What’s the #1 Mistake of a Salesforce Implementation?
According to Lila Logue, Regional Sales Manager at Roycon, it is hands down Data Governance. In a conversation with Lila, we’ll uncover some of the greatest challenges that arise as the result of poor data governance, and some guidelines and recommendations on how to get started or formulate your plan with data governance.
Did you know, that neglecting your CRM data can decrease revenue by 25%, according to a study by Gartner.
So, let’s start with what happens or what can’t you do when you don’t have a solid Data Governance policy in place. According to Lila, when this does happen, it is typically with very old Salesforce instances that have not been managed, and new instances that are set up without any governance. The downstream impacts are pervasive. These are the challenges that a company will see if they don’t have clear guidelines around data:
- Sales:
- Inflated pipeline, inaccurate forecasts, poor reporting
- Sales territories aren’t defined, so you cant automate the assignment of leads and contacts.
- Incorrect Data
- Cannot create repeatable sales processes
- Marketing
- Cannot successfully leverage Account-based marketing (ABM)
- Can’t deliver personalization
- Can’t properly segment audiences
- Cant create industry-focused messaging
- Poor Reporting
- Can’t automate processes
- Compliance becomes an issue when you can’t properly record information for GDPR
- Service
- You lose the ability to leverage self-service portals because you don’t clearly know who the people are.
- Can’t perform case deflection.
- Cant create a meaningful customer experience
- Can’t properly create audiences.
- Finance
- Inaccurate reports: Once the sale is closed, finance will want the ability to look at revenue by state, this helps the quarter close. They can calculate appropriate taxes by state. Something that is pervasive within SaaS is if you have a product being sold in a state where you don’t have employees, then there is the need to pay taxes against that revenue. If we don’t have data standards around the state, then we can’t properly report on this information.
Ultimately you, won’t have a clear vision of who is doing what and what is important anymore. So, what’s the quickest way to get started with data governance? Let’s dive into it.
Considerations Around Data Governance
There are a couple of things about data, first, we need to lay the foundation to be clear about roles, profiles, page layouts, and what each person is expected to contribute to your overall data plan. From a sales, it’s the first entry point, you need to have clear expectations around what the sales rep needs to enter, and how the data will be used downstream in service, delivery, finance, and marketing is really important. Typically, Lila says making the data standards more rigorous for sales reps is really important. Make sure they’re asking the right questions and placing it in the right place, so others can consume and leverage that data in the future. One of the largest challenges to unwind is duplicate data, this goes for leads/contacts and also data on the records. So you’ll want to make sure you have duplicate rules in place, as well as a plan around when custom fields are created, who is responsible for what, and make that required upon entry.
Marketing in partnership with sales also plays a huge role in data. They need to have a clear vision of how leads are created, converted maintained, and updated, it sets up the whole org for success. After the foundation, then comes maintenance, and cleanup strategies. If you don’t have standards around data, like how to enter the country into a field, (US, USA, United States of America), you need data standardization practices. Otherwise, it will lead to connected systems not working as efficiently as they could. So you need to put global picklists in place for states, and countries, it will ensure your connected systems can function properly. An example of this is when you’re using a tool like Pardot, and you are using abbreviations in Pardot, and spelling out state names in Salesforce, you’re going to get a whole lot of sync errors, the data won’t sync back and forth, and you’ll just be stuck with two sets of different information in each record. This is huge when it comes to successfully connecting systems.
Setting Yourself up for Success
When this is set up correctly, you can do the proper lead assignments, and territory planning, you can refine assignment rules, and trigger reminders. Or if that contact takes an action on your website or through a marketing campaign the system knows who they are because the data is correct. According to Lila, here are a few ways to get started.
The quickest way to get started is to make all of the data wide open, but as companies scale, they’re leaning toward private sharing on accounts, role-based on contacts, and opportunities are usually private. Generally, the contacts are shared across orgs, and accounts are private. But sometimes accounts can be shared once they’re customers. Prospects are generally private. So when the prospect is transitioned to a customer account, is when the sharing opens up, but generally, the sharing model is private. And this helps focus the sales teams on their patch/desired prospecting location. People using the data downstream need to have a global view of how the accounts are linked together. Marketing generally has more visibility, sales are locked down, service is more open, and finance is locked down.
Page Layout Expansion
One of the largest challenges we see is unwinding the creation of excessive fields on the page layout. So, role-based sharing Permission sets help to mitigate the page layout expansion that happens after implementation. Limit the number of record types and page layouts, and go to the baseline sharing model to share data that needs to be seen or not seen by respective roles within the organization.
Role hierarchies Can’t Match Your Org Chart
Simple role hierarchy, simple profile structure, not everyone needs to have their own profile and own layouts. Simple is scalable. The same goes with triggers and validation rules, only automate truly defined processes that are documented. If I am going to add a flow to populate data down to other records, that process needs to be locked in, otherwise, we will run into bulk load issues, API timeouts, and records can fail.
Supporting Your Admins
Admins cant do it alone, the business has to be involved in setting the standards for their end-users. Otherwise, there won’t be a consistent way to report on data.
Data = Trust
Staffing and collaboration foster a culture of transparency and trust within your salesforce org. Document the policies, and use the role-based permission to allow for consistency when team members come and go. Today, we see more turnover than we have in previous years, you need to document the processes to ensure new team members are following your data protocols.
Empower Your Admins
You do need to constantly evaluate who needs to add information and when. So it’s always recommended that there is a cross-functional body of system admins, amongst finance, sales, marketing, and service so that there is a meeting of the minds as to who should be entering what and when, so you can achieve the 360-degree view of the customer. As a recommendation, the departments would own:
Marketing: Contact Information and attribution to prove out ROI.
Sales: Activities, Account Information.
Service: They’re more consumers of the data, but they need to own customer satisfaction, so they’d own NPS scores.
Finance: They own invoicing and the data associated with it. Accounts payable. Accounts receivable. This could be generated via a managed package. Depending on your company’s level of transparency, that information might need to be exposed to sales. Sometimes their commission structure would be based on outstanding invoices.
So we now have management of expectations by role, we have our connected systems, the next level is doing market segmentation by region, by state, by the assigned owner of those records. That builds the engine for additional engagement across your client/prospect base and upsell opportunities. It’s all about people, processes, and technology
Let’s talk about your duplicates, they’re a symptom. Talk to Lila, request a conversation here.
Connect with Lila
Lila often thinks she’s the funniest person in the room, but don’t be misled by her humor, Lila is your go-to technical resource. She grew up as a systems administrator, who helped drive the growth of rapidly scaling companies. She’s developed, built, and scaled marketing and sales operations over and over, and has successfully developed the skill to perfect that tricky relationship between marketing and sales. Lila excels at closing the loop to identify where leads are coming in and how to successfully measure KPIs, all while balancing marketing spend. On top of her extensive background, she has spent the last 5 years consulting, focused on community building in the media and communication space.
About Roycon
We’re an Austin-based Salesforce Consulting Partner, with a passion and belief that the Salesforce platform’s capabilities can help businesses run more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or looking to realize its full potential, Roycon specializes in Salesforce Implementations, Salesforce Ongoing Support, and Salesforce Integrations, and Development. We’re the certified partner to guide the way to increase Salesforce Adoption, make strategic decisions, and build your Salesforce Roadmap for success.