A Salesforce Nightmare

I recently picked up a new client to help them out with Salesforce. They are a very small business and just wanted a 2 user group edition to start doing CRM. If they had not already purchased Salesforce I would have suggested that they stay away from Salesforce. Unless you can afford the top end of Salesforce plus numerous plugins, Salesforce can be really very frustrating.

The client was struggling to understand how to use Salesforce, and I can understand that. Salesforce is very American and is very very set up to sell Widgets. If you don’t sell widgets you need to customise it heavily to the way you work, and if you don’t have the Enterprise Edition of Salesforce, you can’t customise it enough. But this company does sell Widgets so I thought there must be more to it as to why they were struggling.

They had paid a Salesforce Partner to set up their Salesforce for them. There was no training included in the package – just a link to a few of Salesforce Sales videos*. Unfortunately, what this Partner did to their Salesforce was so bad it really got them started on the wrong foot with Salesforce.

Here is a list of what they did:

Leads

• Imported thousands of “leads” that were duplicated – in some cases up to 50 duplications of the one lead.
• Imported the Company Name into the Person Name field in the Lead – so when the lead was converted it would create the Company Name as a Contact record.
• Imported the words [not provided] into the Company field – even though they had the Company Name there (and yes, even without the capitalisation and the square brackets – so that the Account Name would be created as [not provided] when the lead was converted.
• Imported the full address, including Suburb into the Street field.
• Imported the State Into the City field.
• Set all the Lead Sources on the imported records as Other.
• Created two fields around credit applications. I asked my client if he does credit applications – no, he doesn’t and did not ask for these two fields.

Accounts

• Created a picklist field containing numbers only – and did not even put 01, 02 etc so the numbers sorted 1, 11, 12, 2, 3 etc.
• Created fields that represented data from the Accounts system with no way of being able to update or maintain that data – the data is out of date as soon as it is imported, and therefore will not be trusted and therefore will not be used. They even created a formula field that referenced these fields.
• Did not create a field for Accounts ID or any way to uniquely identify that client in the existing Accounting system – so even if they wanted to do a manual import and export of data from their accounting system to these fields in Salesforce they would not be able to.
• Created a single Text Area field to store the Customer Address – Why? Oh dear why? And then did not import any data into it!
• Created a Text field to store the Customer Name – again Why?
• Created a Text field to store the Customer Suburb and then imported both the Suburb and the State into that field.
• Imported the letter “G” into the Type field – just G – even the client did not know what G meant. To make matters worse, G was not added as a valid value for that Picklist
• Imported the full address, including Suburb into the Billing Address field.
• Imported the State Into the Billing City field.
• Did not remove any standard picklist values so my client was very confused about terms like “Integrator” and “Hospitality” and why these had any relationship to his organisation.

Interestingly they did not touch Opportunities – which is probably the one area that did need customisations.

Every field or piece of data that they touched was wrong – wrong on so many levels. Now don’t even think to blame the client on the data that they gave you – if they gave you shit data, then query it with them, fix it up, or say you can’t or won’t help them – do NOT just import the shit data.

How is the client going to learn how to use Salesforce when they think they have to update the address and suburb into three different fields? How are they ever going to trust their data when it is inaccurate as soon as it’s entered? Were they going to have to manually fix up all those Leads? What were these people thinking? It is a disgrace that these people call themselves Salesforce professionals and advertise themselves as helping businesses to set up Salesforce – they did not help at all – they made it far worse for my client!

I have now spent about 1 day to fix all this up and hopefully the client can now start again with their Salesforce – this time, with a clean slate.

* On another ranty note, any system that requires the level of training that Salesforce does, even on the “easiest” package, is another reason to avoid using Salesforce for small businesses.