Executive Summary
An effective plan for entering, cleaning and updating the data for your salesforce.com (SFDC) system is critical for achieving success with SFDC. According to industry experts poor planning for managing the data entry/data quality issue has historically been one of the largest reasons for failure with CRM systems.
The data entry/data quality challenges faced by a SFDC customer, and the corresponding solutions and best practices to be considered will vary depending on the company sales process and size. However applying data management best practices can be instrumental for creating revenue growth and a competitive advantage with your SFDC investment.
Why Does Data Quality Matter for Salesforce.com Customers?
This whitepaper concentrates on the data impact and benefits to sales and marketing users selling to other businesses. Although SFDC is used by a variety of other company functions, such as service and support, this analysis focuses on the best practice recommendations for sales and marketing.
There are two main reasons why current stakeholders in a SFDC project should have a strategy for addressing the quality of data in their SFDC system.
1) Historical Lessons Learned from Prior CRM Project Failures:
There is a growing body of research from industry analysts that data entry/data quality is one the top, if not the top factor determining the success or failure for a CRM project.
CSO Insights, a research firm that specializes in benchmarking sales & marketing excellence, published its annual study of sales organizations worldwide on January 12, 2004. The 2004 Sales Excellence Report, which includes responses from over 1,300 sales executives, cited the number one challenge for CRM initiatives was populating systems with accurate data and then maintaining the accuracy of that information. Another research study from the company called, Increasing Sales Effectiveness Through Optimized Sales Knowledge Management, highlighted three key process improvements desired by the study participants tied to using technology for higher sales effectiveness.
• Dynamic Process. Over half the organizations surveyed stated that their top improvement objective was to develop ways to manage sales knowledge delivery in a much more instantaneous, as-the-world-is-changing manner. Annual, quarterly, even monthly postings of information are not frequent enough to meet the needs of the rate of change in the marketplace.
• Easier Access. As noted in past studies, access to information still needs to be improved In a perfect world there would be one place to go for knowledge, and while it might pull information from several sources, the linking would be transparent to the sales team member
