Data is at the core of every move you make in your business. It is fundamental to everything you use Salesforce platform for and acts as an engine that drives your customer marketing and sales programs in Salesforce. Without data, could you decide where to spend your resources or find out your top players within the company? The answer is no, the chances of being able to make the right decision without the relevant data are very slim. It’s the organization's most vital asset to understand customer motives and make critical business decisions.

The conclusion is, Sales and marketing decisions rely heavily on data and metrics. Therefore it is significant for a company to securely manage their data to make informed decisions. Data cannot be much helpful in performing necessary tasks unless it is kept up-to-date, accurate, and comprehensive. Unmanaged and weak data can mean you are running your business on unreliable information. Therefore, it must go through the routine data management process to keep relevant.  

Salesforce Data Management

Data management is an organisational process conducted to acquire, validate, store, protect and process the data, by which they ensure its accessibility, reliability and timeline to meet the needs of the customer that holds the data. Without regular Salesforce data management, organizations tend to make inadequate decisions based on misleading data, which leads to lost sales opportunities. 

Regular data management is all about enforcing constant data quality methods to deliver and maintain high-quality data, including the data involved in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. This strategy of maintaining data quality has become increasingly critical for companies to enforce as part of the work culture. Whether you are transferring data from your old system or assigning sales quotas, or creating reports to share with the marketing teams. You need to make sure that your account, lead, contact and customer data is accurate, up to date and complete.

Steps involved in Salesforce Data Management  

1. Evaluate and manage the current state of data quality

Getting a visual representation of your CRM data in order to assess the current state of data is a good place to start. Data.com assessment is a quick and easy method/tool to check the health of your customer data. It provides you with a brief report to analyze your account, contact, and lead records. 

The second concern is to manage duplicates, Having duplicates data within Salesforce is a headache and can take a lot of time and money to clean up. Although, it can be resolved with Salesforce duplicate management module that allows you to identify duplicate data, improve data quality and prevent from creating any future duplicate records.

2. Build useful dashboards  and determine the key metrics

The next step into the data management process is to have the right data in the right dashboards. Just like maintaining the data quality of being able to evaluate the health of your sales, campaigns or customer support from one place and even on-the-go. This would be a huge advantage in meeting your business goals instead of dropping them due to poor data management. 

Some key metrics for sales teams to consider putting on the dashboard: 

• Time to close
• Opportunity pipe
• Forecast by rep, forecast by stage
• Activities by sales rep
• Win/loss rates

These metrics are must-haves for service teams :

• Time to case resolution
• Cases by source
• High severity case volume
• Top customers by open case
• Case volume trend

While for Marketing teams:

• Leads by source/campaign
• Campaigns by region
• Campaign conversion funnel
• Pipeline
• Top revenue-generating campaigns 

3. Build a 360-degree view of your customer data

Customer data plays a huge role in running a company. It acts as your competitive advantage and drives investment and business decisions to establish your relationship with important accounts. Incomplete or disconnected data, on the other hand, is a liability. Building a 360-degree view of your customer is all about bringing data across various sources in the enterprise, merging it with third-party data and cleaning and coordinating all data sets. 

Majority businesses primarily use cloud data management techniques,  not only to manage customer profiles, but also for combining entities such as products, price, and locations. You need to use compelling new big data technologies, generally used to run Facebook and LinkedIn applications. They combine your interactions and transactions with customers, presenting a comprehensive view of important insights and suggested procedures. Customer Master Data Harmonization Accelerator can help you do just that and establish a business data management framework that aims for better customer data management.

Data Management best practices

ETL tools

The ETL tools (extract, transform, load) are beneficial for individuals that don't have time to clear and clean a chunk of high-quality data records. They come in the form of different ETL software that can be installed to complete the three different tasks automatically and quickly. Firstly, it evaluates the contents of the spreadsheets to be cleared and limits the number of duplicates created. After that, it converts invalid information into the right format. Finally, it loads new required data to create the right accounts and spreadsheets for efficient usage.

Naming conventions

The naming convention is arguably one of the most significant parts of data management. It is useful for both record creation and metadata labelling, and there are several ways for naming your records. 

Naming conventions should be simple, clear, and consistent so you can easily explain it.  For example, the naming convention for opportunities can use Create Date Year + Client Name + Product. Similarly, for a contact, First Name + Last Name, no punctuation or salutations. Whatever naming convention rules business establishes, should be fully communicated and implemented. 

Ensuring data is up-to-date

Like most things, the quality and integrity of your data are also likely to deteriorate with time. If the data is out of date, then even the most robust databases are near to no use. Add-on Salesforce tools such as Data.com Clean can scrub and enrich your data. It compares your account, contact, and lead records with records from Data.com and creates a link between them. Using its Clean jobs feature, you can configure and automate it to clean all your records regularly. 

Validation Rules

The validation rule is probably the most practical Salesforce data management method, created as regular Salesforce algorithms. Various validation tools are available that can be used for third party validation for addresses and other demographic information. Being smaller and easily manageable,  they are as effective as some larger data management tools and most useful for individuals who are working separately. 

Validation rule generally works by blocking the creation or editing of records once the criteria that you list are met. It works specifically on the data that meets the criteria listed. This method helps locate particular data within a large pool of data.

Documenting and Teaching

The final step that any data management representative can take is to utilize the documentation and teaching means. This refers to teaching people how to manage data themselves and documenting them on their own.  This is a common option as it eliminates the burden from your hands and places it among the users. For this method to be successful, make sure that at least one person in the company or organization’s department should be equipped with the necessary knowledge for training others.

What is Salesforce DMP (Data management Platform)? 

Salesforce DMP is a data management platform that collects information from its own and external sources to create comprehensive user profiles. The goal of this platform is to let marketing teams create separate segments for developing marketing campaigns that adjust better to their accounts interest. This whole process makes it easier to gain your target's attention and works toward the goal to sell a product or service.

Its ability to let us utilize the information we have on our users gives us the capability to perform operations such as:

• Procure insights to create campaigns that are more relevant to users interests.  
• Predict if a specific advertising format will work best with the target audience.
• Determine the means to allocate resources across the different channels available.

Final words on Salesforce data management

You can tell that Salesforce data management can be a complicated task to perform; however, implementing some practices makes it more manageable. Plus the information provided in the article above can help you make a decision based on facts and pick out the practice that is most suitable for your particular needs. To some individuals, it might look like a mundane, perhaps even boring task but Salesforce data management is directly associated with the performance and fortune of a business. 

The good news is that Salesforce consulting companies can help you achieve and manage high-quality data by building tools to manage and visualize your CRM data. With that in mind, Evon Technologies would make an ideal partner for your Salesforce data management needs. We will help you implement the right tools and processes to clean and optimize data, remove and prevent duplicates as well as streamline data imports and exports.  We simplify the Salesforce data model by providing Salesforce development services in India so that you can develop meaningful customer relationships. Contact us here or email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to know more about our Salesforce services.