Salesforce has a huge variety of clouds (platforms built on Salesforce CRM) available to use, designed to serve different industries and business goals.
We know that knowledge is key when it comes to Salesforce, so with that in mind, here are the clouds we’ve explored and explained so far. In each post, we take a look at key terminology, business values of using that cloud and specifically what you can do with the functionality available to you!
Nonprofits are by no means left out of the Salesforce ecosystem. As the title of this article says, we’ll be looking into Salesforce’s very own Nonprofit Cloud, a cloud designed and dedicated to optimising nonprofits’ internal and external operations.
Stick around as we delve into the facts and functions of Nonprofit Cloud – you may just discover a new cloud to use or recommend!
What is Nonprofit Cloud?
Nonprofit Cloud is one of Salesforce’s constituent management solutions, tailored for charity and nonprofit organisations. Nonprofit Cloud enables users to connect every function of their nonprofit organisation (including but not limited to fundraising, marketing, operations, grants and donations), and holds all this information in one central place – Salesforce!
Within Nonprofit Cloud is the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). This is a set of managed packages that sits on top of your Salesforce org and is preconfigured for the types of use cases that nonprofits organisations need. NPSP provides users with custom objects like ‘Donations, Households, Organization‘*, etc, everything specifically designed for nonprofits!
How does Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud fit into the wider Salesforce ecosystem?
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud was built with nonprofits in mind. However, this isn’t to suggest that nonprofits are in any way sidelined or prevented from scaling up with the full power of Salesforce. Since it’s built on the same world-leading platform, Nonprofit Cloud can work together with other clouds. For example, Marketing Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) can be added to Nonprofit Cloud to enhance its overall performance for effective donor engagement.
So Nonprofit Cloud integrates with other Salesforce Clouds and provides access to other powerful resources too. Here are some of our favourite Cloud combos, functionality and resources that work well with Nonprofit Cloud:
Salesforce.org – The social impact centre of Salesforce.com, focused on “partnering with the global community of nonprofits and schools to tackle the world’s biggest problems.”
Sales and Marketing Cloud– Nonprofit-compatible Salesforce Clouds that work to provide personalised marketing content and help you manage sales data.
The Power of Us Hub – the portal for Salesforce.org product documentation, how-to videos, webinars, and community groups of all kinds… and the place to get 10 free nonprofit licenses!
Digital Experiences– an external, interactive platform that sits on top of your Salesforce CRM to enhance external user experience. Check out our blog on Experience Cloud for more information!
With Nonprofit Cloud, nonprofit organisations get a centralised constituent management hub for all their internal and external communication, interaction and monitoring. Onboarding and administration can also be centralised so donors receive a more personalised experience, plus, users can get a better overview of personnel management, such as volunteer data. Nonprofit Cloud is scalable, which means that you can grow your Salesforce implementation as your nonprofit organisation grows.
For clarity, here are the main benefits of using Nonprofits Cloud:
The Power of Us Hub, a support hub that is Nonprofit Cloud specific with communities and how-to videos.
Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and ProvenWorks in action
How can ProvenWorks, a Salesforce ISV, work with Nonprofit Cloud? First off, we’d like to highlight that nonprofit organisations get a discounted price for any of our paid solutions that take their fancy! Secondly, we love (we really mean it!) working with nonprofits. We won the Salesforce Partner Innovation Award 2021 in the Nonprofit category for our work with Malala Fund.
Our solutions work seamlessly with Nonprofit Cloud and empower you to:
Import donor and recurring donations data easily;
Verify address data from the point of entry;
Ensure compliance for marketing calls to UK donors and partners.
Manage and organise donor data with SimpleImport
SimpleImport does what it says: it makes importing into Salesforce simple. Do you have volumes of donor data or recurring donations from external platforms that need centralising in Salesforce? SimpleImport and its intuitive Lightning component, ManagedImport, empowers you and your team to import this data quickly with a simple drag & drop. It’s quick to adopt and fast to use, so no vital time is lost from your nonprofit goals.
