No matter what your industry is and how long you are using Salesforce CRM for enterprise management, it is crucial to evaluate your data management strategy from time to time. A foolproof data management system will help you ensure the best practices are being followed, and the sales admins can enjoy the fullest peace of mind. Data backup and recovery is also crucial need that should be made optimal. Sometimes, the admins may come across some strategies which may dramatically improve the data quality and integrity.
However, all the techniques are not ideal for everyone to practice. You need to evaluate your specific use case and then devise the proper data management plans for optimum results. This article will discuss some of the expert data management tips from Salesforce experts.
Salesforce data management tips
- Have an expert data governance team
Business data relies on all departments like marketing, sales, finance, operations, production, quality control, research and development, and so on. So, handling valuable data on Salesforce will make sense only when all the business departments come together and play their roles in ensuring the accuracy and quality of Salesforce data. For this, you have to think of creating a cross-functional team by incorporating all these functional departments and ensuring Salesforce data management is compliant with all industry regulations, and so each department needs to take the responsibility of data management.
- Have a proper security model
Data security can be planned in various ways. Doing this can be daunting if you want to identify the perfect approach for a proper data security model. Choosing an apt model could be best supported by conversations with data governance teams, data reviews, and interactions with all the above-mentioned teams. Salesforce admins can gather all this information and formulate a proper mix of data security features to protect sensitive information and offer proper access to various user. You should also keep in mind that a data security model is ever-evolving. It must be reviewed every six months or sooner to incorporate all the updates in security regulations and based on the latest challenges to data security.
- Regular data deduplication
Another important Salesforce data administration tip is to deduplicate data from time to time. Data duplication can be a killer to your successful Salesforce usage. The integrity of data decides the relevance of your marketing campaigns, skews the sales pipelines, influences the decision making, etc. It may be a disaster if multiple salespeople contact the same customer, leaving a bad impression on them to lose results. It can also have an adverse impact on your company’s internal communication. This may also hamper your efforts of Salesforce data recovery and backup.
In order to tackle this challenge, your data should be deduplicated at least every month or after each bulk loading of data into the Salesforce system. Seasoned Salesforce admins and data ambassadors also tend to use tools to dedupe data and block any duplicate data from entering into the system in real-time.
- Standardizing the data approach regularly
In modern-day enterprises, business data fuels reporting, marketing, sales, product development, etc. If any data elements are unstandardized or free from standard text fields capturing, it may become impossible to offer accurate reporting. This is the major reason data standardization is recommended on a regular basis as a part of Salesforce data management. Standardization of data is supported with picklist fields where it is possible to run the standardization actions on many data points like gender, account type, postal code, state, country, industry, etc., to name a few. This can lead to actionable insights about customers and organizations you are connected with. In terms of standardizing the data elements, one should always consider the scope of reporting the same.
- A solid Salesforce data backup plan
Even though we have already discussed the need for deduplication of data, we encourage one area to keep a duplicate of data, Salesforce data backup. Backup data is essential to ensure smooth operations even in case of a data loss or failure. Most enterprises now have a constant inflow of data into the Salesforce system, making it vulnerable to unplanned changes or inaccuracies. All these can culminate to create a domino effect and end up data corruption. So, Salesforce admins should devise a foolproof data backup strategy to protect and timely restore it in case of data corruption.
You can do a free weekly data backup on Salesforce, which is the bare minimum thing you should do to protect data. Many such backup applications are available at the App Exchange Salesforce tool marketplace. You may also try to adopt other third-party data backup tools also to make a more frequent and steady data backup. With the help of these, you can do automatic or on-demand data backup, which will form part of your solid Salesforce data strategy.
- Verify and validate data
Data is constantly changing. Your customers and prospects may change their jobs, residences, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. They also do not reach out to every business they deal with to update all this information. As the needy, it is your responsibility to reach out to them and uncover such details. Data refreshment must be done at least every six months to ensure you hold accurate and updated information. The companies adopt a layered approach to ensure the same. They find it an add-on opportunity to re-engage with their users by reaching out to them through email or phone, showing the information, and noting any changes.
As Salesforce administrators or owners, you are also advised to prioritize educating the users in order to make them abide by the Salesforce data management best practices. Remember that your Salesforce system is only as strong as the weakest link (user) in it. So, it is essential that everyone is well oriented. You may read and publish articles on CRM data quality, download all the whitepapers, and also maintain an internal committee to oversee the data management activities.