People I work with frequently assume I work for Salesforce or have worked for Salesforce in the past, and that I’m always going to recommend Salesforce’s solution. None of those things are true! I started using Salesforce (Sales Cloud) because it was the right tool for a particular job. Like most people in the Salesforce ecosystem, I’ve never worked for Salesforce and don’t plan to.
A lot of my Salesforce work involves making it an efficient place for users to do a lot of their work and so I often find myself advocating to put some bit of data into Salesforce rather than leaving it in Airtable or a Google Sheet or someone’s notebook. But sometimes data doesn’t belong in Salesforce, and a recent experience made me realize it can be useful to think through these things!
The same organization that has that stores extensive survey data in Salesforce was planning a new online form. The information they were collecting was very different from the survey data and overlapped with the data they have in Salesforce, but was also pretty different. We met to talk about whether or not the FormStack + Salesforce solution that has worked well for the survey data was the right approach with this new project.
We considered a few factors and eventually decided to not use Salesforce for this data. We expect to import a little bit of the data involved in this new project to Salesforce once the project is complete.
Arguments for using FormStack + Salesforce
- We’re familiar with both tools
- The experience of the person submitting the information would be good
- We’d be able to store the data in a way that would improve our full understanding of some people and organizations already in Salesforce
Arguments against using FormStack + Salesforce
- Once the data is submitted, the people who need to work with it are not Salesforce users, and really shouldn’t be Salesforce users. If we made them Salesforce users, we’d have to pay for their licenses for a year and we’d have to set up new profiles and permissions for them.
- Most of the submitted data doesn’t overlap with existing data, and we’d have little use for it in the future.
And so we decided not to use Salesforce for this project! As of today, small to medium nonprofits who need to be able to connect other systems to their CRM have trouble finding a better choice than Salesforce’s Sales Cloud product. I expect that will change in the future and I’ll happily switch to a better tool for the job when it exists.
Artisanal Data 