When to Use a Connector Tool and When to Stop

A connector tool is a service that sits between two other products and passes information from one to the other. Services such as Zapier and Make are well-known examples. You write a rule in plain terms: when this happens in tool A, do that in tool B. There's usually no code, and you can often get a useful rule running in an afternoon.

That's the appeal, and it's also the risk. Because each connection is so easy to add, a small business can build a tangle of them without ever deciding to.

What does a connector rule look like?

A rule has two parts, a trigger and an action.

• Trigger: a new row appears in the event sign-up sheet.
• Action: create a contact in the CRM, with the source set to Trade show.

More complex versions add filters and extra steps. For instance, a rule might only run for sign-ups with a company email, then add a task for a salesperson. Even at this level, it's still simple enough for a careful owner to run.

Which option should you try first?

When you want two tools to talk, work up from the bottom. Stop at the first step that does the job.

1. Do it by hand. How often does it happen? If it's twice a month, a two-minute job may be the right answer.
2. Use a built-in feature. Maybe the CRM already does it. Check before you build anything.
3. Use a native integration. Supported by a vendor, and they have to fix it.
4. Use a connector tool. For a real gap, with a simple shape.
5. Pay a developer. For something important that the options above can't do reliably.

Most people jump straight to step 4 because it's fun. Steps 1 to 3 are usually cheaper to live with.

What jobs suit a connector tool?

A connector tool suits jobs with these features.

Here's a good invented example. A soap maker sells at weekend markets and takes email sign-ups on a tablet. A rule adds each one to the CRM, tagged with the market's name. If it fails, she loses very little, and she can reload the list on Monday. It took her twenty minutes to set up, and it saves her from typing 50 names each week.

Where they do badly

Be cautious in these situations.

• Money. Anything that creates invoices or changes payment records. A misfire goes straight into your books.
• Two-way sync. Keeping two systems matched in both directions involves conflicts and loops. If one change triggers the other side, which triggers the first, you can burn through your usage allowance or create hundreds of records in a few minutes.
• Customer-facing messages. A rule that emails customers can send the wrong thing to the wrong person, at scale.
• Sensitive data. It's one more company that handles your customers' details. Read how the tool handles them, and consider what passes through it.
• Long chains. If step three depends on step two, which depends on step one, a change anywhere can break the rest.

What do connectors really cost?

Connector tools usually charge by usage, often by the number of tasks or runs, and the cheapest plan may have limits on the features you need. As with any pricing page, check what your volume would cost. Prices change, so look at the current page.

The larger cost is maintenance. When a field name changes in your CRM, or a form gets a new box, a rule can break. Some fail with an alert. Others carry on running, doing the wrong thing. And rules tend to live in one person's login. If that person leaves, nobody knows they exist, until something stops working.

Test a rule before you trust it

Treat a new rule the way you treated your first import. Try it on one test record and read the result in the target tool. Check the odd cases too: a blank phone number, a name with an apostrophe, and the same person coming through twice. A rule that creates a contact each time it runs is one of the quickest ways to fill your CRM with duplicates, so set it to look for an existing record first, if the tool allows it.

Then leave it switched on for a week and check its history every day or two. Most tools show each run and whether it worked. A week of clean runs tells you far more than a good first try.

Keep a list

This one habit makes connectors much safer. Keep a simple sheet with one row for each rule.

Use a shared company login for the connector account, not someone's personal one. Turn on failure alerts, and send them to a person who will read them. Check the list twice a year, and turn off anything nobody misses.

When should you stop adding connections?

Here are the signs that you've gone far enough.

• Nobody can explain the whole setup from memory.
• You have more than a handful of rules, and some depend on others.
• You spend more time fixing rules than they save you.
• You've delayed a change to your sales process, because it might break something.
• Your usage bill keeps climbing, and it's getting near the cost of a better-suited product.
• Rules are copying the same data around in circles.

When you see these, you have three ways out. Simplify, by removing rules that nobody would miss. Replace a chain with a native feature, even if it means moving up a plan. Or switch to a product that handles more of this directly, if your must-have list has really changed.

The aim of this chapter hasn't been to connect everything. It was to keep one trustworthy customer record, with as little retyping as you can manage, and no more moving parts than you can look after.

Key takeaways

• A connector tool passes data between products using a trigger and an action.
• Work up the ladder: by hand, built-in, native integration, connector, developer.
• Connectors suit one-way, simple, low-stakes, repetitive and stable jobs.
• Be careful with money, two-way sync, customer messages and sensitive data.
• Keep a list of every rule, with an owner, and stop when nobody can explain the whole setup.