Top 4 Salesforce Data Management Best Practices: A Complete Guide for Salesforce Admins

Are you a Salesforce admin or an architect? How often were you compelled to plan a powerful data life-cycle management roadmap for your CRM in order to leverage the power of your business data? Implementing an efficient Salesforce Data Management Strategy is essential in the era of Cloud 3.0 where data is going to play a massive role, right from the most basic to the most complex of Salesforce CRM implementations.

Most delicately designed business processes and analytic reports will be rendered unavailing without quality data to support them. It’s very important to regularly evaluate the data management systems of your enterprise and review the best practice tips shared by other Salesforce data management experts. There are high chances you might come across a strategy that when implemented can dramatically improve the data quality as well as productivity.

ALSO READ: Data Management in Salesforce: All about it’s Challenges & Solutions

For your benefit and ease, we have curated a small list of the top five Salesforce data management best practices that might take your Salesforce experience to the next level.

Reviewing the 5-year Data Goal

Most of the successful enterprises running on a Salesforce platform established a clear 5-year roadmap of their business data. This includes the critical aspect of how they want to use their data to achieve decisive business goals. Unless you don’t have a future-ready, powerful & long-term data strategy, chances are high that you might not be able to take full advantage of your business data.

Reviewing your data also required in setting up the analytical initiatives for your business. Using the right set of data for analytics can really transform your business decisions and boost overall productivity.

One of the most important benefits of having a clear long-term Salesforce data strategy is to meet compliance and governance demands without any hassle. You know which data to retain, which data to keep secure, till when you need to retain which data, how to protect customer data, etc.

MUST READ: Achieving Regulatory Compliance for Salesforce Data: How to Build a Long-term Data Retention Strategy in Salesforce?

Data Integrity

One of the foremost things that decide the effectiveness of any data management strategy is the quality of data that is being stored in the Salesforce system.

To extract the maximum benefit, all the records, custom objects, data, and information stored in the system should first ideally be named according to specific conventions. This ensures that a record’s underlying information can be clearly understood at one glance and that all records are easily differentiated from one another.
Duplicate records can become great trouble by creating an inaccurate view of the database size, result in wasted efforts from the sales and marketing teams, and can lead to grossly miscalculated revenue and sales projections. Therefore periodically getting rid of such duplicate records is essential. This can be achieved by either using Salesforce’s Data Import Wizard and selecting a matching field to identify duplicates or using Salesforce’s built-in duplicate management tool.
Another necessary aspect is diminishing the quality & integrity of your data over time. It is recommended to keep the data up-to-date. To achieve this several add-on applications can be used to scrub & enrich the data quality by getting rid of the redundant data.

Data Validation

The Salesforce data validation rule is potentially one of the most effective Salesforce data management practices and is generally included when a regular Salesforce algorithm is created.

On an individual level, validation helps to easily manage all the system data as effectively as the larger data management tools. Using validation rules, a user can block the creation or editing of records once a pre-defined criteria is met and work specifically on the data that meets the criteria listed. It comes in handy when locating some specific record within large pools of information.
Likewise, on the organizational level, particularly those who regularly ship products and marketing materials to their customers, implementing a third-party validation for addresses and other demographic information will be immensely helpful. This simple add-on feature can ensure huge time and cost savings with relatively little effort on the organization’s part.

Data Backup and Archiving

In the Salesforce system, it is always recommended to adopt a backup or & archiving strategy considering specific business requirements.

As the constantly flowing data is extremely vulnerable to corruption and accidental damage, creating a proper backup strategy becomes necessary. The frequency of the data backups varies depending on the database size, the number of users, and how often changes are made to the data. A variety of options are available to help you backup and restore your data, including Salesforce’s Data Export Service, Data Loader, Report Export, or any third-party application.

Another option for increasing data security and system performance while reducing the costs is the implementation of a secure Salesforce data archiving strategy. In archiving, less used or historical data is moved out of the system into an external storage space where it can be stored and then accessed whenever required. Even Salesforce’s Big Objects can be used to archive data. DataArchiva helps Salesforce enterprise customers archive their data within the Salesforce system natively using Big Objects and future proof their data storage.

Here is one additional tip

Data Documentation and Teaching

Even the most carefully thought out data management processes and procedures are ineffective unless they are documented and made available to everyone who needs them. The final practice that a data management agent utilizes is the documentation and teaching tool.

This includes teaching individual users how to manage data themselves and document it independently. This can be executed by including helpful texts within a Salesforce program guiding the user about the process to input the information and complete the appropriate task.
For this practice to be successful it is highly recommended that at least one person in the organization’s department should be trained on the tool’s operation. This is a viable option as it removes the responsibility from the admin’s shoulders and places it on the users’ but the key here remains the consistent communication.

To know more about how you can transform your data management needs in Salesforce, please get in touch with our data management experts.