Using Salesforce to Collect and Maintain Data—the Right Way

Even if science and math were your favorite subjects, thinking about all the data businesses collect and how to manage it could easily become overwhelming. Data is vital to any successful business. There’s no doubt about that. Having the data is only one key to success. The other keys involve how you store, utilize, and manage the data you have.

As you think about your company, ask yourself these questions:

• How are each of your teams collecting data?
• Is this data obtained by different teams shared or kept siloed?
• Should all information be made available to all teams?

Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software that enables you to organize all the data you have into one centralized repository. By having this information in one CRM tool, you gain a 360 degree view of your customers allowing you to better serve them and make informed business decisions.  

It’s not uncommon as we start to work with our clients on Salesforce engagements to find similar data on the same customer stored in any number of different tools including spreadsheets and other software tools. If this is the case for your organization, you are not alone. Taking the time to bring this information into Salesforce has proven to gain efficiencies for growing business.

Over 150,000 businesses worldwide ranging from small business to Fortune 500 companies use Salesforce to grow their business. Once the data is in Salesforce, the possibilities are endless for what you can do with it to improve your customer’s experience. We can dig into some of those possibilities another time. For now, let’s focus on the foundational building blocks of data and Salesforce.

We’ve all gone to get more information on a website and been presented with a form to fill out. This first touchpoint of collecting data is important. Although you may want to ask all the questions you’d ever want to know about a person in this interaction, being selective is crucial. Research shows 50% of marketers claim online forms are their main source of leads.  At the same time, 81% of users have abandoned online forms after beginning to fill it out.  

The top four reasons people abandon forms include:

1. Security concerns (29%)
2. Form length (27%)
3. Advertisement or upselling (11%)
4. Unnecessary questions (10%)

Assuming you’ve taken care of the security piece, two of the remaining factors in your control are form length and unnecessary questions. We advise taking a hard look at the information you want to ask and collect. Will it scare off a potential customer from contacting you? Research shows the average form length that results in the highest conversion rate is five form fields.

Questions you may want to consider avoiding:

• Asking for a phone number = conversion rate reduction 5%
• Asking for street address = conversion rate reduction 4%
• Asking for the person’s age = conversion rate reduction 3%
• Asking for city and state = conversion rate reduction 2%

You’ve done your work to streamline your forms to increase your conversion rate. You may have even done some A/B testing to determine which form results in the best conversion rate. Now what? Determining who in your company will be responsible for organizing this data and making it available to only those that need it. Consider assembling a data taskforce made up of leaders from across your organization. This team can establish a common reporting structure to deliver information to stakeholders about progress towards goals and also report regularly to other staff. 

Often when we work with our own client partners on Salesforce engagements, the conversation turns to data security. Salesforce has robust security settings which serve the purpose of offering you a wide range of possibilities but can be overwhelming. Working with a partner like Phase2 can help you sort out your data security needs in Salesforce and design the best strategy for your business.

The ability to utilize a CRM such as Salesforce ultimately comes down to being able to make informed decisions based on the data you’ve collected. Remember, in order to make solid decisions, that data needs to be as clean as possible. 

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