Salesforce is the lifeblood of your organization and the main tool your sellers need to make it through their day. Sure, there are other sales technologies and even LinkedIn for prospecting but Salesforce.com holds it all together. With the app exchange, most organizations make it the hub of all their sales tech. The problem, however, that sellers spend 27% of their time focusing on non-sales related activity because a lot the data they need isn’t accurately reflected in their Salesforce.com. Try these three simple ideas to keep your CRM accurate and updated.
Clean the data as it comes into Salesforce.com. The premise is simple, use the leads table to qualify contacts, companies, and opportunities before they care converted into permanent records. Do not allow users to add any company or contact data into Salesforce.com unless it starts as a lead and make it functionally impossible through permission settings.
Once this policy is in place, add real-time lead appending to clean leads as they come into your system. In an early blog I wrote the importance of contacting leads as soon as they come into your organization and lead appending will ensure this will happen. If you have one point of entry into Salesforce.com and the point is reinforced with a cleansing tool, your data will enter current, complete, and accurate.
Empower the users. Although up to 5% of the inaccuracy in your CRM originates from misspelled or misrepresented data from the users, empowering the users to clean up their own mess benefits the database overall. After all, who has a more vested interest in the cleanliness of Salesforce.com than the sellers themselves?
The key to Account-Based Selling is a clean Salesforce.com. By deploying a utility that corrects the company and contact data inside and account record, sellers can become part of the solution instead of the problem. An account cleansing tool will empower the user to clean up the accounts and contacts that are important to them and thus important to the entire company. Old contacts will be labelled as such and their replacements will be imported ensuring the entire buying committee is represented.
Systemic Cleaning. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the average person changes jobs ten to fifteen times (with an average of 12 job changes) during his or her career. You can see the impact this has on your contact data by a rate of decay at 25% – 36% per year. That has a very tangible impact on the health of your CRM but also a great opportunity to follow your old customers to their new jobs for quick wins.
Data decay presents most prominently within the contact data table and we recommend cleaning / updating contact records every 90 days. The impact will be updated titles, email addresses, and locations while identifying INACTIVE contacts that have moved to other companies. We recommend keeping the old record and labeling it INACTIVE then create a new lead for the individual at his or her new company.
RampedUp is a tool born inside of Salesforce.com so of the functionality above is “native.” Real-time lead appending, user deployed account cleansing, and systemic contact clean / append are truly simple ways to keep Salesforce.com accurate and updated. The impact is an overall cleaner database that will produce more productive sellers and marketers.