Case Study 08 · CModel Data, Inc · Systems Diagnosis
The Ask
Leadership wanted a straight answer to a question that had been sitting unresolved for months — were reps' emails being consistently captured in Salesforce? It read as a simple reporting request. It wasn't.
The Wrong Turn
The initial approach was building an activity report — straightforward on the surface. But the report was measuring Outreach, a third-party sales sequencing tool that only logs emails sent through its own sequences. That's not what leadership meant. They meant native email capture — every email a rep sent, sequenced or not.
The distinction only surfaced after leadership pushed back and drew the line between the two themselves. Without that correction, the report would have shipped a confident answer to the wrong question.
Root Cause One
The real target was Einstein Activity Capture (EAC), Salesforce's native mailbox sync. It had 7 "licensed" users but nothing configured, and no sync history had ever existed. Tracing those 7 licenses led somewhere unexpected: every one belonged to an employee who'd left the company years earlier.
The current sales team had never been licensed for the feature at all. This wasn't a case of reps ignoring a tool they'd been given. The feature had never been turned on for anyone currently employed.
The Fix, Round One
The correction had three parts: fix the license and permission assignments, add the current team to the existing — empty — configuration, and scope the sync deliberately to emails and events only, deliberately excluding contacts to avoid an unrequested side effect on the CRM's contact data.
"Not an adoption failure — the feature had never been turned on for anyone currently employed. That distinction changes what you fix, and how you explain a months-old gap to leadership."
Root Cause Two — The Twist
Everything broke again the next day. Tracing it back led to the Exchange connection itself — it was authenticating as a departed employee's login. Underneath that was a bigger problem: Microsoft had fully retired the underlying permission model, Application Impersonation, that the entire legacy integration method depended on.
This wasn't fixable with a permission grant or a new login. The auth method itself no longer existed on Microsoft's side.
The Real Fix
The fix meant migrating to the currently supported method — OAuth / Application-Level Authentication — which required coordinating with an external IT admin to complete the Microsoft-side consent step. With that in place, the EAC configuration was rebuilt on infrastructure that would actually keep working.
The Result
Confirmed live, working sync across all 11 current users — the first time this organization ever had functioning email and calendar capture. A leadership request that had sat unresolved for months closed with a clear paper trail distinguishing what actually happened: not "reps never adopted it," but "it was never built for anyone still here."
What Was Built