Best practices for SFDC data management

Businesses that rely on Salesforce don’t always reap the benefits they expect. They’re not able to get the actionable insights needed to boost customer loyalty, operational efficiencies, and revenue. The culprit is often poor Salesforce data management. Simply put, they’re not following best practices for essential aspects of SFDC data management, including data governance, security, integration, automation, data quality, and backup.
Read on to learn what Salesforce data management means, how it can help you achieve your goals, best practices for SFDC data management, and top 10 tips for implementation.
Salesforce Data Management Benefits
Salesforce data management encompasses the processes and practices used to collect, store, organize, maintain, and recover data throughout its lifecycle. With effective management, you can:
- Make Better-Informed Decisions: Quality data leads to better insights, driving strategic decisions and delivering high-impact benefits.
- Enhance Customer Experience and Retention: Accurate and timely data enables personalized interactions and targeted communications and helps you anticipate customer needs. This fosters loyalty and significantly improves customer retention rates over time.
- Ensure Compliance: Proper data management helps organizations adhere to regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), Australian Prudential Regulation Authority Act (APRA), and Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).
- Improve Efficiencies: Streamlined data management automates workflows, reduces manual tasks, and improves data accuracy, leading to increased operational efficiency and more productive resource allocation.
- Ensure Resiliency: Reliable backups and rapid recovery minimize downtime and data loss and enhance business continuity. This enables you to adapt swiftly to disruptions and effectively reuse historical Salesforce data.
Salesforce Data Management Challenges
The vast number of people using Salesforce within an organization, and the varied types of data living in the platform, present inherent data management challenges, including:
- Data Silos
Information can become fragmented across different Salesforce systems and instances, making it hard to achieve a unified and consistent view.
- Data Quality
Inaccurate, outdated, or incomplete data can hinder business processes and decision-making.
- Scalability
As organizations grow, managing an increasing volume of data becomes more complex and resource-intensive.
- Data security
Ensuring Salesforce customer data is safe and secure is no easy feat in a world where cybercriminals are increasingly targeting cloud applications. In addition, with so many Salesforce users within a given company, the likelihood of some of them accidentally deleting or overwriting key information is high.
- Backup and Restore
Most IT organizations have backup systems in place for on-premises applications. It’s a no-brainer insurance policy in case of outages and data loss. However, when it comes to Salesforce, many admins and IT pros assume their data is already being effectively backed up by Salesforce and, therefore, will be readily available as needed. But that’s not necessarily the case. IT teams/Salesforce admins need to be proactive about deploying a Salesforce backup and recovery solution themselves.
Why? Most SaaS vendors abide by the “shared responsibility” model. This means vendors are responsible for protecting the application itself and keeping it up and running. But users are responsible for data protection of app-generated data and recovering that data in the event of loss or corruption.
Salesforce has gone back and forth with this type of model. They used to provide very basic data recovery capabilities for customers. In 2020 they discontinued them. Recently, Salesforce said they are planning to reinstate those recovery capabilities along with basic backup. However, throughout time, they have highly encouraged the use of third-party backup and recovery vendors on the AppExchange that provide more robust capabilities, such as GRAX.
- Data Reuse
Business users are eager to leverage historical data in Salesforce for other operational and analytical tools for other purposes. These include everything from compliance and auditing, customer service and retention, application and product development, to feeding machine learning and AI training sets, and more. IT teams must make it easy for authorized users, such as data teams, to quickly access the data they need when they need it.
However, accessing Salesforce data for use outside of the application is often a manual endeavor. Highly skilled IT teams need to dedicate significant time and resources for ETL (extracting, transforming, and loading data) and for creating and maintaining APIs for each downstream consumption tool. Yet, many organizations aren’t able to support or deploy the IT resources required. As a result, many business users can’t take advantage of their Salesforce data in ways that would substantially benefit their company.
Even if an organization does have sufficient IT resources for ETL and APIs, challenges still exist. If too many users or systems try accessing Salesforce simultaneously, they may hit their organization’s API limits and have to pay more to increase them. The performance of the Salesforce application itself may also degrade, frustrating users and impacting productivity.
Plus, users who access data often copy it into their own folders and systems. Most organizations don’t even know how many copies of data they have or where they live. This quickly becomes a compliance, security, and data management nightmare, not to mention operationally inefficient.
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Salesforce Data Management Components
To get the most value from SFDC data management, be sure to include these 6 best practices: data governance, data security, integration, automation, data quality, and backup.
