Salesforce Data Hygiene: 7 Steps to Error-Free Data

Ever wondered why your Salesforce reports seem off? Or why your sales team's productivity isn't quite where it should be? 

The answer might be lurking in your data. 

Salesforce data hygiene isn't just a buzzword — it's the backbone of your CRM's effectiveness.

Discover the hidden costs of neglected data hygiene, followed by a practical guide to maintaining a clean Salesforce ecosystem. We'll wrap up by introducing a cutting-edge Salesforce plugin designed to streamline your data management process.

Further Reading:

Why Is Salesforce Data Hygiene Important?

Effective sales performance relies heavily on accurate and reliable data within Salesforce.

Let's look at its impact on sales teams and other benefits of Salesforce data cleansing.

1. Improved Decision-Making Accuracy

When your data is accurate and up-to-date, you can focus on high-value customers, spot sales trends and opportunities, and make confident, data-driven decisions. 

This means you can prioritize your efforts on the most promising leads and maximize your sales efforts.

For instance, imagine being a sales manager with a clear picture of your top leads. With clean data, you can identify the top 10% of leads most likely to convert and allocate your team's time and resources accordingly. 

This boosts your sales performance and helps you make the most of your time and resources.

2. Enhanced Sales Opportunities

Clean data is essential for identifying and pursuing new sales opportunities. When your data is up-to-date and accurate, you can easily understand your customers' needs, preferences, and pain points. 

This allows you to tailor your sales approach, build stronger relationships, and ultimately close more deals. By leveraging clean data, you can unlock new revenue streams and drive business growth.

3. Improved Customer Success

Your customers expect personalized, relevant, and timely interactions with your brand. But if your customer data is inaccurate or outdated, you risk disappointing them. 

By maintaining clean data, you can ensure that your customer interactions are informed by accurate insights, leading to higher satisfaction rates and increased loyalty.

4. Boosted Employee Productivity

When your data is clean and organized, each sales rep can focus on high-value tasks rather than wasting time on data entry, correction, and validation. 

By automating data hygiene tasks and implementing efficient data management processes, you can free up your team to focus on what matters most: driving business growth and delivering exceptional customer experience.

5. Better Forecasting

Clean data gives you a clear view of your sales pipeline, enabling you to create accurate forecasts and make informed decisions about resource allocation. 

This means you can plan and budget with confidence and avoid costly surprises.

6. Enhanced Sales Process Adherence

Clean data can help you accurately track how well your team follows your established sales process. 

This insight allows you to identify bottlenecks, refine your approach, and adapt your strategy based on real-world performance data.

For example, clean data helps you see if deals stall at specific stages, like negotiations. If the data shows certain reps aren't logging key details, like follow-up actions or decision-maker info, you can address the issue directly.

7. Seamless Handoffs Between Sales and Support

Clean data ensures a smooth transition from sales to customer support. 

When your Salesforce support teams have access to accurate, up-to-date customer data, they can provide better service, boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty.

8. Compliance and Risk Management

Clean data is crucial for regulatory compliance and risk mitigation. With rules like CCPA and GDPR affecting US businesses, keeping your data tidy helps you dodge hefty fines and protect your reputation. Plus, it makes it a breeze to handle customer data requests and audits.

In summary, maintaining Salesforce data hygiene drives business growth, improves customer satisfaction, and optimizes operations. 

But what exactly does bad data look like, and how can you identify it in your own Salesforce org? Let's look at the common characteristics of bad Salesforce data.

What Constitutes Bad Salesforce Data?

Bad Salesforce data can take many forms, from incomplete records to inaccurate information. 

Here are the most common signs of poor data quality in Salesforce:

  • Incomplete Records: A common data quality issue in your Salesforce database often manifests as incomplete crucial fields. Empty email addresses, missing industry classifications, or blank opportunity amounts can create significant gaps in customer profiles and sales pipelines.
  • Duplicate Data: Multiple records for the same entity in Salesforce, often with conflicting information. This fragments customer data across several entries, diluting the single source of truth.
  • Outdated Information: Stale data that no longer reflects current reality, like defunct company details or outdated product interests. These data errors misrepresent the actual state of customer relationships.
  • Inconsistent Formatting: Varied data entry styles for the same type of information, such as phone numbers or company names. This hinders data aggregation and reporting accuracy in Salesforce.
  • Inaccurate Data: Factually incorrect information in your Salesforce database, ranging from misspelled names to erroneous financial figures. This undermines the reliability of your entire dataset.
  • Irrelevant Data: Extraneous information that doesn't align with business objectives or aid decision-making.
  • Non-compliant Data: Information stored or used in ways that violate data protection regulations or industry standards. These data quality issues expose the organization to legal and reputational risks.

