Addressing data hygiene should be considered. It’s essential to be proactive to minimize the impact of insufficient data on your business. Streamlining your systems will remove data clutter from Salesforce and marketing automation and allow your teams to focus on the information and platforms that matter most.
Automated Reminders
Most people have experienced automated appointment reminders from a digital calendar or a phone call. This technology saves time and resources for businesses that depend on scheduled events or customer interactions.
For example, maintenance service providers can send a text message or email to clients about their upcoming appointments. It helps reduce no-shows and scheduling errors, as well as improve the efficiency of staff. In addition, automation tools like People.ai can spot-check data to catch errors that human users might miss. It allows sales managers and admins to leverage the best information possible for their sales efforts.
The role of automation in maintaining Salesforce hygiene is essential because dirty data has measurable negative impacts on your business outcomes and leads to a lack of sales growth. Moreover, relying on dirty data can be more efficient than you think. According to MIT, a business with a database of poor quality loses up to 15-25% in revenue.
Automating processes can free up valuable team members to focus on more important duties and drive a positive business impact. When choosing which tasks to automate, focus on those with consistent parameters and logic that apply to many people or are repetitive. This way, the resulting automation will be more effective than ad hoc tools that only speed up specific functions.
Automated Auditing
Many processes and tasks can be automated to reduce the time spent auditing and help ensure data is clean, accurate, and complete. Automating these tasks frees up your team’s time to focus on higher value or more complex work while reducing errors and making your organization more efficient overall.
Sales operations professionals should assess each process and task to identify which can be automated, starting with simple or repetitive ones. Some examples include a test step within an audit, a data extraction process to supply standardized information for multiple audits, or administrative activities like document retention, hours tracking, and certification management.
Once your IA function has considered how automation could reshape its operating model, setting up systems to support the changes you plan to implement is essential. It includes ensuring that your automation tools can be configured and customized to meet your organization’s specific needs and adhere to relevant data privacy and security standards.
A key challenge with implementing automation is motivating your sales team to follow good data hygiene practices. By providing little nudges and implementing automation tools that regularly double-check for inconsistencies, you can make it easier for your team to adopt these practices without slowing them down. It will also make your organization’s data more reliable and more accessible for the analytics and forecasting teams to work with.
Automated Deduplication
Data deduplication — eliminating redundant data records — is one of the most critical aspects of Salesforce hygiene. Duplicates can lead to skewed reporting and lost productivity, jeopardizing the customer experience by sending them duplicate marketing messages or sales emails.
Establishing standardized processes and automation tools that manage data flow between systems where possible is critical. It will minimize data entry errors and ensure that records are always synchronized and validated. It also helps to set up automated processes that regularly run spot checks and cleaning jobs on data to catch things that may have gone unnoticed.
Automating data deduplication is the best way to keep duplicates from growing out of control and requires minimal human intervention. The process can be done as data is entered or modified (in-line deduplication), as a background activity that runs on demand, or at a predetermined cadence (post-processing deduplication).
It is essential to carefully consider the automation settings and review filter results when using post-processing deduplication, as this approach can be more prone to false positives and merges based on loose fuzzy matching algorithms or filters with a low confidence level.
Whether you are trying to motivate your reps to follow best practices, streamline the data flows between your systems, or eliminate duplicates, a well-designed automated data hygiene solution can make all the difference. With some automation, your team can feel supported instead of hindered by the time-consuming, manual tasks associated with good data hygiene.
Automated Cleanup
Getting every team to make data hygiene a priority requires a significant effort. But it is worth the effort – as the old saying goes, “garbage in = garbage out.” Incomplete, inconsistent, or incorrect data leads to poor decision-making and missed revenue opportunities. Data cleansing tools can automatically identify duplicate records, repair them, and standardize formats.
This type of automation helps prevent insufficient data from accumulating in the first place and ensures that all data is clean and reliable. While it is essential to audit insufficient data to understand where it came from and how it got there, this process can take time and effort. Tools can automate this process, scan your data for duplicate records, and repair and deduplicate them.
A good rule of thumb is to limit the data you collect and store to keep your database size manageable. A cluttered, difficult-to-use system adds to the risk of insufficient data. Minimizing the amount of data your organization keeps allows you to focus on the information you need for sales operations and analytics. Having a minimalist database makes it easier for your teams to find the data they need and makes it less likely that data will become outdated, inconsistent, or corrupted.