Verify and authenticate address data at the point of entry with AddressTools
AddressTools verifies your constituent address data to ensure only clean data lives in your org. Need a postal address format for donors, volunteers and partners? We’ve got you covered! Working with the UK Gift Aid process? AddressTools helps keep any manual updates within this process to an absolute minimum (<0.05%*) enabling efficient and timely processing of Gift Aid claims.
Ensure compliance for marketing calls to UK donors with PhoneTools
Cold calling donors or potential donors for your nonprofit? The UK has strict data privacy laws against cold calling, allowing UK residents to register to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) and UK businesses to the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS). PhoneTools is a native Salesforce solution that screens your donor numbers against the TPS and CTPS lists to tell you directly if you can call that phone number.
Education Cloud is a platform built on Salesforce CRM aimed at the education sector, including schools through to higher education institutions like universities and colleges. This cloud is aimed at keeping students, alumni and staff connected.
Our blog will take you through the key aspects of Education Cloud to provide you with more knowledge on what you can do with this Salesforce Cloud, and more importantly, to decide whether this is the right cloud for you. Let’s get started!
What is Education Cloud?
According to Salesforce, Education Cloud is intended to ‘deliver the personalised engagements, proactive advice, and connected experiences students expect’. Education Cloud has a few extra benefits such as the Power of Us hub, K-12 focus, K-20 focus and Education Data Architecture. All of these features enable Education Cloud to better connect students, staff, schools, districts and universities, as well as give schools and universities a 360-degree holistic view of the education journey.
Quick glossary:
We’ve mentioned a few key terms for this cloud already so welcome to the glossary! Here we’ll define some of the terms we mentioned above.
Power of Us hub: A community support hub that helps Education Cloud users access 10 free subscriptions and find discounts on other subscriptions, products and services from Salesforce.
K-12: Refers to the term given to the school years for children from Kindergarten to 12th grade in high school. However, in this respect it shows the type of institution this CRM platform is aimed at, with the ability to scale as the school grows. It also acts as a ‘single source of truth’ for each student and their family with all their data held in one place, making it easier to personalize interactions between school, student and the student’s family.
K-20: Refers to the term given to the school years for children from Kindergarten right through to degree. This means that both K-12 and Higher Ed institutions can use Salesforce’s Education Data Architecture to create a connected holistic view of their students. For Higher Ed, this means giving universities a flexible way to ‘track dual enrolment, universal learner profiles and more’ with a focus on lifelong learning.
Education Data Architecture: This is Salesforce’s flexible architecture that provides the foundation of Education Cloud. It’s designed for higher education institutions to get started with Salesforce faster by providing objects, logic and automation tailored towards student data, program enrolment, alumni, engagement and more. This trail on Trailhead is a great place to learn more!
What can you build with Salesforce Education Cloud?
Salesforce Education Cloud is a set of functionality built on the powerful Salesforce CRM platform. This means that when you’re using Education Cloud to manage your data, support your students and create an online community, the world is your oyster!
Here are some real-life examples of things you can do with Education Cloud to enhance your student and staff experience:
Streamline student services on one platform to deliver unified experiences
Manage the entire admissions process
Provide external users with an interactive and beautiful looking interface for all your community interactions – think student registration portals! Check out our blog on Experience Cloud to learn more
Engage with prospective students, students and alumni with personalised marketing material to build lifelong relationships
Create beautiful reports and dashboards on recruitment and admissions data
💡 Top tip: Using Education Cloud can increase enrollment by 10%
Why should you use Salesforce Education Cloud?
With students and families now expecting a unified online journey, having a system in place that facilitates more time on education and personalising the student experience and less time on non-academic needs is vital.
Since Education Cloud is student, teacher and family centric, it provides one single platform on which to manage and support the full learning experience, from admissions to alumni.