Establishing a Data Governance Framework
By creating this framework, you help ensure Salesforce data is accurate, secure, and usable. You’ll want to include the following:
- Policies and Procedures
Establish clear policies regarding data collection and usage, data entry, and data access and sharing. If you don’t, you’re likely to experience data inconsistency and noncompliance.
- Clearly defined roles
Everyone needs to know what they’re accountable for—so clarify the roles for data stewards, data owners, and users. Spell out how data stewards manage data quality. Make it clear that data owners are the people making decisions about who accesses which data and how that data is used.
Cross-functional teams are also important. Make sure to include representatives from IT, sales, marketing, and compliance. This will ensure your data management practices support these departments’ goals. It will also help foster a culture of collaboration and data-sharing.
- Data Quality Standards
This defines standards for data accuracy, completeness, and consistency.
- Data Security Measures
This is about establishing security protocols to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access. You’ll want to specify user permissions, encryption methods, and security assessments.
- Compliance and Regulatory Guidelines
Create processes for data handling and retention that comply with legal requirements.
- Monitoring and Reporting
SFDC data management requires continual monitoring and tweaking. By tracking data quality, usage, and compliance, you can more easily identify areas for improvement.
Role of Automation Tools
Automation tools can significantly improve Salesforce data management efficiency by reducing manual processes, minimizing errors, and freeing up resources for more strategic tasks. Key automation targets include:
- Workflow Rules: Automates standard processes such as lead assignment and follow-ups, ensuring timely actions.
- Process Builder: Allows users to automate complex business processes through a user-friendly interface.
- Scheduled Data Imports: Regularly scheduled data imports can help keep records up-to-date without manual intervention.
- Continuous Backup: Ensures backups happen regularly and eliminates data gaps.
Salesforce Integration
Integrating Salesforce with other systems (like ERP, marketing automation, customer support, AI, BI, and backup solutions) enhances SFDC data management by:
- Eliminating Data Silos: Integration provides a comprehensive view of customer data across platforms.
- Efficient Data Flow: Automated data syncing lowers the need for manual data entry. As a result, human errors are minimized and data is much more accurate.
- More Valuable Reports: With more data sources to pull from, reports have more information and reports deliver accurate, actionable information.
- Boosting Business Results: Integrating Salesforce with data lakes and data lakehouses can make it easy to reuse data for AI algorithms, analytic tools, and other applications – and gain game-changing insights.
Maintaining Salesforce Data Quality
Regular Data Audits
Regular data audits are vital for maintaining data accuracy and reliability. They help organizations identify and rectify inconsistencies, redundancies, and outdated information.
Deduplication and Validation
- Deduplication
Eliminating duplicate records ensures each customer or lead is represented accurately, reducing confusion and improving the quality of insights you derive from SFDC data.
- Validation
Implementing validation rules during data entry helps maintain data integrity. For example, requiring specific fields to be completed or adhering to formatting requirements can prevent errors at the source.
Salesforce Data Backup
Salesforce data is a rich historical record of critical business activity concerning customers, products, partners, and employee actions. When backed up effectively, it becomes more than just insurance. It becomes the foundation of a strong data management plan and a source of truth for operational and analytic initiatives.
Follow the guidance below to ensure your SFDC backup data is ready for reuse.
- Backup Frequency: One of the key factors to consider when backing up data is frequency, also known as data fidelity. It connotes how much data loss you’re willing to tolerate if the original source gets corrupted. For mission-critical applications, that amount of time (known as RPO – recovery point objective) is shrinking fast. According to ESG Research, more than half of organizations that use Salesforce expect RPOs to be less than 15 minutes, and nearly 1/4 expect zero minutes. Zero data loss.
Why is this trending so low? One obvious reason is disaster recovery. Organizations want to capture as much data as possible as often as possible — including changes made to that data — in the event of service failure or data corruption. The other reason is data reuse.
Automatically backing up data at a high frequency results in comprehensive data that paints a full and accurate picture. It makes that data an invaluable source for business users to tap.
- Backup Location: Where your Salesforce backup data lives is critical to whether business users can depend on it being readily available. If you back it up using a third-party vendor, ensure the data doesn’t reside in that vendor’s infrastructure. If it does, you’ll have the same accessibility challenges as when it resided in Salesforce.com. In addition, the risk of security breaches and data corruption increases along with the increased number of touchpoints your data makes on its way from Salesforce to you.
