Why defrag data in Salesforce.com?

October 11, 2015

Bad data is the #1 productivity killer when using CRM systems. The problem can be solved by structuring your data in Salesforce.com.

Remember years ago when your computer was slowing to a crawl? Recall technically savvy friends giving you 7-step instructions on how to “defrag” your hard drive?

Data problem yesterday: Hard Drive Fragmentation

In the past people kept saving tons of files to their PCs hard drive. When the hard drive filled up, large files could no longer be saved in one single place. Instead, your computer stored fragments of large files in many different places. This was called fragmentation.

You could actually hear a hard drive jumping from place to place trying to pull a file together. The problem was solved with clever software, that organized your hard drive automatically by moving files around so the big files could be stored in one place. When the “defrag” was done, the response time of your computer would improve and you could get your work done faster.

Data problem today: CRM Data Fragmentation

In today’s more advanced technological world, our data is stored in the cloud and most people think they don’t need to worry about defragmenting their data anymore. This is, however, far from the truth.

As everyone using the most popular CRM system in the world, Salesforce.com, keeps adding data to their system every day. This creates a very similar problem – data fragmentation. The more data your team adds, the more fragmented and disorganized your customer data will become.

To give you some examples, someone might import 25,000 leads from an Excel file. The invoice system adds 7,000 customers while duplicating existing data in Salesforce. Before the day is over, another person might add the same customer record five times (true story).

How data fragmentation hurts sales

Let’s say you’re going to Fort Lauderdale to visit some of your customers. When you try searching “Fort Lauderdale” in Salesforce.com, you must type in different spellings such as “Ft. Lauderdale”, “Fort Laderdale” and “Ft Lauderdale” just to find your customers in the system.

You must also need to search in surrounding towns like Hollywood, Dania Beach, Plantation, and Oakland Park. These cities are all in Broward County. If you can’t search across a county or metropolitan area, you’re walking right past many sales opportunities.

Missing millions of dollars in revenue

Take the simple challenge of visiting customers in the Fort Lauderdale area and multiply that across everyone in your company, across all territories, cities and metropolitan areas:

  • Can your marketing team effectively invite customers to local events?
  • How can sales teams be truly effective while visiting customers in the field?
  • Can finance teams run sales reports across states, counties, and metropolitan areas?
  • Does sales management know if customer records are owned by the right people?

Defrag data in Salesforce.com

The solution to the problem is simple, all your data in Salesforce must be “defragged”. Every customer record must be associated with a zip code, city, county, metropolitan area, plus the right sales territory and sales region. When your customer records drop into the matrix of a complete geographical data structure, all customer data will immediately become useful.

Defragmenting data in Salesforce is an automatic process that works much like the software that structured your hard drive. The RealZips app will do the job for you, automatically matching customer records to zip codes and creating a complete geographic data matrix.

Get back to connecting with customers

When the RealZips GeoData is in place, your customer data in Salesforce.com can be put to use like never before:

  • Sales can search customers across cities and counties, planning effective field trips.
  • Marketing can run campaigns across any geographic area with great efficiency.
  • Everyone searching for customer data and running reports will no longer be frustrated.
  • Data analytics will be fun, immediately finding new business opportunities to call on.