‍Task Object — Stores activities as tasks with a subtype field (email, meeting, call, etc.). Surfaced in the activity timeline and pipeline views. Flexible and widely supported.‍
• Enhanced Email Object (EmailMessage) (Recommended) — Stores the full HTML email with complete context — FROM, TO, CC, BCC fields intact. Standalone object for emails. Supports custom fields, page layouts, and workflows. Automatically creates a linked Task in the background. Enables standard Salesforce reporting on email activity.‍
• Custom Email Objects (Avoid) — Not compatible with EAC or many third-party vendors. Creates serious data migration issues, especially during M&A. If you're already using them, look for solutions that can sync historical activity data back into standard objects.

For Meetings

• ‍Event Object (Recommended) — The standard Salesforce object for logging meetings. Supports parent/child events so a single meeting with multiple internal attendees doesn't create duplicate records. Enables bi-directional sync with Google Calendar and Outlook.

The alternative: Avoma's activity capture

If EAC's limitations are holding your revenue team back, Avoma's activity capture is purpose-built to close every gap that EAC leaves open.

Unlike EAC, Avoma writes activity records directly into standard Salesforce objects — making them fully reportable, automatable, and migratable. For teams switching from EAC, Avoma can sync up to 24 months of historical activity data into proper Salesforce records from day one — something EAC fundamentally cannot do since it never stored that data in Salesforce to begin with.

Beyond activity capture, Avoma layers in Conversation Intelligence — automatically capturing insights from calls and meetings, surfacing action items, and writing structured notes back to the Salesforce activity record. Your CRM doesn't just know that a meeting happened — it knows what was discussed, what was agreed, and what happens next.

If you're evaluating Salesforce activity capture solutions, the best way to understand the difference is to see it live — including how records are stored, attributed, and reported on.

Book a personalized Avoma demo.

10 questions to ask before choosing a Salesforce activity capture tool

Always run a pilot. Test in your actual environment — the details matter far more than the demo. And always ask these questions before committing:

1. What's your data capture success rate across Gmail and Outlook?
2. Which Salesforce objects do you write to — Tasks, EmailMessage, Event, or custom?
3. How do you automatically associate activities to the right Account and Opportunity?
4. How do you handle email thread deduplication and parent/child events for meetings?
5. How many API calls do you consume per email or event?
6. How do you avoid duplicate records when other tools (e.g., Avoma, ChiliPiper, Outreach) are also writing to Salesforce?
7. How many months of historical activity can you sync back?
8. What happens to our data if we offboard — can we export everything?
9. How do you handle GDPR and CCPA compliance?
10. Can you walk me through exactly how your logging logic works, step by step?

Audit your Salesforce activity capture rate

If your team is manually logging activities, you have data on fewer than 1 in 3 customer conversations. If you're using Einstein Activity Capture as your primary solution, you have activity data you cannot report on, automate from, or migrate away from.

Both situations compound quietly — incomplete activity data leads to incomplete pipeline visibility, which leads to inaccurate forecasts, missed coaching moments, and deals that die without warning.

Start here: Audit your current activity logging rate. Pull a sample of closed-won and closed-lost deals from the last two quarters. Check how many activities were logged per deal and what percentage of your team's actual email volume those records represent.

The number will tell you everything you need to know about the size of the problem — and the size of the opportunity.

If you want to see what complete, Salesforce-native activity capture actually looks like — including how records are stored, attributed, reported on, and migrated — book a demo and see it in a real Salesforce environment.

Schedule an Avoma demo.