Now, let's shift our focus to the impact of neglecting data hygiene.

The Cost of Poor Data Hygiene in Salesforce

Ignoring data hygiene can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Here's a breakdown of the potential costs of dirty data:

  • Financial Implications: Bad data leads to wasted marketing spend, inaccurate sales forecasts, and lost revenue opportunities.
  • Operational Inefficiencies: Frequent data cleanups consume valuable time and resources, diverting your team's focus from core business activities.
  • Missed Business Opportunities: Inaccurate data can lead to missed sales opportunities, inaccurate lead scoring, and ineffective marketing campaigns.
  • Compliance Risks: Violating data privacy regulations can result in hefty fines and reputational damage.
  • Damaged Customer Relationships: Inaccurate data can lead to communication errors, frustrating customer experience, and damaged relationships.

Having identified the consequences of poor Salesforce data hygiene, it's time to take decisive action.

Step-by-Step Guide to Maintain Salesforce Data Hygiene

Maintaining Salesforce data hygiene is crucial for ensuring the accuracy, completeness, and reliability of your CRM data. Below is a step-by-step guide to help you keep your Salesforce data clean and actionable.

Step 1: Define and Standardize Data Entry Processes

Creating clear guidelines for data collection and entry is the first step in maintaining Salesforce data hygiene. 

This includes defining field-specific formats and required information. Implementing picklists and dropdown menus can limit free-form text entry, reducing errors and ensuring consistency. 

Tools like Scratchpad can further streamline data entry by allowing you to update Salesforce directly from email, calendar, and other sources.

Step 2: Implement Data Validation Rules

 Data validation rules are essential for ensuring the accuracy and consistency of your Salesforce data. Here's how to implement them effectively:

  • Set up field-level validations:some text
    • Enforce data formats for critical fields (e.g., phone numbers and email addresses) to ensure data standardization.
    • Ensure data consistency across related fields with cross-field validation rules.
  • Prevent incomplete records:some text
    • Mark critical fields as required.
    • Use dependent picklists to guide users through logical data entry flows.
  • Create alerts for missing or inaccurate data:some text
    • As a Salesforce admin, set up notifications to alert users when required fields are missing or data doesn’t meet specified validation criteria.

Step 3: Regularly Audit Your Salesforce Data

As a Salesforce admin, conducting regular audits is essential for maintaining data integrity and ensuring accurate reporting.

Timely audits will help you identify data issues such as duplicate records, inaccurate customer information, and outdated data.

Leverage native Salesforce tools like Reports and Dashboards to monitor data accuracy and highlight areas requiring attention.

Additionally, you must perform quarterly in-depth data audits to ensure long-term data cleanliness.

Step 4: Clean and Deduplicate Salesforce Data

Start by using Salesforce's Duplicate Management tool or a specialized data cleansing tool like Cloudingo. These tools help identify and merge duplicate records, ensuring data consistency across your system.

Once duplicates are handled, regularly scrub incorrect or irrelevant data using native tools like Data Loader or external data cleansing solutions. 

Finally, establish a routine for ongoing data maintenance to prevent errors, inaccurate entries, and outdated information from accumulating.

Step 5: Automate Data Hygiene Tasks

Automating data hygiene tasks can streamline operations, reduce manual errors, and ensure consistent data quality.

To automate effectively, you can:

  • Utilize Salesforce automation features like Flow and Process Builder to streamline data cleaning and ensure data is updated automatically.
  • Set up automated workflows to regularly update outdated customer information and ensure your database reflects current, accurate data.
  • Use third-party tools specializing in Salesforce data hygiene to help automate and scale your data maintenance efforts.

Step 6: Train and Educate Your Sales Team on Data Hygiene

Here's a quick checklist to keep your team up-to-date with data hygiene best practices:

  • Educate every sales rep on the importance of data hygiene and provide clear instructions on how to input clean and accurate data into Salesforce.
  • Offer incentives for maintaining good data hygiene, such as rewards for sales reps who consistently enter clean, accurate data.
  • Regularly monitor data inputs and provide feedback to your team to ensure continuous adherence to data hygiene standards.

