Best Practices for Implementing Salesforce CRM - Cloud Experts

Get these must-have administrator toolsAs a Salesforce CRM administrator, it’s your job to keep Salesforce CRM humming, your data safe andclean, your users productive, and your managers happy with easy ways to monitor the business. Andbecause Salesforce CRM is always growing and changing, it’s important tokeep up with new releases.It’s a challenging job, but there are lots of tools to help you in thefollowing areas:• Ensuring data quality• Making yourself and your users productive• Staying on top of releases• Providing insight into your businessAbstractSalesforce CRM has dozens of tools to helpadministrators do their jobs. This documenthighlights the best.By Nancye MichaelianKeep your data cleanAccording to industry analysts, maintaining data quality is an ongoing effort. But with Salesforce CRM,there are tools to help you out. Here’s a summary of what you can do in 3 key areas related to data quality.1. Keep data clean – Because data can be captured from different sources or entered manually,duplication is an ongoing challenge. Ask your reps to search for records before they create newones to reduce data duplication. Standardize naming conventions for company names andaddresses. For example, decide whether to use U.S.A., USA, or US. However, although you canreduce duplicate data, some duplication is inevitable. That’s why we recommend you automatedata cleansing with data cleansing tools, such as those on the AppExchange.2. Enforce data entry standards – Use default values, define required fields, set up data validationrules, and define workflow field updates to make sure users enter the data you need, the way youneed it. For example, you can create a data validation rule on an opportunity that ensures that thevalue for a custom discount field doesn’t exceed a certain percentage. Click to find out more aboutdata validation.3. Monitor data quality – Set up dashboards to monitor the quality of the information users enter.For example, you can set up such dashboards to highlight when fields are left blank, to trackoverdue tasks, or to track when records are updated.For more information about data quality, link to the Best Practice “6 steps toward top data quality.”