As you already know, Salesforce has the potential to quickly and easily bring together company data, providing a single source of data for operations, marketing, and sales. This, in turn, enables better forecasts, analysis, and decisions.
Unfortunately, while Salesforce has the potential to provide all this fantastic information to help make decisions about your company, all too often that potential is limited by some familiar drawbacks…
- Underutilization → Some sales reps don’t use Salesforce to its full potential… or at all… resulting in poor Salesforce data quality which hurts the accuracy of your marketing analysis and sales forecasts.
- Inconsistency → Contacts, Leads, and Opportunities may not be organized consistently across the company, reporting and dashboards can end up looking messy and even outright misleading.
- Human Error → It’s commonplace for reps to not fill in fields or convert Leads and Opportunities as intended… resulting in yet more lost or misleading data.
So in theory, yes, Salesforce has the power to bring together all your company data to enable better decision-making, but if your employees aren’t putting the right data into the system, then it’s clear that your company isn’t getting as much out of Salesforce as they could.
This sad state of affairs is the reality for many companies even after years of trying to improve Salesforce data quality.
Sound familiar?
You’re not alone.
Many companies have problems achieving great Salesforce data quality. That doesn’t mean that their investment in Salesforce was a bad one. It just means that they have to go further to improve their data quality to maximize their return on that investment.
Getting employees to use Salesforce to its full potential can be challenging, but it can be done.
You can only get out of Salesforce.com what is put into it.
Salesforce is more useful the more it is actually used. It is important to get all your employees to log in not just once in awhile, but multiple times every day.
If this is a struggle, consider adopting a recognition and rewards program to drive Salesforce adoption by tracking usage and rewarding and recognizing personnel who utilize Salesforce consistently and correctly.
Keep in mind that Salesforce data quality cannot be improved by simply putting more data into the system. The data needs to be of high quality too. So consider rewarding the data entry habits that you want to reinforce, like:
- Fully inputting all information fields when creating contacts
- Filling in custom fields correctly and accurately
- Adding useful information to records by using notes
- Regularly updating opportunity stages
- Tracking and rewarding whatever it is you need your employees to do more of and better in Salesforce
The problem isn’t Salesforce, but rather how your team is using it.
This guest blog post was contributed by Greg Greunke. Greg is VP Customer Success at ThinkSmartOne. ThinkSmartOne provides employee incentive programs to improve key corporate success factors such as employee motivation and Salesforce Data Quality rates.
