In a recent survey of Salesforce Admins done by Symphonic Source, 89% of respondents reported thinking that their data is dirty. Dirty data, meaning it contains inaccurate, incomplete, erroneous or duplicate data, can cause all sorts of problems.

Imagine a sales rep calling a customer and discovering that a different sales rep just called that same customer yesterday. If I were that customer, I’d be looking for a different business from which to buy. What does that mean for your company? Lost sales, lost revenue, and lost profits, which likely will translate into lost jobs for some employees of the company. This is just one example, the very tip of the iceberg of problems that dirty data can cause. Let’s not concentrate on the negative though, let’s focus in on a few things you can do to help your organization understand the importance of clean data, ways to clean it up, and how you can keep it that way.

Understand the Different Types of Data
Data drives decisions. Pure and simple. Most businesses that survive in today’s highly competitive marketplace, no matter what industry they are in, are driven by data. Historical data tells you what happened in the past, which products and services sold well and made the company money, and which ones were like tomatoes left on the vine too long that they started to rot and smell bad. Predictive data takes it a step further and forecasts what might happen based on historical trends. Prescriptive data goes even further by offering choices tailored to desired outcomes based on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Dirty Data is Not Just a System Issue
It’s a combination of how a system is configured along with how careful the people are who put data into the system. There’s a fine line between speed and accuracy, and of course the goal is both, but often they seem mutually exclusive. They don’t mix well, like oil and water. So how do you address this? Your organization needs a data steward. Someone to be placed in charge of making sure your data is as good as it can be, and the best person for that job would be someone who has seen dirty data from the inside out, someone who knows firsthand how to deal with cleanup and maintenance of data. In a lot of organizations in the Salesforce ecosystem this is the Salesforce Administrator. They are charged with the responsibility to ensure that the system is configured for maximum effectiveness, with a minimum probability of erroneous data.

The Best Strategy: Prevention
The absolute best way to prevent a database full of dirty data, is to prevent the dirty data from ever going in. Put things in place that validate data before it’s saved, and utilize some techniques and features that Salesforce gives you to address the low hanging fruit, like state and country picklists which force standardization by offering predefined, standardized lists so that California is always CA and not Cali. Review the guidelines from Salesforce for entering currency, dates, times and telephone numbers to help with those items specifically.

Investigate Your Data Sources
Preventing bad data is a great start to data excellence. Keeping your data current and duplicate-free is a challenge that many organizations face every day. It’s especially difficult when some of your data comes from other sources, other systems in your company, or even from sources outside your company. Don’t just assume you have good data because of the source. Sure, it’s ok to trust people and data they send you, just be sure you understand what they do to ensure clean data before they send the data to you.

Establish a Standard
Dirty data doesn’t care if you are the President and CEO of a multi-billion dollar, international company or the “mom” in a “mom ’n pop shop” barely squeaking by to pay the monthly rent. So why should you play nice with your data? Get mean! Get ugly! Get competitive! That’s right, hold your team members accountable for the quality of their data, and drive to the desired outcomes by implementing gamification. People are competitive by nature, and John will see that Jane has more badges or a higher score. John won’t like that. Sorry John, but Jane apparently does more to keep her data clean, to help drive her sales and revenue to meet and exceed her targets. Play hardball – publish a dashboard showing the top performers. Just think what your organization would be like if the remaining 80% were performing like the top 20%. Look out world!

Tools That Help Keep Your Data Clean
There are a number of tools out there that have been made specifically to help clean data. RingLead, for example, has a complete suite of tools for data quality that not only remove duplicates, but also prevent the creation of new duplicates. There’s also Cloudingo, which lets you cleanse your data from a simple dashboard. But if you want to give your users a quick and easy way to maintain their data, whether it be for Opportunities, Lead/Contact info, or even Campaign Management, implement X-Author for Excel by Apttus. X-Author brings Salesforce and Microsoft Excel together, allowing your users to work in the fast and familiar user interface of Excel, while maintaining their data in Salesforce.

Learn to implement a unique, effective data migration strategy in this upcoming webcast with Bluewolf and Apttus. Register here.