This blog on Salesforce data integrity features a brief intro to the contacts and accounts information inside the Salesforce and how do you establish a connection with them. Then it will focus on the benefits and methods that you can follow to maintain data integrity.

Introduction

Contact information is the basic establishment of your CRM (Customer relationship management) software. Your investment in Salesforce, thus, is just on a par with the subtleties within it in regards to your accounts and contacts – their identity, why they closed, and how much revenue they are creating.

Sales Intelligence gives you the response to each and every one of these questions. It allows your Salesforce to operate tactically as far as its effort, lead prioritization, anticipating, and overall account strategies are concerned.

The benefit of Salesforce Data Integrity

Nothing disturbs your outbound sales and marketing processes like bad contact and account information. The advantages of keeping up with Salesforce.com data integrity are many, while the outcomes of not doing the same as are phenomenally agonizing.

Salesforce Data Integrity Benefit: Time Saved

Your Sales team’s time is significant as it is associated with their efficiency. Furthermore, each call they make or email they send that goes to an erroneous telephone number or email is a hit to their efficiency, their attitude, and motivation.

Ask any sales representative – nothing is more debilitating than turning out an epic prospecting email and sending it to a prospect, just to get hit with an auto-answer that the email address is wrong.

Nevertheless, your sales representative ought not to need to invest tremendous energy chasing down an email or telephone information on a prospect as you're paying your representative to make a sale and not play as a novice NSA operator.

Salesforce Data Integrity Benefit: Smarter Targeting

Taking a gander at your current customer list is a simple method to source new look-alike contacts and accounts and then pursue them tactically.
Does your product or services sell best with records in a particular with any specific industry or sector? Do your optimal purchasers have a particular employment title? Or they work in a specific department?

Understanding your present customer base and at that point utilizing those bits of knowledge to launch focused outbound marketing and sales endeavors to comparable leads and accounts, is an incredible method to guarantee that your efforts are not squandered because of pursuing the wrong individuals.

What Data Do You Need in Salesforce?

You require two explicit sorts of data within Salesforce:
 
To import that information into Salesforce, it is recommended to use tools or applications like SalesIntel to source and export hand-checked data on the general population and organizations that you're specifically selling or targeting into your Salesforce CRM implementation.

How about we investigate the kinds of Salesforce data that your sales, advertising, and customer support team need to carry out their responsibilities successfully and effectively.

At the contact or lead level, you ought to have at least:
• Name
• Job Title
• City
• State
• Division or department
• Email Address
• Office Address
• Direct Phone Number
• Mobile phone Number
• LinkedIn Profile URL

At the account level, you ought to have the following data points:
• Industry
• Organization HQ City
• Organization HQ State
• Organization Size
• Technology and innovation used
• Revenue generated

With this abundance of information available to you, you can run everything from account-based advertising playbooks to 100% logical A/B tests on informing and personas to full-throttle sales campaign on your immediate target market.

Nowadays of vast customer and market information, absent or erroneous data ought to be the last thing keeping your organization away from achieving its objectives. Precise Salesforce data is the establishment of your organization to generate revenue. It's imperative for sales, operation, and marketing team, along with Salesforce Administrators, to comprehend the wealth of resources accessible to them and to use them in the best possible way.

Maintain Salesforce Data Integrity

If you are struggling to get precise contact and account information for your sales team, you need to invest in Salesforce Data enrichment tools to create a systematized process for maintaining data integrity and moving forward.

Following point must be kept in mind to maintain data integrity

• CSV files cannot have any commas.
      o Use “Find & Replace” to find commas and replace with nothing before importing or else your data will end up in the wrong field
• Eliminate all duplicates before importing data.
      o Removing duplicates from a spreadsheet is a lot simpler than merging them in Salesforce as Import Wizards will try to merge duplicate accounts, contacts, and leads.
• Compare data already in Salesforce before importing more
      o You can use several tools like Excel Connector or Apex Data Loader and V-lookup to compare new data against existing data before importing.
• CSV files cannot save formatting.
      o After formatting the columns for Number, Date, Zip Code etc. you can save the CSV but you have to keep it open when importing or else the formatting will be lost.
• Search before creating records manually.
     o A quick search will tell you if the contact data or account already exists in the system.
• Usage of validation rules to maintain your data structure.
     o By introducing validation rules, you can impose data formattings such as two letter states or three letter country codes.
• Usage of “Required Fields” where needed.
     o In certain objects, required fields may be essential, such as Phone or Status fields but if you make every field mandatory, records may not be created or false data may be entered.
• Do a small batch import at first
      o Import 5-10 records initially to ensure that they are uploaded as expected before importing all records.
• Use reports to check data integrity regularly
      o Generate reports for your different objects and embrace the fields that are most significant to you. Sort by columns to do a spot check on their usage.

Conclusion

It is advisable to invest in the Salesforce data enrichment applications like Sales Intelligence. It is also advisable to develop a standard operating procedure and checklist for uploading data on Salesforce to ensure that the integrity is maintained at the initial stage itself.