As the most robust and widely used customer relationship management (CRM) platform on the market, Salesforce has evolved far beyond just a customer-facing system. Nearly two-thirds of executives say that they rely on CRM data for every stage of the customer lifecycle. From website visits to customer org charts, Salesforce creates a trusted 360-degree view of your customers.
This powerful view is what drives customer relationships, improves the customer experience, and allows your organization to glean more actionable insights to guide your business strategy.
However, realizing the full breadth of Salesforce’s capabilities often comes with the major hurdle of unreliable, incomplete, and poorly integrated data. One survey found that 44% of CRM users said their company loses 10% of annual revenue due to poor data quality.
So, how can you best position your organization to get ahead of these potential pitfalls? One solution to these challenges is to implement a data governance plan that includes a resilient data stewardship framework within the platform.
Data governance and data stewardship are often confused with one another. The terms are related, but there are distinct differences.
Data governance is a collection of clearly defined policies, procedures, standards, processes, roles, and responsibilities that ensure the effective and efficient use of data in enabling an organization to achieve its goals. Data governance policies and procedures ensure that the combination of data across clouds, objects, and profiles can be leveraged optimally for users.
In this era of digital transformation, platforms like Salesforce are likely consuming massive amounts of data from other platforms across an enterprise’s tech stack, and often share data with those platforms. In order to realize the true power of the data that Salesforce consumes and generates, it’s essential to have clear policies and procedures related to object creation, field values, business processes, and rules within the platform. Your Salesforce data governance strategy will inform how your unique data sets are allowed to be accessed and changed, ensuring streamlined data use and secure access at every touchpoint.
Data stewardship is the practical oversight and management of an organization’s data assets. Data stewards are responsible for implementing the tactical aspects of a plan for CRM data governance. If data governance consists of the policies and procedures for how data is captured and managed, data stewardship is responsible for the active implementation of those rules and procedures.
For organizations that use Salesforce, data stewards ensure that the front-line user enters data correctly so that the business can leverage that data in-platform for tasks like forecasting, reporting, advanced analytics, and investment strategy planning.
An effective data governance plan in Salesforce and data stewardship framework enable you to mitigate risk, empower people with the right data at the right time, and drive business growth.
As with any system, the old adage “garbage in, garbage out” applies to Salesforce. No matter how well-designed, user-friendly, and integrated your Salesforce org is, its output is dependent on the quality of the data in the system. Without a data steward maintaining data integrity throughout its lifecycle, the value of your Salesforce investment can decline dramatically.
Improving operational effectiveness, decision-making, strategy development, and execution all depend on data quality. Having a well-defined data strategy enables a strong Salesforce data governance that empowers data stewards and positively impacts everyone in the enterprise with the information they need to plan and act more effectively.
Poor data stewardship and data governance in Salesforce can diminish trust in the data utilized across your organization, leading to internal friction and lost productivity. It can also cause reputational risk in the eyes of your customers, partners, and vendors who need assurance that you can maintain data accuracy and privacy. Effective CRM data governance and stewardship protect you from these risks.
Because of the power and flexibility of the platform, Salesforce data stewards can have a significant impact on the end-user experience without having to code. For example, a single admin can implement and police a mid-sized enterprise’s CRM data governance through “clicks” and straightforward platform configuration.
Your Salesforce platform is likely touched by a plethora of your enterprise’s technical and functional resources. These resources may differ in the way they manage data, document their work, and communicate with one another. These discrepancies further highlight the need to have a clearly articulated and understood data management strategy that includes strict governance protocols.
Data volume is another challenge, since Salesforce holds an enormous amount of information. Addressing these concerns only grows more important as volumes of data grow larger and more complex over time.
41% of business leaders say data complexity is a major hurdle to understanding their data. The more data you have, the more important it is to implement Salesforce data storage best practices.
A solid Salesforce data governance framework guides your data stewardship practices and sets your team up for success. The following Salesforce data management best practices are important to consider as you develop your data stewardship framework:
Ensure Salesforce users are only seeing the records they need to see. Leverage profiles, roles, and permission sets to mitigate oversharing. Utilize validation rules, minimize the use of free-form text fields, and leverage other field types to ensure that users are entering data in a consistent manner.
Architect and design your Salesforce solution to accommodate how data will be used in the short and long term. For example, adding validation rules to keep out erroneous data will help in creating a standard data model that allows admins to act as first-line data stewards.
Ensure good data literacy. Data stewards should have proper data literacy, which includes an understanding of the relationships between objects used across your Salesforce clouds. Set up a data model that can cleanly organize data so that it’s easy to sort and analyze down the line.
Consistently assess field usage across objects and clouds. If fields aren’t being used or don’t need to be there, remove them to mitigate the presence of tech debt and clutter in your data storage.
It’s easy for leaders to buy into your data strategy when it aligns with your organization’s broader business strategy. It is important that your organization understands that data governance in Salesforce is done “with and for” them rather than “to” them.
To prevent the endless cycle of low-quality data in your Salesforce instance, it’s important to maintain data quality throughout the lifecycle. If you’re integrating data into Salesforce, apply governance as far upstream as possible.
Include policies and procedures around consistent data checks and updates during development activities and key project milestones.
How you assign data stewardship tasks will depend on the size of your organization and your budget.
Here are some general rules of thumb to consider as you plan for staffing:
It’s common for companies to struggle with Salesforce implementation, data quality, manual processes, inadequate reporting, and a lack of trust in their data. Additionally, mergers, acquisitions, and new software implementations can cause (and expose) data quality gaps.
You may want to consider working with a Salesforce partner if you struggle with these challenges or want to avoid these pitfalls:
The right Salesforce partner can change the way you use the platform. If the partner has experience both inside and outside of Salesforce, they can design a holistic modern data governance and management solution that is absorbed into your Salesforce platform.
Meeting new regulatory requirements is always a challenge, especially at large organizations with legacy systems and processes. When one of the country’s largest banking institutions needed to update its processes in order to stay compliant with new regulations, it turned to Kenway—and we turned to Salesforce data governance to solve the problem.
The Kenway team approached this challenge by configuring custom workflows to automate the benchmarking analysis process and incorporated Salesforce data governance best practices into these processes. The combination of new processes backed by a solid CRM data governance plan resulted in the firm’s ability to increase productivity and reduce costs.
At Kenway, we help you leverage holistic Salesforce capabilities by considering data strategy, management, governance, and stewardship across your technology ecosystem. Whether we are working solely on a Salesforce engagement or a broader technology initiative, these processes are integrated into every project.
If you want to seize the full range of opportunities Salesforce offers and get rid of data quality, integration, and accessibility issues once and for all, reach out to our experts today!
Data governance in Salesforce is a collection of clearly defined policies, procedures, standards, processes, roles, and responsibilities that ensure the effective and efficient use of data to enable an organization to achieve its goals.
While data governance lays out the guardrails and guidelines for proper data management, data stewardship is the day-to-day oversight and management of that data. In other words, data stewardship activities are informed by the data governance plan.