Item: DemandTools
Rating: 10
Author: Eli Strong

Overall Satisfaction with DemandTools

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our DemandTools licenses are primarily for the use of our SFDC system admins. The tool solves several business issues on a weekly basis. We use it for imports of data into standard and custom objects, mass backups, data cleanup of leads/contacts/accounts, field updates when changing, adding or modifying terminology or adding functionality, and for weekly updates on targeted marketing data. We have built scores of stored scenarios that look at keywords in a few fields on a Lead or Contact and then flag that record with certain criteria that allows us to better target in our marketing efforts.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Allows you to make any import field a 'key' for import matching.
Has easy to use point and click functionality to allow for complex procedures.
Makes mass updates and cleanups faster and easier with flexible criteria.

Cons

Importing lists of individuals can be a multi-step and cumbersome process. For those imports, I always use PeopleImport, rather than DemandTools. It reduces my time investment by about 75%.
The matching functionality on company names can sometimes be a bit difficult to master, there is fine line between exact, cleaned, or fuzzy and occasionally DemandTools misses the mark.

Return on Investment

Less time spent manually cleaning up data and converting leads synced from our marketing automation tool.
Greater targeting abilities in a fraction of the time due to stored scenarios.

Alternatives Considered

Jitterbit and PeopleImport

I also use Jitterbit free, which is great for flipping between production and sandbox when importing, but I am more comfortable with DemandTools' full range of tools and find them to be easy to use. I use DemandTools more often for updates and cleanup, than for imports and that is where it really shines.
I also use DemandTools sister product PeopleImport, which is great for importing Leads and Contacts, but doesn't have the ability to import into any other objects or to accomplish the cleanup and update abilities that DemandTools can.

Other Software Used

Jitterbit

Likelihood to Recommend

I love DemandTools for importing updates to standard (other than Lead and Contact) and custom objects and for mass updates, cleanup and conversion of all objects. Where is tends to be a pain is when importing lists of people (Leads and Contacts). Say for example you get a conference attendee list of 500 people and you don't know which are leads, which ones are contacts and which ones are associated with an existing account and which ones have no relation to your organization. Importing this with Demand Tools used to take me around 2 or more hours and 7 distinct processes. With CRMFusion's other tool PepleImport, I reduce that time to 30 minutes or less and one distinct process, that also allows me to import into a campaign if necessary and assign tasks...all in one set of steps.

Comments

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DemandTools' range of abilities gives big bang for the buck

Modules Used