- Data Ownership: Best practice is to backup data directly into your cloud data lake. When it’s in the AWS S3, Azure, or GCP cloud instance that your company owns, there’s no need for ETL or API headaches. There’s also no waiting on backup vendors to provide the data that your users need. You also eliminate data silos and enable people throughout your enterprise to easily and safely access it. And just as important, you have total control over who can access that data and track where they copied it.
By keeping your backup data in your own cloud instance, you’re essentially turning traditionally cold data into hot, production data that can be easily and quickly accessed.
If cloud app data is stored in a universally understood format, like Parquet, this data can be seamlessly streamed from your data lake into popular analytics and data warehousing tools. Tools such as Tableau, Amazon AWS (Redshift, QuickSight, SageMaker), Microsoft Azure (Power BI, Analysis Services), Snowflake, among many others, can enable your data teams to unlock actionable insights faster.
Digital Chain of Custody: When you capture and retain all changes made to your Salesforce data, make sure you also capture information about who made them. This includes who they are and where they were located, their IP address, the device used to access data, and so on. This enables the granular traceability you need to maintain a digital chain of custody for compliance and security purposes.
Best Practices for Training Users on SFDC Data Management
Targeted training sessions can significantly enhance your organization’s proficiency in data management practices. They’ll help you ensure improved data quality, better compliance with governance standards, and increased operational efficiency.
Make sure to include the following in your programs:
- Role-Based Training
Role-based training equips Salesforce users with the specific data handling skills and knowledge required for their jobs. For example, administrators might focus on data governance policies and setting up validation rules to maintain data integrity, while sales reps learn how to input and manage lead data effectively.
As Salesforce updates its applications or roles change, use ongoing training to ensure users stay informed about new features.
- Hands-On Learning
This involves interactive, practical training sessions where users can experiment in applying Salesforce data management practices in real-time scenarios.
Workshops can focus on data entry, deduplication, and data quality checks. For instance, they might require employees to work in a sandbox environment to create reports that track data accuracy metrics.
Training may include simulations, such as managing a data import process. Users can practice mapping fields correctly and handling common errors that arise during imports. They might work in teams to complete a data cleanup project, where they collaborate on identifying duplicates and strategizing on how to resolve them. This reinforces teamwork and sharing of best practices.
- Ongoing Support
Ongoing support helps reinforce and remind users about Salesforce data management practices. Organizations provide access to Salesforce’s resources and their own guides, such as a data management manual that includes best practices for data entry and maintenance. Video tutorials might cover topics like creating custom reports for data audits.
You can also consider a dedicated community forum for Salesforce users to facilitate knowledge sharing about data management challenges and solutions. Users can post questions about data quality issues and receive input from peers or experts.
SFDC Data Management Case Studies
There are many ways businesses benefit from SFDC data management. Here are a few use case examples.
Uses Case: Sales Efficiency
Issues:
- Fragmented Data: Lead data from this major telecom company was fragmented and came from a variety of different sources. Sales representatives often worked with outdated or duplicate information. The result was confusion and lost opportunities.
- Inconsistent Processes: Salespeople used different methods to enter and track lead data. Records were often incomplete.
Solution:
- Data Governance Framework: The company created clear policies on data entry, standardized fields, and data ownership roles. They built cross-functional teams with sales and IT to ensure alignment.
- Lead Management Automation: Using Salesforce automation tools, they set up workflows to automate lead assignment based on geographic location and sales rep load.
Benefits:
- Increased Lead Conversion Rates: The company increased lead conversion rates by 25% within six months of implementing the governance framework.
- Time Savings: Sales reps spent less time searching for leads and correcting data. Not only were they more efficient—they could focus more on selling instead of data management.
Use Case: Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
Issues:
- Duplicate Records: This global software company had many duplicate customer records. This complicated order processing and customer service. Customers often received multiple communications. They were often confused and frustrated.
- Data Quality: Inaccurate and incomplete customer data made marketing campaigns less effective.
Solution:
- Regular Data Audits: Regular data audits helped identify and eliminate duplicate records. Salesforce reporting tools were used to generate lists of potential duplicates.
- Deduplication: They used Salesforce’s data management tools to create a systematic deduplication process.
Benefits:
- Slashed Duplicate Records: They reduced duplicate records by 90%.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction Scores: Customer sat scores increased by 15%, making them one of the highest in their industry. Customers noted they found the more personalized and relevant communications helpful.
Use Case: Data Compliance and Recovery
Issues:
- Risk of Data Loss: This fintech firm wasn’t protected against data loss due to system failures and security breaches.