Put simply, Education Cloud:
Enables you to give students and their families, prospective students and staff applicants a personalised and centralised journey for an optimum experience;
Gives you access to Power of Us hub – a support community network;
Secures an internal and external communications hub;
Enables you to access 10 free licenses and discounted services from Salesforce;
Is scalable, customisable and compatible with other Salesforce Clouds, integrations and third-party vendors to help you deliver an exceptional education experience for students;
Is built specifically for schools and universities.
Salesforce Education Cloud and ProvenWorks in action
Education Cloud empowers the education industry with a world-leading single platform that adds great value to your institution. It creates endless new and improved opportunities for interactions between your students, alumni and staff.
ProvenWorks offers solutions that work seamlessly with Education Cloud to:
Open up import jobs to external users simply and securely
Empower internal and external users to in put verified addresses at point of entry
Open up importing jobs to your internal and external users safely
Regularly importing volumes of student-related data is time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. SimpleImport empowers users and admins to quickly import files – XLS, XLSX, ODS & CSV – into your Salesforce CRM. No more wasting time on manual administrative tasks.
Empower users to provide verified address data from the point of entry
Ensuring your mailed communication gets to the right individual is crucial. Incomplete address data contributes to a poor admissions or student experience and increases failed delivery costs! AddressTools empowers users to enter verified addresses at the point of entry, even on student registration portals. Our solution solves your address data concerns, so you remain focused on giving students and their families the best education journey possible.
Salesforce recognises how vast and vital the healthcare sector is to everyone, and has established a cloud focused on this sector to improve patient and internal user experiences.
In this blog we’ll look into what Health Cloud does and what you can gain from using it.
What is Health Cloud?
Health Cloud is built on Service Cloud, one of Salesforce’s most popular offerings. Health Cloud is a set of functionality that allows patient liaisons and healthcare professionals to monitor, segment and prioritise patient data. This cloud partnership provides the healthcare sector with improved and personalised customer service, as well as, internally, showing healthcare professionals a 360-degree holistic view of their patients. These advantages are possible through features such as smart case management functionality, EHR-to-Salesforce API connections and secure record management.
Now that we’ve covered an overview of Health Cloud, let’s define some of the key terminology!
Quick glossary:
Service Cloud: The key Salesforce Cloud that Health Cloud is built on. It enables users to create a tailored and personal customer experience, to ‘increase satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value’.Want to learn more about Service Cloud, check out Trailhead’s Service Cloud Basics module!
Smart case management: According to Salesforce:“A case management system lets a company collect and organize customer service interactions that occur on any channel.” What makes it smart? “Modern case management platforms pull customer requests into a database, where customer service agents can view and respond to them…”
EHR-to-Salesforce API connections: An add-on API Salesforce extension specifically for Health Cloud. These connections enable your Salesforce CRM to receive and translate EHR, and other sources of medical data, for patient records.
What can you build with Salesforce Health Cloud?
Salesforce Health Cloud is a set of functionality built on the Salesforce CRM platform. This means that when you’re using Health Cloud to communicate patient needs, collaborate with other healthcare professionals and track and monitor patient progress, everything is in one place!
Popular examples of things you can do with Health Cloud:
With Health Cloud, you can access the right health information about patients from a range of sources, including EHR systems and wearables. Healthcare professionals can prioritise tasks and segment patient lists, provide real-time and collaborative messaging for providers, patients, family members, and care teams. All this enables patients to receive the best and most personalised care possible.
Health Cloud is native to Salesforce, so there is no requirement to switch between solutions which can lose you time or worse, cause confusion in interpreting and working with siloed data.
Put simply, Health Cloud allows you to:
Remain on Salesforce – everything you need is in one place!
Personalise patient services
Receive and manage all medical data records and contacts in one, central and secure system
Engage with health liaison officers, patients and more using community hubs
Tailor, configure and scale your cloud as you grow
Salesforce Health Cloud and ProvenWorks in action
As a set of functionality, Health Cloud adds tremendous value to your healthcare practice by creating endless new and improved opportunities for you to interact with your patients and partner healthcare providers.
