Data cleansing should be regular
70% of CRM data becomes obsolete each year, so regular data cleansing should become your routine. The most evident way to maintain data timeliness is to ensure that your in-house administrator or Salesforce support vendor regularly provides data cleansing with dedicated tools. Another measure you can take to fight obsolete data is to enforce weekly data cleansing activities to employees. For example, sales reps may clean up expired opportunity close dates and other CRM data, which is no longer relevant.
Data cleansing should be complemented with measures on sales-related processes improvement
Keeping your sales data clean is not a merely technical activity. It requires reviewing lead and opportunity management processes to unify standards for data input for different systems used in a company. For instance, sales reps use Salesforce Sales Cloud integrated with a marketing automation platform. If sales reps and marketing specialists do not have unified standards for data input (unified lead and opportunity name format, phone number format, etc.), duplicated data in CRM will be a result.
Data cleansing should be supported with proactive technical measures
According to 1-10-100 Rule, it takes $1 to verify a CRM record when it is initially inputted, $10 to clean it later, and $100 to do nothing (a result of lost opportunities and wasted time). To prevent the revenue drain caused by discordant sales data, you should take proactive technical measures to maintain data quality. For instance, an in-house Salesforce administrator (or the one from a Salesforce support service provider) can enable automated deduplication with Salesforce duplicate rules that help to identify and manage (delete, merge, etc.) duplicate records. The administrator can also introduce validation rules. They prevent the entry of data not compliant with the internal quality standards of the sales data in your company. For instance, a rule can validate that the opportunity’s close date isn’t prior to the current day or that the opportunity amount is a positive number.