Data, Data everywhere

Many companies when starting off with a new salesforce.com CRM have their data spread over a variety of different sources. Imagine data scattered over your accounting system or ERP, excel spreadsheets, your legacy CRM tool (anywhere from ACT to Siebel), individual Outlook files, Exchange Shared folders, website registration or e-marketing software, and even some custom built software packages which should have gone out in the 90's. This can be overwhelming, how do I get all of this data from numerous different sources all into my new CRM?

Extract, Transform, Load

Hallman can assist with this. We have experience with all the different ways you can get data into salesforce.com, starting with things like the Wizards (at the most basic level), to the Apex Data Loader, Apex Scripts, Excel Connector, as well as third party data migration tools which can really simplify the whole 'Extract-Transform-Load' (ETL) process.

GIGO - Garbage in, Garbage out

Once you have your data migrated into the CRM system, how do you keep it clean? Many companies are plagued with the problems of duplicate data, whether it is contacts or customers in the CRM. Then there is the concern of data validity, how to I ensure data is correct that is put into my system and keep it uniform? Then what about data enrichment, if I have my customers company name and website, is there an easy way that I can enrich my salesforce.com data with the correct address and ABN for example?

Validation, Enrichment and De-Duplication

By defining a base standard for data quality and enforcing this through validation rules at the user interface level we can maintain consistency. Built in functions in salesforce.com can be installed or configured to assist with enriching data, for example taking a company name and auto reccomending correct address and contact information. There are also built in features in salesforce.com to minimise data duplication, for example enabling the system to search for duplicates before adding a new entry, as well as third party tools that can analysize and clean your data in one fell swoop.

Want to know more? Please feel free to contact us.