Data — it drives knowledge, decisions and the survival of your business. When your Salesforce instance is riddled with bad data then it reduces the integrity of knowledge, decisions, and your company’s survival. With this in mind, data cleansing your Salesforce environment is important to maintain the quality of information your company holds. It is the lifeblood of your business so implementing a consistent Salesforce data cleansing process will optimize ROI of your business operations.

Productivity

Are your salespeople contacting the right people? Or are they wasting time emailing prospects that have moved on? People switch jobs and employers. Better data will ensure that your reps are contacting the right people. Data.com is just one provider that can enrich the data of your leads and accounts to boost the performance of your salespeople. It’s a data cleansing app that lives natively in Salesforce.

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Duplicates can be a salesperson’s nightmare, especially if you are using a sales automation tool. Sales automation, although extremely powerful, can allow duplicates to slip through the cracks. Emailing the same person with multiple lead records shows the prospect we don’t have it together. It’s just sloppy. In addition to this, when a rep sees multiple lead records of the same person then this can trigger the rep to investigate both leads for activity, or even cause them to merge leads. Invest in a tool that can deduplicate records like Cloudingo or RingLead.

Salesforce Data Cleansing Creates Better Reporting

A data cleansing process leads to better reporting. Salesforce reporting can already be a beast to wrangle so if your data is a mess then it will be a challenge to keep your reporting method in good order. As the company expands, so will your data. According to SiriusDecisions, a B2B organization’s data doubles every 12 to 18 months. And 10 to 25 percent of the marketing database contains critical errors.

While your organization becomes a wealth of data, a consistent data cleansing process will give the power back to decision makers. C-level executives might not care about how the data is compiled. The “how” of reporting is up to you. Executives look at the big picture so it is up to you to use the data available to help them make decisions.

Reduce Wasted Costs

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Bad data will waste time and money around all aspects of your business. Let’s go back to the salesperson example. I worked at a company that sent company swag to prospects via direct mail. After following up with a call, the sales rep later learned the prospect no longer worked at the company. A waste of company time and resources. From salespeople contacting the wrong prospect to billing sending invoices to the incorrect address—a clean database will reduce wasted costs associated with your company’s operations.

IBM projects bad data costs the United States around $3 trillion per year. And Dr. Thomas C. Redman from HBR claims workers spend their time in a place called “The Hidden Data Factory.” In this “Factory,” departments participate in an assembly line of data quality control.

Managing the Salesforce Data Cleansing Project

You know objectively that bad data costs businesses time and money. It’s a matter of implementing the right time, tools, and processes to carry out the data cleanse.

Managing this project can be a daunting task. And let’s be honest, a Salesforce data cleanse is not a sexy process, but it’s like changing the oil for your car.

There are tools out there, like the ones we mentioned earlier. There’s even a data cleaning ROI calculator that may help with your decision-making process. But a tool may be required to manage the entire project of cleansing your Salesforce data. It will keep you organized and accountable. You may have to communicate and collaborate with different team members and business units. With a Salesforce native project management solution in place such as Inspire Planner, people can access the tool to get the answers they need. From accessing tasks, schedules, or overall visibility to the project’s progression.