how to clean salesforce data

How to Clean Up Your Salesforce Data in 6 Steps . Establish a Data Management Team; Use Reports and Dashboards to Identify the Problems; Create Duplicate-Catching Rules; Develop a Data-Hygiene Schedule and Maintenance Plan; Control Data Capture and Input; Put Your Data to Use – Using your data regularly helps keep it clean!

Full Answer

How often should you clean your Salesforce database?

But having a Salesforce database that is chock-full of problematic data isn’t the end of the world. You can use tools like Insycle to clean already-existing data, then schedule regular automated data cleaning sessions to run on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

What is data clean in Salesforce classic?

Data.com Clean compares your account, contact, and lead records with records from Data.com and creates a link between your records and matching Data.com records. Clean also provides clean status information for accounts, contacts, and leads. In Salesforce Classic, your users can do the following.

How to remove duplicate data from Salesforce?

Cloudingo is a tool that not only allows you to deduplicate records, but also allows you to update records in bulk with customized rules, delete inactive or stale records, and schedule automated cleanup. While removing duplicate data from Salesforce, also take the time to assess if the record is actually valuable.

What are the best practices for improving data quality in Salesforce?

There are a few best practices that any company that wants to improve their data quality standards should follow. 70% of CRM data becomes obsolete each year, so regular data cleansing should be a part of any Salesforce organization's data management plan.

What is data cleaning process in Salesforce?

Salesforce data cleaning is the process of removing and repairing outdated, duplicate, or incorrect information from your Salesforce database. Over time, prospects change jobs, companies go through mergers and acquisitions, and contact information changes.

How does Salesforce maintain clean data?

How to maintain clean dataEstablish a process. If you discovered that your organization does not have data quality standards, then now — more than ever — is the time to create a formal process that supports complete and accurate data. ... Educate the organization. Creating or changing a process can be difficult. ... Reward teams.

What are the steps to clean data?

Here is a 6 step data cleaning process to make sure your data is ready to go.Step 1: Remove irrelevant data.Step 2: Deduplicate your data.Step 3: Fix structural errors.Step 4: Deal with missing data.Step 5: Filter out data outliers.Step 6: Validate your data.

How do you clean database data?

Here are 5 ways to keep your database clean and in compliance.1) Identify Duplicates. Once you start to get some traction in building out your database, duplicates are inevitable. ... 2) Set Up Alerts. ... 3) Prune Inactive Contacts. ... 4) Check for Uniformity. ... 5) Eliminate Junk Contacts.

What is Sfdc hygiene?

Salesforce hygiene means the system is maintained by its everyday users. Each representative keeps quality data that is easy to collect and doesn't slow down a sales funnel. In an ideal world, leads come into your Salesforce with the right name, company, and contact information.

How do you maintain data quality in Salesforce?

Business success depends on accurate, complete data that your sales team knows they can rely on. Use Duplicate Management to reduce and prevent duplicate records. Use Data Integration, Data.com Prospector, or Data.com Clean to incorporate data from third parties and Data.com into your records.

What is data cleansing examples?

Those are:Data validation.Formatting data to a common value (standardization / consistency)Cleaning up duplicates.Filling missing data vs. erasing incomplete data.Detecting conflicts in the database.

What is data cleaning explain with examples?

Data cleaning is a process by which inaccurate, poorly formatted, or otherwise messy data is organized and corrected. For example, if you conduct a survey and ask people for their phone numbers, people may enter their numbers in different formats.

What is use of data cleaning?

to remove the noisy data. correct the inconsistencies in data. transformations to correct the wrong data.

How do I clean my CRM database?

The Ultimate CRM Data Cleanup ChecklistFix Formatting Issues & Standardize Formats.Consolidate and Standardize Data Fields.Merge Duplicate Records.CRM Data Cleanup: Create a System and Use It Often.

What is scrubbing the data?

Data Scrubbing, also referred to as Data Cleansing, is the act of correcting your data in a Database that has errors, is incomplete, not properly formatted, or has duplicate entries to make it usable before exporting it to another system.

Why data cleansing is required?

Data cleansing ensures you only have the most recent files and important documents, so when you need to, you can find them with ease. It also helps ensure that you do not have significant amounts of personal information on your computer, which can be a security risk.

How does dirty data get entered?

Well, usually dirty data gets entered in, in one of three ways. The first is probably the most obvious, which is manual entry. Manual entry as the name implies, someone logs into the system, they’re typing away on their keyboard and they enter in a new record.

What is duplicate data?

Duplicate data means that same information already exists elsewhere in the database, at least more than one time. The next one would be incorrect data. An example of incorrect data would be a street address that is outdated. The next is inaccurate data.

How does dirty data happen in Salesforce?

In Salesforce and most other CRMs, the origin of dirty data can usually be pinpointed by one or more of the following behaviors: Importing data from varying sources that lack proper structure or formatting rules . Adding data that lacks proper structure or formatting rules (e.g. international phone numbers) ...

How to clean up data?

Every organization’s needs are different, but here are some actions that can help establish a process: 1 Assign a point person or team responsible for data cleansing 2 Schedule recurring events to tackle data cleanup and enrichment 3 Schedule weekly team meetings to assess what’s working or not working 4 Check the health of new data sources before adding 5 Review existing validation rules or set up new ones 6 Document any feedback, issues, or areas for improvement 7 Create documentation for data quality standards and best practices, including the reason why data is captured 8 Share documentation with organization and include in training for new employees

What to do if your organization does not have data quality standards?