ProvenWorks offers solutions that work seamlessly in Health Cloud to:
Empower internal and external users to provide verified addresses at the point of entry
Open up import jobs to partners simply and securely
Import data into Health Cloud efficiently
Is data importing a pain point impacting your and your patients’ experience? SimpleImport enables simple and secure importing into Salesforce without losing precious time for patients or healthcare professionals.
Empower internal and external users to provide verified addresses
Managing patient information and keeping records clean with up-to-date data is essential for the healthcare industry. AddressTools ensures all address data is verified from the point of entry. AddressTools solves your address data concerns, while you focus on treating your patients.
“AddressTools solved our use case of standardizing our account data for current and future accounts in our organization.”
Alexis Johnson, Sales Operations Analyst at Comscore
Comscore is a trusted partner for planning, transacting, and evaluating media across platforms. With vast audience insights that combine digital, linear TV, over-the-top (OTT) and theatrical viewership, they combine reliable third-party measurement with transformative data science to provide insight into multi-screen behavior and help businesses grow.
An interview with Alexis Johnson, Sales Operations Analyst at Comscore
Alexis Johnson explains Comscore’s need for standardized addresses in Salesforce, and how AddressTools gave them the native easy-to-learn solution they were looking for.
What specific challenges were you trying to solve that made you look for a solution?
We were seeking an address standardization service for our Salesforce organization that would:
standardize addresses for existing and future account data.
meet this requirement for a third-party integration within our Salesforce org.
fulfill our overall need for data integrity and completion.
How was your search for a solution?
There were other vendors that were considered, however AddressTools offered a great package that met all of our needs. It offered the perfect solution to standardize our addresses, and to help align our data to meet the requirements needed for the third party integration.
How easy is it to use AddressTools?
It was extremely easy to install the application into our org and configure the settings. Our Account Manager was very helpful in ensuring a successful installation, and setting up the package settings to meet our requirements and needs.
How long did it take to train your users?
We did not roll out a formal training, but for our internal teams, it took about an hour to explain the configuration on the backend.
How does AddressTools solve the problems you had with your process?
AddressTools solved our use case of standardizing our account data for current and future accounts in our organization.
What is your experience working with the ProvenWorks Support team?
Excellent; the Support team was extremely communicative and helped with any questions or concerns that we had whilst implementing AddressTools.
Why AddressTools?
It is a great address standardization service, is extremely easy to install and configure in Salesforce, and they provide excellent customer service. Would definitely recommend!
Find out more about Comscore
Discover more about Comscore and the first-class services they provide.
AddressTools
Validate, standardize and verify your address data with our award-winning solution. Learn more and book a demo.
Do you want to learn more about how AddressTools could be a great addition to your Salesforce org? We’d love to chat! Use the scheduler to book a free call with our team and start your journey to cleaner address data.
Can’t find a time that works for you or would rather email first? Fill out our contact form and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
On Wednesday 9th February, Beth and Ruth, our Operations Director and Marketing Manager, headed down the hill from the ProvenWorks office to UTC College. They had been given the perfect opportunity to share their passion for all things technology, software and Salesforce!
UTC College, a local school in Reading, had invited ProvenWorks to run a careers workshop as part of their Industry Skills Specialist Teaching and Knowledge Programme. This business masterclass programme consists of weekly career sessions across mixed year groups.
An introduction to the Salesforce ecosystem
The workshop focused on careers in software, specifically within the Salesforce ecosystem. To start, Beth and Ruth shared their own journeys into software from very distinct backgrounds, showing students that opportunities in the industry are available regardless of subject choices and skillsets.
After an introduction to the range of jobs available within the Salesforce ecosystem – Administrator, Developer, Architect, Business Analyst, Consultant and more – it was onto a practical challenge!
It’s project time!
For the challenge, students had the chance to act out a role available in the Salesforce ecosystem through the lens of a specific time and budget restrained project. For example the Developer had to ask if they could build a solution rather than buy one, the Business Analyst had to assess the risks of the project, and the Admin had to research how user-friendly the proposed solution was.
