Data management is the most crucial aspect of maintaining a good CRM solution. As the No. 1 CRM now, Salesforce has the same requirement when it comes to managing data. For this purpose, Salesforce offers a lot of tools for managing, storing, and analyzing the data for proper business administration. You can use the Salesforce data management tools to find out in-depth information about customers, deliver a better user experience, and increase the effectiveness of Salesforce administration.
Data management on Salesforce itself is a data-driven approach that involves properly structuring and analyzing data about customers, prospects, employees, and stakeholders. The end goal is for the sales and marketing teams to use this data to ensure better customer relations. The data should be as accurate and updated as possible.
When done right, Salesforce data management will offer the highest sales and business innovation opportunities and help the managers make better-informed decisions. Data drive insights can maintain better customer relationships, retain customers, and drive more sales. The more insights you gain about the customer intentions, the better you can plan your targeted marketing campaigns and optimize the scope of sales. This is all about getting the best output by best analyzing the available historical data. Proper data management is essential for perfect Salesforce data recovery and backup when needed.
Five steps in proper Salesforce data management
Let us further explore the give key steps involved in successful data management.
- Importing relevant data
Modern business organizations tend to produce a huge amount of data every minute about customers, transactions, products, services, etc. All these data go to the CRM, but everything may not be relevant. You may be overwhelmed by loading your system with too much data, so first, identify the CRM-relevant data for the key business processes. Here are some of the most CRM-relevant data types.
- Contact info as customer demographic and biographic data.
- Data used to run analysis reports and dashboard reports.
- Data related to the daily operations of the organization.
Choosing the right data and triaging the rest will help reduce data clutter and improve the user experience and reduce cost.
- Optimizing large volumes
As we have seen above, organizations tend to generate huge volumes of data for CRM-based process management. The company data stores may now contain millions of records. This may slow down the processing, and companies require some advanced tools to manage it. If you have a huge volume of data to manage, it is important to optimize the CRM. You can make use of some tools to speed up the performance as below.
- Custom Indexes which will speed up SOQL queries.
- Database Statistics to collect the essential stats for better planning and maintaining data access.
- Force.com Query Plan, which can speed up and optimize SOQL queries
- Divisions for segmenting data into different logical groups to run better searches and generate customized reports.
- Skinny Tables with frequently used fields for speeding up the read-only operations.
- Integrating external non-CRM data
To properly manage the Salesforce platform, you may need non-CRM data too. You can incorporate other data sources from across the organization. This may include enabling the external data sources, integrating web applications, and syncing data with Salesforce. There are many tools available for non-CRM data integration as below.
- Salesforce Connect to get the data to read/write access from external apps.
- Einstein Analytics (Wave) to embed the CRM dashboards onto the Lightning pages
- Salesforce Mashups helps to access data on different systems through UI or web services
- Heroku Connect to sync data from different apps onto the Heroku platform
Integrating all these data will help to expand Salesforce’s data management capabilities.
- Archiving data
For optimizing the performance of Salesforce, you may also need to distinguish between the historical and current data. Current data is meant to manage the day-to-day operations and provide insights, whereas historical data may be less relevant in daily operations. So, it can be archived to declutter the active database and enhance overall performance. This can also help reduce the data management cost. There are many tools for data archiving as:
- Data Extracts for exporting historical data to external storage.
- Bulk API Data Extracts, Salesforce API, which can extract a large quantity of data in batches.
- Big Objects as a Salesforce feature that will help to store billions of records as read-only.
Other Heroku solutions can sever archive data on the Heroku platform.
- Analyze data
On achieving proper and secured data storage and archiving of historical data, you may need to manage the data in such a way as to analyze it through the Salesforce platform. For this, you have to create some standard procedures for CRM data. You may set up the following approaches:
- Center of Excellence ensures that changes made to the data system follow the standards and support the business goals.
- DevOps/Release Management process to design the release management.
- Design Reviews ensure standard design compliance in code, configuration, and integration with other systems.
- Data Governance for establishing the needed inspections and ensuring the quality of the CRM system.
Proper data management on Salesforce will help you efficiently assemble and analyze the CRM data. Salesforce admins and experts can use these strategies to build a proper Salesforce data management plan which will further ensure effective structuring and efficient utilization of the data for operational and analytical purposes. Along with ensuring these steps in Salesforce CRM data management, it is also important to have a proper backup and restoration plan for the data and metadata. Even though Salesforce offers native backup and recovery support, the users need to make arrangements for more effective and quicker data recovery services. You can find many such data backup and recovery tools on the Salesforce app marketplace, App Exchange. You may compare the features of different applications and identify which one fits the best to your needs and adopt it