Establish a process. If you discovered that your organization does not have data quality standards, then now — more than ever — is the time to create a formal process that supports complete and accurate data. An absence of process or poor adoption of process is what leads to dirty data in the first place.

Why is clean data important?

The importance of clean data. Clean data — data that is free from errors and inaccuracies — is essential to any sales team. It enables teams to focus on exploring leads, fostering customer relationships, and meeting business goals instead of constantly verifying the integrity of their data.

How to establish a process for data cleansing?

Every organization’s needs are different, but here are some actions that can help establish a process: Assign a point person or team responsible for data cleansing. Schedule recurring events to tackle data cleanup and enrichment. Schedule weekly team meetings to assess what’s working or not working.

Is it OK to cleanse data?

Once you understand the health of your organization’s data, it’s time to take action. It’s likely that things are OK; maybe good, but definitely not great. It’s likely your organization could benefit from a data cleanse.

Can you merge duplicate records in Salesforce?

Duplicate data can easily take on a life of its own. However, merging duplicate records is key to an effective data cleanup process. Duplicate Check for Salesforce is a free tool that finds duplicates, prevents duplicate records, and merges duplicate data. Cloudingo is a tool that not only allows you to deduplicate records, ...

What is sales data cleansing?

Well-performed sales data cleansing embraces data hygiene activities on the business and the technology sides. Dedicating a good amount of time and effort to keeping your sales data clean solves the problem of poor data quality and brings increased accuracy of sales reports and forecasts, sales reps’ productivity and shorter sales cycles.

Is sales analytics good?

Sales analytics and forecasting can only be as good as the quality of data stored in CRM. If the data used for analysis is accurate and complete, reliable reports and forecasts will come as a result. Increased sales reps’ productivity. Having accurate and complete data in CRM helps sales reps spot leads with higher conversion possibility ...

Contact data decay costs millions each year

While implementing Salesforce CRM, you may have gone to great pains to ensure high data quality. But within a year, 30-70% of your contact data will have decayed.

Unstandardized data results in inaccurate reporting

Importing of unstandardized data is one of the biggest causes of bad data. Usually, this happens when:

Missing and incorrect data breaks down processes

In the example above, we talked about how you were unable to get accurate customer counts by country because input for the BillingCountry wasn’t standardized. Imagine if, for many of your customers, the field wasn’t filled at all, or was incorrectly filled?

Duplicates cause confusions and wasted resources

Put simply, you have duplicate data if you have multiple records for the same account, lead, or contact. These duplicates could exist in a single list, or across several data sources. Regardless, the fact remains that if you have duplicate data, your team is wasting time and resources and is causing missed opportunities.

Ehsan Elahi

A wanderer at heart, Ehsan specializes in exploring how people interact with product-focused B2B companies across various touch-points and leveraging that insight in content marketing. In his spare time, he dabbles in data science and learning how to get the most out of data.

Squeaky Clean Data

No matter how prepared you are for an emergency or how fast an email can be sent, it won’t get to the end user if you have bad data about that customer. According to Harvard Business Review, bad data costs US companies $3 trillion dollars in wasted time and resources to make up for or fix that data.

Database of Record

So where to begin? Let’s start by talking about your database of record (DBOR) or where you store the most accurate and up-to-date information about your customers. Step one is to make sure everyone (and we mean everyone) agrees and—more importantly—uses your DBOR as their source of truth about customer information.

Make Data Hygiene a Priority

It’s time to make data hygiene a priority in your day-to-day workflow. Let’s review some possible risks and solutions to improve the quality of your data.

All About the Data

Clean data is great. Fast processing of that data is even better. So let’s review some best practices in data storage that can help with account optimization and email processing times.

Data Retention

One of the easiest options for ongoing data hygiene is to create a retention plan to limit the number of data extensions in your account and the amount of data you store. When you create a data extension in Marketing Cloud, you can choose how you want to apply data retention by selecting to delete specific data or the entire data extension.

Prepped and Ready

In addition to saving your company money, reviewing data hygiene and storage is an important aspect of emergency preparedness. It’s like checking the expiration date of the food in your emergency kit. Just remember to focus on the following key principles.

Quiz

1 What is considered a best practice to control data processing times?

Reports, Folders & Dashboard Organisation

The reporting side of Salesforce can become messy very quickly and is something companies struggle to keep under control. Salesforce’ reporting system is so easy to use that users can be up and running in minutes after being given a basic “How to” demo, unfortunately this can have its down sides as well.

Field Trip & Page Layouts

Recently I’ve discovered a little App called Field Trip that can be downloaded from the AppExchange. Field Trip is simple and effective, it will analyse all of your fields for a particular object and then allow you to run your own Salesforce Reports on their findings.

Start Validating!

Even though its not going to help you clean your current data situation, there should be some questions you should ask yourself as you are starting a cleaning process.

Cloudingo

For everyone that has come to this article because they need to clean current record data, this is a part you will want to read. Cloudingo is a great App that has got a lot of recognition recently, they have 104 reviews on the AppExchange averaging 5 stars and have received many glowing reviews from various independent companies.

Data.com

Thanks to the Sales Cloud Certification I am now a resident expert on Data.com! (sort of). Data.com is a Salesforce product that allows you to perform a number of different services against your data, their flag ships products are Data Clean & Prospect.