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
• Distribute More Easily. a mechanism needs to be in place for notifying salespeople when specific pieces of sales knowledge in which they are interested become available. Individual preferences can be identified by a user-defined profile
There was a tendency for buyers of CRM solutions in the 1990s to focus on the functionality of a CRM application and not on the sources and updating of data that would enable the users and management to achieve their CRM objectives. Sales and marketing executives with multiple CRM initiatives under their belt have indicated CRM software is somewhat like an empty spreadsheet where the true value is gained only when populated with effective data.
2) End User Satisfaction Drives CRM Success
From the authors personal experience, CRM applications have historically had a bad reputation among sales users. During the 1990s, Sales Executives were quick to adopt Sales Force Automation solutions (a subset of todays CRM market). Sales reps were subsequently required to do a tremendous amount of research and manual data entry to get each of their leads, accounts, contacts and opportunities into the CRM application. The end result of all of this manual, time consuming work was to provide sales management with pipeline and forecast reports. As a result, reps resented the CRM application because of the data entry requirement and that it didnt provide any productivity benefit to them.
In many cases companies migrated data from legacy contact management applications like ACT, Goldmine or MS Outlook without deduplicating the records and cleaning the data. This caused the users to loose confidence in the CRM application all together due to crippling data problems. Without reps entering data or having confidence in their CRM solution, many CRM projects died or had marginal success. The CRM project sponsors lost trust in the CRM vendor for the failure when the root issue was a data entry or quality problem.