“We learnt that there is more to making software for a customer than what the customer wants. The budget that is given to you needs to be managed properly to make sure that you stay under budget because there are many other costs involved within a project. There is great responsibility on the Consultant and the Salesforce Architect.”
Muhammad, Year 13 BTEC Student
Reflection and feedback
The session was rounded off with a reflection on the project as well as the highlights and challenges of each student’s role. By the end, Beth and Ruth had a classroom full of aspirational Developers, Admins, Architects and more!
“Students found the workshop very engaging thanks to it being such an interactive and team-based session. Students now know what it is like to be in a particular job role and understand the kind of responsibilities they may have in that job role along with expected salary.”
Monika Dongare, Computer Science and BTEC Teacher
ProvenWorks investing in education
At ProvenWorks we’re delighted to share our own career journeys into software. It is a privilege to deliver authentic stories and meaningful workshops to a classroom full of engaged students, seeing them solve problems, work together and reflect on their own skill sets. From what we’ve seen in the workshop, we can’t wait to see what the future holds!
Summarised succinctly by one up-and-coming Business Analyst: “Miss, that was a sick lesson!”.
About ProvenWorks
We mean it when we say we’re Salesforce experts. We work exclusively in the Salesforce ecosystem and our products are built 100% for Salesforce.
2021 has been a busy and hectic year for all of us here at ProvenWorks, so we wanted all the team to spend a moment to reflect on their achievement and memorable highlights of the year.
Without further ado here are our highlights of the year.
Beth Clements, our Operations Director
“Working closely with 23 inspiring non-profits, helping them to be data heroes and meeting a bunch of awesome people along the way!”
Ruth Cawdron, our Marketing Director
“ProvenWorks winning the 2021 Salesforce Partner Innovation Award for our work with Malala Fund! Read the article here.
Becoming a Ranger after starting Salesforce Trailhead in March!
Winning the Salesforce Partner Innovation Award for your work with the Malala Fund.”
Chris Sweet, our Customer Success Executive
“Working with and supporting 94 customers to ensure they keep getting the absolute best and most out of our products!”
Joel Mansford, our Managing Director
“My highlight of the year has been increasing our ProvenWorks team by more than 50% in the past year, gaining superbly talented people. They’re all AMAZING!”
Adel Nazirov, our Senior Developer
“As a Senior Developer, it was a great feeling introducing best practice protocols across the ProvenWorks development team this year.”
Callum Hurry, our Director of Product Engineering
“Working with Cloud for Good and seeing the University of Alabama Birmingham use AddressTools in their demo at the Salesforce Higher Education Summit! See the shoutout: https://youtu.be/wWG0K4-SgLY?t=563
Reading the amazing and inspirational customer stories, and learning how ProvenWorks products have improved data quality issues at so many organisations.”
Laura Truman, our Marketing Assistant
“Leading the ProvenWorks data cleansing campaign to share my knowledge of how to maintain good data in Salesforce. Discover it all here.
Getting hands on with leads in Salesforce and putting my Trailhead knowledge into practice!”
Denis Gurbuz, our Sales Executive
“My highlight has been becoming part of the team and enhancing the ProvenWorks’ Discovery Demo content.”
Damian Tomczik, our Sales Director
“Connecting with everyone in the office again and meeting the new ProvenWorks team members – in person!”
Andrey Vyshlov, our Chief of Staff
“Getting to know the ProvenWorks team and having an opportunity to bring a growth mindset into the picture!
Here’s to a super successful 2022 filled with awards, record sales, and investments.” 🥂
Our team has been working on some really exciting feature releases for AddressTools that will make your PowerSearch experience even better!
What do I need to know?
We’ve added two extra features to PowerSearch’s settings to help specify and focus your searches, and optimize your address data entry.
Why should I be excited?
Select a priority country so that search results from the selected country will be shown first. Here’s an example of USA set as the priority country.
