How Raising the Quality of Salesforce Data Can Increase Sales

This quote from Brenda Gonzalez at Hotze Health and Wellness Center could easily be a quote from any Salesforce user. Did you find yourself nodding your head in agreement while reading it?

As a boutique-type health and wellness center, Hotze’s customers expect a high level of service. However, that level of service was being compromised by a messy Salesforce database filled with inconsistencies and duplicates.

That’s when Brenda, Project Manager and a self-professed “data-lover”, took matters into her own hands and decided to clean the data.

Migrating “A big mess” to Salesforce

Hotze Health and Wellness Center uses Salesforce as its system of record to track its client relationships. Because of the nature of Hotze’s business, data in Salesforce is very dynamic, changing frequently, and with a steady flow of new data. Further complicating matters was that Salesforce, as a CRM solution, was introduced when Hotze decided to migrate all business data from a legacy MS Dynamics implementation. While the migration itself went well, no attention was paid to the quality of the data being migrated.

The end result was a new Salesforce setup that mirrored all of the problems of Hotze’s original Dynamics database. Without addressing the underlying problem of data quality, things were getting out of hand as the data was continuously and rapidly changing.

Brenda Gonzalez, Project Manager at Hotze, described the migration process as a “big mess.” Before rolling out Salesforce, and taking control of systems and data, Hotze had a fairly freewheeling approach to data and systems’ access. There was no dedicated systems manager or data steward in the organization. All employees were effectively users on the system with no profiles or role-based permissions.

The common symptoms

It should be noted that these characteristics are not at all unusual for small organization in growth mode and that run a high-volume business. Brenda gives a perfect example, “I remember I would look for just one patient name and I would get up to ten different records. Some of them would be leads, some would be contacts, different addresses, different phone numbers. We couldn’t trust the data, and people didn’t want to use the system. If you can’t trust your data, you can’t trust your business reporting and measurements.”

As a business that provides personalized health services, customer service began to suffer significantly, as did Hotze’s reputation.

“If we had a lead contact us and there were multiple records for them, we would look like we didn’t know what we were doing,” Brenda said. “One record would have ‘Joe Blow’ as the lead owner, one would have ‘Mary Smith.’ Different data, different emails. We just looked bad. And as you know first impressions are everything. If a lead reaches out to us and we don’t have their information straight, it’s just not a good impression. As a health practice, our customers expect a lot of personalized attention.”

Manual work didn’t cut it

When Brenda joined Hotze, she quickly realized what a problem their bad data was, and the related problems it was causing.

Her initial attempts at tackling the issues were manual, searching for duplicate records on a case-by-case basis and merging them. “There was no easy way of doing it. You can only do that so many times a day, and you don’t know where all the dupes are. I couldn’t do it for all of our thousands of leads,” she said.

At the time Brenda started, there was also a new sales director who, Brenda reports, was very like-minded. Together they were able to identify the root causes of the problem and begin to address them.

Enter Cloudingo

Brenda, a self-professed “data lover” turned to the Salesforce AppExchange looking for a solution after reaching a breaking point of frustration over inaccurate out-of-date data. She chose Cloudingo over other options because, in her words, it “just had a lot more functionality.”

Brenda had a great initial experience with Cloudingo. She worked with one of the Cloudingo product specialists to get oriented to the application and to understand how to use the Cloudingo dashboard, filters, and automation features. “I didn’t even need to use up all of the free trial before I was like, ‘Okay, I need to buy this!’” she said.

Once fully setup, Cloudingo was off and running, cleaning old legacy data and getting the Hotze Salesforce org to a baseline it had never been to, even from inception.

Taking on a proactive approach

Maintaining that new higher level of quality was one of Brenda’s objectives too. “I prefer to be proactive rather than reactive,” she said. “New records are added to our Salesforce org every day, so I run Cloudingo on a daily basis (about 12 filters). And on a monthly basis I go in and see which records couldn’t be merged automatically. It’s usually just a handful. Then I decide what to do with them.”

The benefits of clean data

In summary, Hotze was able to consolidate all duplicate records using Cloudingo, giving them a single, reliable record of each client and a trustworthy profile of their customer base. Not only has the cleanup process been valuable purely from a data standpoint, it has also streamlined business processes: “We can see all the calls we’ve made, all the communication we’ve had,” Brenda said. “Then based on these activities we’re able to put a process together on how to move forward rather than having to look at five different records and look at them individually. We can now say, ‘What’s the next step to get this prospect on board with us?’”

Cloudingo has become not only a regular and vital part of Hotze’s daily operations, it has also become a safety net according to Brenda. Automated scanning for new duplicate records and merging of the results happens in the background. “I can feel safe that if there is a duplicate record accidently created, Cloudingo will catch it and I don’t even have to think about it,” Brenda said.

One of the biggest benefits of clean data for Hotze is that their various departments now feel comfortable and more secure using Salesforce. Brenda reports that her Salesforce users now trust the data and she directly attributes an increase in sales to raising the quality of the data. “Cloudingo is my ‘go-to.’ It makes life so much easier,” she said.