Beware the Checkbox

Anyone who’s ever worked with me has heard my rant against checkboxes.? This means anyone who will work with me in the future will likely also hear this rant.? So in the interest of transparency to any future colleagues, here’s why I hate checkboxes:

They don’t scale and they give you bad data.

Why don't they scale?

By their nature, checkboxes are a very blunt instrument.? The box is either checked or it isn’t.? This is fine when you only need a binary answer (e.g., checkboxes for email opt outs).?? Checkboxes will get you into trouble whenever you need to get more sophisticated than that.?

A common scenario is keeping track of target accounts.? You might have 50 target accounts that you want your teams to focus on.? It takes maybe 5 minutes to create a checkbox called “Target Account” and then update the checkbox to TRUE for your 50 target accounts.? You can then easily report on those 50 accounts, market to them, see how well they’re performing, etc.? Checkbox for the win!

Until next year when your list of target accounts changes.? Your only option is to uncheck the box on the original 50 accounts and re-check it on the new 50.? But now you’ve lost all visibility into the original 50 target accounts unless you use cumbersome history reports/tables.? One of the reasons you wanted a checkbox to begin with is because they’re so easy to use and now that’s ruined!? You’re also crunched for time because that’s how life works so you have to decide quickly to either a) continue using the existing checkbox and lose historical information or b) create a new checkbox to track this year’s target accounts.? Your Salesforce team tells you there's an option c, d, and e too but those will take longer and you need this done before the end of the quarter, or before commissions are paid, or before your boss gets back in town.? So the checkbox can gets kicked down the road and forgotten about.? In a few years you’ve got a bunch of checkboxes on your account page: Target Account, Target Account 2022, Target Account 2023, Tier 1 Account (because the name of the campaign changed), etc.

There are other ways to handle this – picklists, custom objects, campaigns – that take slightly more time upfront, but save you time down the road.? And give you better and easier reporting.?

How do they give you bad data?

Speaking of reporting, checkboxes can also give you bad, or useless, data. Another common request is to use the checkbox to verify an action was taken: “I want to block deals from moving to the next stage unless the salesperson does X.”? So a checkbox gets created that the user has to check to say that they pitched the new product or sent a specific piece of collateral.? If they don’t check that box their deal can’t move forward.? Guess what that means?? Everyone always checks the box.?? We don’t actually know if they performed the action we requested.? All we know is they checked the box saying that they did.

(I should pause here to say that I don’t mean to imply users are lying.? But a salesperson might need their deal to move to the next stage so it appears in their forecast.? They’ll check the box so that deal shows up.? Then they might perform whatever action we asked of them.? Or they might forget.? The point is we won’t know, because we’ve required they check this box.? They have no way of moving forward without it.)

If a box is always going to be checked, what’s the point of requiring someone to check it?? It’s a needless click for the user and a useless data point for everyone else.? If the activity is important enough to track via the checkbox, we’re probably going to validate it in periodic reviews or 1:1s, in which case we don’t need the checkbox.? And if it’s not important enough to validate, then we also don’t need the checkbox.

To be clear, this is different than a checklist to remind people of complicated processes with many steps.? Checklists are super helpful!? But the checklist itself doesn’t need to be built into Salesforce.? In an ideal world, your CRM is able to see what actions a user did or didn’t perform.? You can then do your own analysis on average deal size or campaign influence based on people who followed the ideal process versus those that didn’t.? If every user is checking every box, you can’t do any comparisons because all deals look the same.? Even if they’re not.

This doesn’t mean you should never use a checkbox.? It just means there should be a higher bar for creating them.? My theory is that checkboxes have about a six month expiration date on them.? If the box is still working for you after six months then you might be safe (but I’d check again after another six).? If you find that a checkbox is not giving you what you need, change it now!? It’s only going to get worse the longer you let it stay.