And/or, choose allowed countries, so that search results are limited to only the countries you select.
How do I access these new features?
Simply update your AddressTools Premium package to use these new features. You will need to use version 7.94 of AddressTools which you can find via the AppExchange.
Interested in learning more? Check out our award-winning package for Salesforce. Harness the power of address standardization, validation and verification in your org.
Dale Carnegie supports their franchise network with over 50 unique file imports each month thanks to SimpleImport.
“SimpleImport is a must-have. It’s true to its name; simple, reliable and effective!”
Christopher Addeo, Vice President of Information Technology at Dale Carnegie Training
Dale Carnegie was founded in 1912, inspired by one man’s belief in the power of self-improvement. Since then, it’s evolved into a movement that’s crossed borders and generations, showing people how to tap into the best parts of themselves to create positive change.
Today, through franchises in over 90 countries and all 50 states, they help people gain greater influence and make meaningful contributions in the places that matter most.
The challenge: moving data from external sources into Salesforce Sales Cloud
As a global franchisor, Dale Carnegie was challenged by siloed information stored in separate franchises using different file formats and languages. Supporting their franchisees with a single org meant that imports needed to honour complex sharing rule configurations to segment their data.
A small support team for a large amount of imports
Time-consuming import jobs due to differences in how franchisees operate
Complex sharing rules to navigate
Inconsistent file formats
Multiple data sources and multiple languages
The solution: automatic recollection of prior import mappings makes importing quick and easy
Dale Carnegie needed a strong, efficient importing solution to speed up their regular complex importing jobs. With a small team supporting many franchises, the solution had to be efficient to use, and capable of managing multiple data sources and formats.
With its simple user interface, compatibility with Dale Carnegie’s unique Sales Cloud configuration and sharing rules, and support of multiple file formats, SimpleImport is the perfect answer to their problems.
The result: Dale Carnegie supports their franchise network with over 50 unique file imports each month
After a simple and speedy installation, and with the straightforward solution configured, Dale Carnegie’s administrators can manage their complex importing processes with ease thanks to SimpleImport.
This new way of working has enabled the support, sales and even marketing teams at Dale Carnegie to focus on what’s most important: their customers.
A better customer experience
Less time importing means support staff have more time to focus on delivering an outstanding level of customer support
Customers and prospects receive a tailored experience since the Dale Carnegie team has an up-to-date picture of customers and prospects thanks to frequent easy imports of important data
An optimized workflow for staff
Saving import mappings reduces the exhausting administrative overhead
A user-friendly UI makes the whole import process straightforward
Sales reps work effectively with the latest customer information
Support staff can spend more time helping customers andless time importing data
The team can easily work with multiple file types, including XLS, XLSX, CVS and ODS without leaving Salesforce
The Dale Carnegie team can trust their CRM and its data thanks to regular, quick import jobs
Why SimpleImport?
“Cases are typically resolved quickly and professionally. I don’t reach out to ProvenWorks for support often – the application is robust, reliable and is self sustaining. The fact that we don’t need support very often speaks to why we love this product.“
Christopher Addeo, Vice President of Information Technology at Dale Carnegie Training
SimpleImport
Importing files is so vital for so many organizations. It’s good news that Simplelmport makes this job as effortless as possible. Learn more and book a demo.
Do you want to learn more about how SimpleImport could be a great addition to your Salesforce org? We’d love to chat! Use the scheduler to book a free call with our team and start your journey to faster, simpler imports
Can’t find a time that works for you or would rather email first? Fill out our contact form and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
This is the third instalment of our Data Cleaning 101 mini-series. So far we’ve explored why clean data is essential in Salesforce, and introduced 5 steps to start you on your journey to cleaner data. Now it’s time to dive into the details! We’re going to examine the different problems you probably have with your data and take a closer look at some of our favorite ways to tackle them!
The problems
users entering bad data
unstandardized data and messy reports
duplicates and more duplicates
inaccurate old data
1. Users entering bad data
It’s great if you prioritize clean data, but if your users can still input bad data with no barriers, we’re back to square one.