Step 7: Implement Data Governance Policies

Data governance is a framework of policies, procedures, and standards that ensure the effective and efficient use of information within an organization.

Here’s how to go about it for your Salesforce Org:

  • Define roles and responsibilities for data management
  • Establish processes for data updates, deletions, and access controls
  • Create a comprehensive data dictionary
  • Develop guidelines for data quality and consistency
  • Set up regular policy reviews and updates
  • Align policies with business needs and regulatory requirements

While Salesforce tools like Data Import Wizard and Duplicate Management handle basic data tasks, Scratchpad offers a more efficient and comprehensive solution.

Scratchpad: Tidying Up Your Salesforce Ecosystem

Scratchpad is a powerful Salesforce plugin designed to help sales professionals optimize their workflow by simplifying data entry and management.

Here's the deal: Sales team’s have improved their CRM Hygiene by 80% in just two weeks with Scratchpad. That’s because it’s heavily adopted by reps since it’s designed for the way reps work. And every update in Scratchpad is instantly reflected back in Salesforce. How’d they get that 80% number you ask? Scratchpad’s new CRM Hygiene Tracker measures the accuracy of your process and data.

Simple as that.

Key Features

Scratchpad offers several features that simplify Salesforce data entry and management:

1. AI-Powered Suggestions

Keep your opportunities and customer records current with Scratchpad’s AI suggestions. From your calls and emails, Scratchpad’s AI Sales Assistant recommends updates for ‘next steps’, ‘MEDDIC’ criteria, or other important fields. 

With just one click, you can review, accept, or modify the suggestions — ensuring your Salesforce data remains accurate and relevant without the need for manual entry.

2. Command for Quick Updates

Scratchpad Command offers a lightning-fast way to update Salesforce without navigating its complex interface. 

Whether it’s changing opportunity stages, logging next steps, or updating key deal fields, the commands allow you to perform these tasks from any web page or app in seconds. 

3. Instant Notes

Scratchpad’s Notes allows sales reps to capture critical meeting notes or deal information in real-time, right from their browser. 

With automatic sync to Salesforce, every note is tied to the relevant record, ensuring nothing gets lost. It eliminates the need to toggle between spreadsheets, providing a single interface where your reps can effortlessly transition from note-taking to Salesforce updates without missing a beat.

4. No-Code Automation

Set up Salesforce updates directly from Slack or schedule reminders for follow-ups without needing to code. This feature simplifies processes, making it effortless to keep your Salesforce data accurate while saving you time on manual data entry.

5. Deal Rooms

Deal Rooms create a collaborative space where your team can work together on deals, share updates, and align strategies—all while keeping Salesforce updated automatically. It integrates directly with Slack, meaning you can update Salesforce from within Slack channels.

Have more questions about Salesforce data cleaning? Let’s tackle them.

Common Questions About Salesforce Data Hygiene

1. What Are the Common Causes of Salesforce Data Decay?

Salesforce data decay is often the result of a combination of:

  • Human error
  • Inadequate data management processes
  • Lack of data standardization

Common causes include outdated or duplicate records, incorrect data entry, and insufficient data validation.

2. How Often Should I Clean My Salesforce Data?

The frequency of cleaning Salesforce data depends on various factors, including data volume, usage, and complexity. 

A good rule of thumb is to check your data quality every month or quarter. This helps you catch and fix any issues quickly.

However, organizations with high data volumes, complex data structures, or high-velocity sales environments may require more frequent cleaning cycles. 

It's also a good idea to set up automated cleaning processes that run in the background. This helps keep your data clean and up-to-date and reduces the risk of it getting messy and outdated.

3. What’s the Role of AI in Improving Salesforce Data Hygiene?

AI is a game-changer when it comes to keeping your Salesforce data clean and healthy. It can automate the process of cleaning, removing duplicates, and adding missing information to your data.

AI tools can also look at large amounts of data and spot patterns, mistakes, and inconsistencies that humans might miss. This makes data cleaning faster and more accurate.

For example, Scratchpad’s AI Suggestions can automatically recommend updates for opportunities and customer data in Salesforce, including fields like next steps and MEDDIC. 

Similarly, the AI Sales Assistant also captures key details from sales calls and meetings, updating Salesforce in real-time, saving time, and maintaining data quality.

So why wait? Try Scratchpad for free today and discover how its AI-powered features can help you prevent data issues and ensure a tidy Salesforce ecosystem.