Top 5 reasons not to use Salesforce.com

Last Updated on Wednesday, 5 August 2009 07:57 Written by Steve Tuesday, 13 December 2005 12:54

I’ve talked a lot about the great features of Salesforce.com, but every software choice has drawbacks. You know someone who thinks one software platform is the one to solve all your problems, doesn’t have any major drawbacks, and can wash and wax your car, 100% guaranteed (this is not a guarantee)? Turn and run.

Here are the top 5 drawbacks I see in using Salesforce.com as a nonprofit. You , not me, you have to decide if they outweigh the benefits for you.

5. Salesforce.com is lacking some key functionality

• It doesn’t do households well–there’s not a great way to say that a couple lives together and send one thank you letter to them for the total amount the two of them have donated.
• It can’t do complex reporting like, “show me everyone who signed up for our newsletter and showed up for our volunteer event last month.”

4. The USA PATRIOT Act sucks

• The US Government can compell a hosting service like Salesforce.com to show them your data if they decide you are a terrorist. Salesforce.com can’t tell you about it.
• You really need another point here? That’s not bad enough?

3. You are reliant on the Internet to get to your CRM data

• You have to be online to use Salesforce.com’s full functionality

2. You’re too big

• Salesforce.com is more than happy to donate 10 licenses (you need one for each named user) to qualifying nonprofits, but if you want more than 10 licenses you may or may not get them

1. Getting Rent Donated has its own risks

• Salesforce.com is a service not software, so you don’t buy, you rent.
• Donated rent is great, but if the donation stops you either have to find the money to pay the rent or find another place to live. Moving on short notice is never fun.

So there’s the dirt, the secrets you don’t learn until after you’ve signed the deal. Hopefully it will help you make a good decision for your nonprofit.

[Update]: A friend just asked me if this post was still true, almost 4 years after I wrote it. It’s stunning to me how much things have changed in that time span. I thought I’d address each point in turn

5. Salesforce.com is lacking some key functionality

• Householding has been pretty much solved by the addition of Apex, VisualForce, and the general advancement of the platform. A version of it is available as part of the Nonprofit Starter Pack–you can also install it standalone. If you don’t like how it works, you can take the source code and modify it.
• Analytics have gotten much better with roll-up summary fields, custom report types, analytic snapshots, and custom summary fields on reports. Also, Apex lets you denormalize your data and push aggregates around to make all kinds of complex reports possible.
• There will always be cases where reporting doesn’t do what you want it to do–the questions we come up with are still more complex than our analytic packages, but careful design can get you much, much farther than 4 years ago.

4. The USA PATRIOT Act sucks

• Better president, but it still sucks.

3. You are reliant on the Internet to get to your CRM data

• This hasn’t changed, but every day the Internet gets closer to an always-on utility. Look at the rise of iPhones since I wrote this original post.

2. You’re too big

• The Salesforce.com Foundation now will sell licenses above the 10 donated to you. These are sold at about 80% off list price–that’s a screaming deal. I don’t think any nonprofit can be considered too big for Salesforce now that we’ve got that model in place.

1. Getting Rent Donated has its own risks

• The Salesforce.com Foundation makes donations of the service on a year-to-year basis. While most groups would prefer that the donation to the service be made in perpetuity, this isn’t the case. But the track record has shown no desire by the Foundation to pull licenses from organizations.

When I wrote this post in 2005 I had significant reservations about Salesforce.com as a platform for nonprofits. As you might imagine, I am now very pleased with the Force.com platform and where it has come to in 4 short years. So much so that I now work at the Salesforce.com Foundation and can’t be considered impartial in any way

So thing have changed massively for the better. You’ll always need the Internet for cloud computing, and when you use the Internet the government can eavesdrop, but other than that, I’m amazed at the progress we’ve made in just under 4 years.

Every forecast is wrong

Last Updated on Monday, 12 December 2005 11:38 Written by Steve Monday, 12 December 2005 11:36

Last night I was reading Natural Capitalism, a great book about the future of industry and design. I highly recommend it to anyone building or buying anything–that’s everyone, by the way. On page 100, there’s this great quote from Stewart Brand:

Every building is a forecast. Every forecast is wrong.

As we design technology and human systems to meet our current needs, if we’re not thinking about how those needs will change we’re doomed to fail. Needs absolutely will change, and the things we’ve built will be asked to meet those new needs. They’ll do it gracefully or kicking and screaming, depending on how we designed the original system.

When you’re choosing and customizing a technology system to meet your needs today, consider how hard it will be to modify it to meet your needs tomorrow. Be kind to the person who someday will be tweaking your system to meet new needs–it may be you.

Finding out how groups work

Last Updated on Monday, 12 December 2005 09:03 Written by Steve Monday, 12 December 2005 09:03

I’ve talked about how we’ve decided my job is to implement CRM, not create databases. What we’re trying to do is help groups make the shift to “customer centric” relationships–focusing on the value they provide for their constituents, and thereby increasing the value of that relationship for both parties. We think CRM can be the technology support groups need to make this change, and lack of good CRM is one of the main reasons groups are doing this more effectively right now.

To papaphrase the president, CRM is hard work. It’s hard because for it to be helpful it has to very closely match the way you work. What often happens with CRM is that it doesn’t support the way you sign up volunteers, or it doesn’t let you manage mebership renewals–it doesn’t support you in the way you work. And if it doesn’t support you in the way you work, you’re either going to stop using it, or hate working with it. Either way, CRM has failed.

I’m currently working with my first customer to understand how they work so I can design the CRM to meet their needs. I just had a two hour conversation with them about:

1. What currently sucks with their database, and with the way they work?
2. If there were no limits, how would they want CRM to change the way they work?
3. What unintended negative consequences could using CRM gring about?
4. What measureable things will we look to in the future to determine if CRM is in fact helping?

The weird thing is, we both had fun going through these points. It was somewhat cathartic for them to tell me all the stinks with the way they work now, lifing the weight of small chunks of time lost to repetitive process added up over months. And I can’t get enough of raw process inputs into my crazed, analytic head, constantly fitting them to patterns I know that exist in the technology, and thinking of new things to invent to solve new problems. But it was fun, and after I spend a few hours analyzing the results, we’ll be back at it again for a few more hours getting more in depth about how they handle major donors and memberships from start to finish. The great thing is that after this process not only will we have a better shot at making CRM successful, they’ll better understand the way they currently work, and will be more able to change because of that.