For this problem, we’re looking for solutions that will clean data at the point of entry.
If you’re looking at AppExchange solutions, use our five step guide from Part 2 to assess whether the solution resolves your specific problem.
💡 It’s important to consider everybody across your Salesforce organization and make changes that also consider the end-user experience.
2. Unstandardized data and messy reports
As basic as it sounds, ensuring that your data is uniform and standardized will save you time on all kinds of tasks.
For example, if you create a report to find accounts based in Mississippi, imagine if all your records show Mississippi instead of MS or Mississippi,and its various misspellings. No more bloated field filtering, just clean data with uniform reports!
For this problem, we’re focusing on ways we can better organize our data.
Use international standards
Use internationally-recognized standards to segment your data in the best way possible. They’re designed to be consistent and globally understood!
Run standardization tasks
Consider exporting data to standardize it with your favorite tools then reimport it back into your organization, or look into ways you can automate it within Salesforce.
Apps like IndustryComplete* will streamline industry categorization, SimpleImport* can speed up those importing tasks, and AddressTools* will start standardizing your address data immediately! (There are free versions available too for some of our tools* to get you up and running for no cost!)
3. Duplicates and more duplicates
If your role involves importing and entering data, duplicates are a constant battle. Dealing with duplicate information or “dupes” is a huge blackhole of time for admins and fundamentally for your business too.
Find a solution that stops or at least clearly alerts you to duplicated data. Have you implemented Duplicate Rules in Salesforce? Or is there a budget for a dedicated duplicate check tool? You have some great options out of the box and also on the AppExchange.
If you’re importing data, Excel and Google Sheets have some great duplicate handling tools available. Try them out before importing your data into Salesforce.
Duplicate rules in Salesforce are not to be sniffed at! They can be a great free feature if you’re on Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions.
And of course, we love SimpleImport Premium’s*multi-field matching to help identify existing records easier, preventing duplicates from being inserted and saved.
4. Inaccurate old data
Up to 40% of user productivity is lost to incomplete, inconsistent data. Sorting bad data from good wastes 50% of users’ time. These stats alone show how existing bad data is bad for business.
Removing or validating existing data is essential for your users to remain focused and productive. If some data is now redundant, archive or delete it from your system altogether, but if it’s still in use, correct it by updating and validating it. There are plenty of applications that not only draw your attention to the incorrect data, but give you the option to update, change or delete it.
Schedule regular spring cleans of your org – regularly diving into your data is the best way to ensure your data is up to date, and to spot any blackholes of outdated information! Checking through your data every two weeks is best as our Operations Director, Beth, recommends in our 5 step guide (Part 2).
Tools that have access to international databases can be an invaluable addition to your org, i.e. looking up address data against postal authorities.
Summary
Now you have the tools and wisdom to win the war against bad data. Let’s recap the main 4 data problems that we’ve managed to tackle, they are:
users entering bad data
unstandardized and messy data
the dreaded duplicates
inaccurate old data
Hopefully, with the facts and resources presented in this final instalment of our Data Cleaning 101 mini-series, you can take full control of your org and clean up your bad data!
Data Cleaning 101: a round up
So now it’s the end of our little crusade against unclean data. But first let’s go over what we’ve added to your data cleaning arsenal.
Data Cleaning 101 has provided you with:
a reality check about maintaining clean data in your CRM (blog one),
5 tips to remember before purchasing a solution to figure out what you want to get out of your data (blog two),
4 specific data problems you might have and how to solve them.
We’d love to hear your stories with bad data and the applications that saved your data. Are there any tips you think we should know about? Tell us!
Or, whether you’ve simply enjoyed learning about data and data cleaning let us know, we’d love to hear from you.
I want to start cleaning up my data!
Got issues with your data in your Salesforce org that you’re ready to tackle? Get in touch and see if one (or more) of our solutions can help clean the dirty data stinking up your CRM.