- Compliance: They had a hard time proving their compliance with their industry’s requirements for data retention and security.
Solution:
- Comprehensive Backup Strategy: The firm developed a robust backup strategy that included continuous, automated backups of Salesforce data into a data lake that they owned, using a third-party backup solution.
- Archiving Practices: They implemented data archiving practices to securely store historical data in their data lake while reducing the volume of active data in the Salesforce system.
Benefits:
- Rapid Data Recovery: In the case of system failure, the firm could successfully restore all critical data within hours, demonstrating the effectiveness of their new backup strategy. This could be verified through system logs and recovery timelines.
- Regulatory Compliance: Archiving their historical Salesforce data ensures compliance with data retention regulations and makes it easy to create compliance reports and pass data audits.
Top 10 Tips for Effective Salesforce Data Management
- Establish Data Strategy and Classification
Establish a data strategy that explains the way you gather and use Salesforce platform data so that all team members are on the same page.
Create data classifications. This is critical to understanding what data your organization has and where it lives. Data classification can help you determine which data to keep, archive, or delete. Organizations that classify data are also more likely to use that data to make more informed business decisions and satisfy security and compliance requirements.
- Create a Clear Data Governance Framework
Define policies and responsibilities for managing Salesforce data across the organization.
- Encourage Cross-Functional Collaboration
Foster communication between departments to improve data governance and management.
- Utilize Data Validation Rules
Set up validation rules during data entry to ensure accuracy and completeness.
- Regularly Audit Your Data
Conduct frequent data audits to identify and correct inaccuracies in SFDC data. Regularly check for and eliminate duplicate records to improve data integrity.
- Use Automation Tools
Leverage Salesforce’s automation features and third-party solutions to streamline processes and reduce manual tasks.
- Integrate Systems
Use integration tools to ensure data flows seamlessly between Salesforce and other systems.
- Implement Robust Backup Solutions
Continuously backup data outside of Salesforce, make sure backup data resides in your organization’s own cloud instance, and create archiving practices that ensure cost-effective and comprehensive data security and compliance.
- Monitor Key Metrics
Track data quality metrics to identify trends and areas for improvement.
- Train Users Continuously
Provide ongoing training and support for users to ensure they understand Salesforce data management practices.
SFDC Data Management FAQ
Q: Why is Salesforce data management so important?
A: Companies that focus on Salesforce data management benefit from data that is accurate, accessible, and actionable. However, those who don’t follow SFDC data management practices experience poor decision-making, frustrated customers—and greater churn, and compliance risks, as well as significant competitive disadvantage.
Q: What do you recommend including in a SFDC data management strategy?
A: First, don’t short-change your strategy. Make sure to include data governance, data security, integration, automation, data quality, and backup. You also need to instill a company-wide commitment to following the best practices for each of these components.
Q: What are the key components of a data governance framework?
A: Every company is a little different. However, most Salesforce data governance frameworks include policies for data quality and data security; clearly defined roles and responsibilities; procedures for data management; and guidelines for compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.
Q: What’s the best way to ensure my Salesforce data is accurate and complete?
A: Conduct regular validation checks, set up deduplication processes, and cultivate a culture of data stewardship.
Q: Are quarterly data audits enough?
A: Data audits should ideally be conducted quarterly or biannually to check for data accuracy, completeness, duplicates, and compliance with governance policies.
Q: How can cross-functional teams improve SFDC data governance?
A: Cross-functional teams bring diverse perspectives, ensuring that data policies align with the needs of different departments. They enhance accountability and collaboration.
Q: What type of automation tools improve Salesforce data management?
A: Salesforce Flow Builder (which will replace Salesforce Workflow Rules and Process Builder when Salesforce no longer supports them beginning December 31, 2025), along with third-party integration and backup solutions, help automate data syncing and streamline data lifecycle management tasks.
Q: Why is data backup important for effective Salesforce data management?
A: Data backup is critical for protecting against data loss from unforeseen events. Regular backups ensure critical data can be restored quickly, minimizing disruption and maintaining business continuity. It also enables you to have a complete record of all your historical Salesforce data.
Q: How does archiving benefit Salesforce data management strategies?
A: Archiving data outside of Salesforce – in your organization’s own cloud instance – helps reduce storage costs, improves system performance by decreasing the amount of active data, and ensures historical data is available for audits and compliance and analytical needs.
Could your organization benefit from more effective Salesforce data management and data backup? Get in touch to learn how improving your processes can deliver the results your business needs.
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