Best Way to Cleanse Your Salesforce

Dirty data is the source of many issues, reduced system performance, false reporting, and a lower level of customer experience. While we know that cleaning your data is important, we know just how tedious these tasks can be. While it is difficult to keep your Salesforce clean, there are some easy things you can do right now. In this article, we will talk about some tips you can implement today to keep your Salesforce data clean.

1. Dedupe Your Salesforce

Duplicate data causes a lot more problems than just seeing double in your reporting. It causes your sales reps a lot of problems. Think about how hard it is for them to manage an account when vital information is scattered across multiple duplicate records. It would be like trying to bake a cake while looking in one cookbook for the ingredients and using another for baking instructions.

Having said this, the first step on your Salesforce deduplication journey is to prevent them from coming in. Try implementing best practices for record creation that requires users to search for existing records prior to creating a new one.

2. Make Sure Your Definition of “Qualified Lead” is Up to Date

When was the last you looked into what exactly a qualified lead is? If you can’t remember or it was more than three months ago, it’s high time to revisit that definition. In fact, if your business has a shorter sales cycle, it is a good idea to revisit even more frequently than that.

As a quality marketing or sales program, you are constantly looking at the success KPIs associated with conversion rates. Those same characteristics and demographics that were initially used to qualify a lead may not fit the description of the leads that converted into sales. If you look deeper into the sales funnel, does this definition remain current for those opportunities won?

Pretty much all companies that release a piece of software also produce an upgrade to make sure it’s current. Make sure you also upgrade the definition of a qualified lead, so you are providing your sales reps with the strongest qualified leads possible.

3. Remove the Invalid Addresses

We have all seen the fake abc@123.com or the bobcustomer@gmail.com. In addition to wreaking havoc on your sales and marketing teams, this junk data is clogging up your database pipelines. If you are using some sort of marketing automation software like Marketo to send emails, you can sync your data with Salesforce and automatically remove any emails that bounced or were undeliverable.

Another good idea is to implement a double opt-in process for all those who signed up to receive your emails. This will help prevent the fake emails from getting into your Salesforce in the first place.

4. Provide Training to your Users

There is always a need to train your users on the best practices of working with data. If you do not keep your training current, the attention level for the needed details will start to deteriorate, and you will soon find yourself in the problem you had before. There are many videos and materials available on the Trailblazer websites that talk about some of the best practices of working with Salesforce. Consider implementing them in a periodic training exercise.

In addition to this, you will also need to show your users why the Training you are providing is important. Explain to them that all of this will allow them to increase their productivity levels, increase customer satisfaction, better reporting, and many other benefits. All of this needs to be championed by the C-suite, so be sure to get executive buy-in for all of the Training you have planned. This will help make sure that all of your efforts will be put to use and not forgotten after the training are over.

5. Limit the Use of Free Form Fields

While free-form fields certainly have their purpose, it gives the users too much freedom to type in anything they want. This leads to many inconsistencies, duplicate records and other issues we talked about earlier. Also, if the particular fields you use are used for reporting, then you don’t want them to be free form. In general, it’s a good thing to guide the user in terms of what you are looking to find in this field, and the best way to do this is by giving them the options they can put in.

Reading through the call notes to discover what the final outcome of the call is frustrating. Instead, consider adding in a call disposition dropdown menu. Here you can provide codes or descriptions of the final outcome of the call for users to choose from. Dropdowns ultimately help to save the user time, provide you with reportable information, and get rid of inconsistencies.

Eliminate Inconsistencies? Inconceivable! Not with dropdown menus. Try this, during your next sales meeting, ask your team to write down how they would abbreviate ‘United States.’ Get them to pass their papers forward and read each others answers. This will show why dropdown menus are a must. Your Honor, we rest our case!

Don’t Let Duplicate Data and Other Issues Drain Your Resources

No matter how prepared you are for an emergency, communications won’t get to the intended use if you have bad data. According to Harvard Business Review, bad data costs US companies $3 trillion dollars. This is due to wasted time and resources that are required to make up for or fix the incorrect data. This is especially true in email marketing for those who pay for contacts. Often, you can’t even send to them because you have bad information about them. Consider taking a data assessment to check how your company is doing. Or, simply make the fair assumption that your data hygiene can always improve.