I was having a nerve racking ‘unhandled exception’. Now here I am, a foundation grantee – didnt pay a DIME to demand tools. But she and Mark went through a GoToMeeting Session with me, ran it by developers, ransacked previous case history of theirs, did everything they could. In the end, I ended up figuring out myself (pat on my back) – and I am pretty sure it had to do with the java options in IE. (blech. IE). Even though they themselves didnt come up with the answer – I was overwhelmingly impressed by the service. I never felt like the poor begging non-profit I usually feel like! I was handled with respect and decency – and Mark took calls from Laurie in his car and on planes about the problem.

Now I just happen to be a c3 with a sister PAC organization. And I am a former campaign organizer. You can guess who is going to be recommended to each and every endorsed candidate our PAC comes up with when it comes to software and data.

DemandTools GETS IT. And where they haven’t figured it out, they are working on it. I just love how they understand the importance of LISTS. (something refreshing in the NP world). And if they haven’t figured it out yet, they are making it a priority for their releases.

These folks have a staff that loves their job. And they give out NP licenses to SF donation grantees! They really have a conscience for making the world a better and easier place for those of us committing our lives to something.

I can’t say enough good things about them!

What I still need – isnt really a problem on their end – its more like SF’s end. When you use the SF import wiz, you can map those street 2 and street 3 lines – but you can’t any other way. Or the whole NAME thing in SF. I can’t map prefix/first/middle/last/suffix, and not being able to do that any other way than the SF wizard makes me nuts.

GRRRR. But YEAH for DemandTools!

Since neither of these two other tools are dedupers it is kind off a apples vs. oranges comparision. Neither of these products has the capability of finding a properly merging duplicate records that are already in the Salesforce.com database.

RingLead and Web2Lead (our business partner) are incoming filters (and good ones too). The act of pre-filtering in DemandTools is not done with the deduper that Scott / Steve reviewed, it is done with our Discovery modules (FindLeadID, FindContactID and FindAccountID. These modules do have the capability that you are referencing.

Be on the lookout for our new import module to be released before Dreamforce. We are working with 4 very large Salesforce.com customers to spec and battle test “PeopleImport”, The ultimate way to import lead/account/contacts with all the bells and whistles including multiple dedupe passes against other leads, contacts and accounts. Automatic tasking, campaign attachments, event notation and more. It also has the ability to map a save location for “contradictory field values”

Thanks

Mark Esdale
VP Business Development
CRMfusion Inc.

However, their tool, like Salesforce’s, doesn’t handle a critical issue when it comes to de-duping: capturing any data lost, either through overwriting or through not overwriting (so the new data’s lost). The only two tools I’ve seen that can do this are RingLead and Market2Lead (they capture “lost” data either in tasks or in the Description field, respectively) – while those two companies don’t match some of DemandTools’ other offerings, I would recommend to anyone that they really look at what de-duping features they deem most important…