Salesforce Implementation Best Practices: Data

Cloud for Good has recently published an eBook to highlight best practice recommendations for CRM implementation including considerations for executive sponsorship, business processes, data, automation, usability/scalability, and analytics based on our and our customers’ success stories and lessons learned.

The first question any time that we hear phrases like “Best in Class,” “Best of Breed,” or “Best Practices” is: who decided the best? What we have learned in our many years of CRM consulting is that best is relative and often dependent upon experience, trials and, most often, failures. We believe that one has to go through a challenging if not difficult experience at least once in order to learn how to do it better the next time.

At Cloud for Good, we are Salesforce experts who speak fluent nonprofit. Our consultants have led thousands of implementations across multiple industries and verticals, both as consultants and as customers.  I would like to focus on data in this blog post because data is one of the most critical aspects of any implementation and must be considered, not only for the initial migration, but also for ongoing integrations and data entry.

Nothing sinks a new implementation faster than bad data. Users will quickly lose faith in the tool as well as those leading the implementation effort if incomplete, incorrect, or irrelevant data is present.

Data “Dos”

  • Put a great deal of effort into data cleansing and task users with the cleanup process. Focus not only on de-duplication, but also data quality including completeness and adherence to data policies that you wish to implement and enforce in the new tool. For example, you might enforce complete contact names (Mary Unknown is not a valid contact) or a requirement that every Opportunity/Donation must have a Contact Role.[…]
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