The 5 Best Ways to Keep Mistakes out of Salesforce.com

Every year millions of data entry errors find their way into Salesforce.com data. You wouldn’t be the first executive in history to look for a contact name and see a street. Or to discover that reps are duplicating (or triplicating) efforts as they contact Rich, Richie and Richard Smith.

Data can be missing, inaccurate or just plain wrong. And it’s expensive. IBM estimates that bad data costs U.S. businesses $3.1 trillion a year. Here are 5 routines that reps can follow to help keep bad data of Salesforce.com.

1. Enter information immediately after an action: The longer reps wait to complete the CRM record, the more they forget. Even if your rep takes great notes, they’re still notes. “Did I write 50 or 60?” “What’s that extra 0?” The more time they wait to enter the data, the more data fields go blank. A rep may intend to go back and complete the record, but they get busy and forget.

2. Pay attention: Entering data in Salesforce.com is a routinized task, not meant for sales reps who are at their best when they think on their feet and improvise. Reps need to work extra hard to focus. To make sure street names don’t go where a contact names should go. And to make sure the anticipated close date doesn’t land in a field titled “next contact.”

3. Slow down: Anybody who’s in a hurry makes mistakes. Sales reps in a hurry don’t see the Rich and Richie Smith records, so they create a new one for Richard. Harried reps fill your Salesforce database with typos, transposed letters, variations in spelling. You may look at a record and see 15,00. Does that mean 15.00 or 15,000?

4. Check the record after it’s completed: In other words, proofread the work. Of course, in this case, you’re asking an unfocused, harried sales reps to proofread their own work, to find mistakes they’ve already missed. Maybe they’ll catch one error in five. But it’s still one less error in your database and it helps.

5. Get your reps an assistant: Sales reps and data entry clerks have diametrically opposite skill sets. Reps think fast and improvise. Their notes appear unstructured because they focus on keeping conversations moving. Data entry clerks are more methodical. They make sense of unstructured notes, asks questions and carefully enters data that everybody can use.

Rollio is that assistant. After every action, Rollio asks the rep what happened and turns the answers into completed the Salesforce.com record. Rollio also asks reps for more than they might enter on their own.

Sales organizations that have deployed Rollio report that they collect 3X more data. And it’s accurate.

Click here to see how Rollio works.

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