In an ideal world, the data in your CRM platform would be 100% accurate 100% of the time. It would mean Marketing could run campaigns and ensure the intended recipient actually receives the email or direct mail. Sales would be able to call on leads and contacts without running into wrong, invalid, or old numbers. IT/Admins wouldn’t have to look into purchasing more tools to ensure their database is clean and free of duplicate leads and contacts. Reporting and forecasting would be more accurate, time would be saved, productivity increased; the list goes on!

Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world. According to the Annual Salesforce Admin Survey, 89% of Admins would say their data is dirty. What does that mean? Dirty data exists, in a big way. You just need to know how to spot it and minimize the risks.

Here are some simple tips to help get you started:

It’s difficult to get adoption of the CRM platform, let alone proper data entry. By providing proper training to users to ensure accurate data entry, inaccuracies can be avoided. To aid with adoption of the CRM platform, X-Author for Excel by Apttus comes into play. Allow your users to make changes and updates easily using the Excel interface while working in Salesforce.
Standardize your data. This gives you the ability to take actions that would otherwise be difficult (or impossible) to do. Accurate and consistent data will help increase user adoption as well – if your CRM platform can provide users with reliable data, they have more reasons to use it, but as soon as the data starts misleading them, you’ll experience the drop in usage.
Based on experience, Admins think the biggest culprit of dirty data is duplicate records (28%) followed by human error (26%). That said, do your best to eliminate duplicate records. You read that right. It IS possible to eliminate duplicates. Nobody said it was easy though. Set up flows that warn a user when a duplicate record is being manually created and catch duplicates that are being uploaded as part of a list.

If you implement these three changes, you’re sure to experience an increase in user adoption, more efficient reporting, more accurate forecasting, and happier users. Clean data is not only beneficial to Admins’ maintenance time, but it also helps sales reps who are looking to close deals and hit their numbers.