​Data Integrity in Sales & Operations

By Scott Gordon, The Chief Revenue Officer
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Whenever I perform a CRM implementation or process optimization project, I’m often stunned by the laissez-faire (hands-off) attitude towards the handling of critical sales and operational data. There’s an old expression in database management – garbage in = garbage out. Therefore bad (or no) data in equals poor decision making, bleeding margins, and poor customer experience out.

Usually when I’m asked to conduct a CRM project (generally a Saleforce.com rollout), my client is having challenges related to point solution proliferation (there’s an app for everything these days), disjointed processes that lack definition or accountability (see point #1), dropped balls, missing documents, poor customer communication, and an overall lack of visibility into the real metrics driving their business.

They hope by rolling all of these disparate software and cloud based solutions under one all mighty platform that process, forecasting, and accountability will take care of themselves, but, in my experience, that is seldom if ever the case. If the bridge is out, you don’t need a new car, you need a boat (or a plane), or a new bridge.

In fact, while there can be a lot of heavy lifting related to a CRM platform migration, the implementation itself is just the beginning of a much longer process. Without roll-out and frequent refresher training, many users will simply revert to what they’ve always done because it works for them and change is hard.

Most end users don’t have the perspective to understand why using the new platform you’ve selected is important (because it’s often never explained to them) and why the integrity of the data they enter into it can mean the difference between a profitable venture that provides them with opportunities for advancement and pay increases, and one that eventually succumbs to the weight of its own inefficiencies.

Imagine, you’ve just made a significant financial commitment to Salesforce.com and a consultant to get it up and running for you, but your operations employees continue to track their projects in Google sheets and your salespeople work their pipelines in personal organizers. If you plan on leveraging Salesforce’s powerful reporting and forecasting capabilities (which you’ve now paid a handsome price for) you need these folks to forgo their old ways in favor of the new unified platform where this far-ranging data can be consolidated, organized, and harvested for better business intelligence.

If you are unsuccessful in doing this, no platform, regardless of its capabilities, will ever live up to its full promise. What you’ll be stuck with is incomplete data that continues to live in various buckets in a multitude of formats, all of which lack compatibility with any of the others.

How can you solve this challenge?

1. Give your employees clear and concise reasons for the organization’s need to change platforms. Understanding why you’ve decided to make this change will help with the acceptance of it. This step will also help you to identify champions and detractors out of the chute.
2. Provide user training in group and individual settings to encourage adoption and eliminate the frustration the often accompanies change. Show them how the new platform makes their jobs (and lives) easier.
3. Provide refresher training often as your employees begin using the new platform. This is where unfamiliarity and frustration will conspire to undermine adoption and provide detractors with willing ears to poison.
4. Discourage use of old tools that are being replaced. You don’t have to be Machiavellian about it, use carrots instead of sticks.
5. Give public accolades and prizes to early adopters. Make this a constant theme for the first several months. Again, carrots.
6. Use the platform as a repository for important documents and templates. Build libraries of relevant documents and show users where to find them. Remove these documents from shared drives and other locations. This will greatly boost interaction with the new platform since users will need these resources to perform their jobs.
7. Build email templates and require all customer communication to be driven through the new platform. Utilize the platform’s chat features for all formal interdepartmental communication. My old mantra at HelioPower was, “If it’s not in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist.”
8. Create dashboards and other useful information that is engaging for end users and managers and improves their visibility and competitiveness (especially for salespeople).
9. Create reports that track usage by individual, team, and department.
10. Create reports that expose data holes and work with employees to embrace data integrity.

In today’s data driven world, organizations that amass data, organize it, reconcile it, and use it to make important business decisions significantly outperform those that don’t – especially at scale.

Integrity in equals profits out. These firms are able to identify dropped balls and stop dropping them. They are able to remove redundant or duplicative process steps. They are able to forecast sales and revenue with accuracy so they can properly staff their businesses to reflect current business conditions. They are better able to deploy scarce resources and make smarter investments. They provide world-class customer service. Most importantly, they become significantly nimbler and more profitable as the data driven improvements they implement compound over time.

Garbage in equals profits out only if you’re a garbage man, otherwise, ensuring that your company is consistently giving its valuable data the respect it deserves it critical to its long-term success. Neglecting to do so, puts your firm at a distinct digital disadvantage in today’s information economy.
If you’re working on disparate I.T. platforms and making decisions based on incomplete or missing data (e.g. going with your gut), it’s just a matter of time before you become a relic of a bygone business era.

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