What Does Good Data Management Look Like on Salesforce?

Good governance is the foundation of successful data management. It involves setting clear guidelines and policies for how data is managed and accessed across the organisation.

On Salesforce, governance includes defining data quality standards, conducting regular data quality reviews and configuring dashboards for monitoring. It also ensures assistance with data cleansing and deduplication, ensuring your Salesforce data remains reliable and up to date.

A data dictionary serves as a crucial resource for defining key business terms and Salesforce data structures. It documents the physical data model, making it easier for users to understand and work with data in a consistent way.

Regular updates to the data dictionary are necessary to accommodate new data fields or changes, ensuring definitions stay aligned with evolving business processes. This helps maintain clarity and uniformity when interpreting data on the Salesforce platform.

Duplicate records are a common problem that can skew insights and undermine data integrity. Keeping your data free from duplicates improves sales and marketing efficiency while providing a single source of truth.

Salesforce’s deduplication process ensures duplicate customer, lead or account records are identified and consolidated. Automated tools and processes can streamline this task, reducing manual efforts and improving the overall quality of your CRM data.

High-quality data boosts operational performance and customer trust. Regular audits and data cleansing routines help address ad hoc quality issues, whilst automated systems can flag and correct problems in real-time.

Maintaining high data quality on Salesforce means regularly monitoring and correcting inaccuracies or inconsistencies in your records. Salesforce offers tools to configure dashboards and reports that assess data quality metrics, ensuring teams have access to accurate data for decision-making.

Well-designed dashboards offer a real-time snapshot of key metrics, including data quality, sales performance and customer engagement. A comprehensive dashboard not only supports transparency but also drives data-driven decisions across the company.

Salesforce dashboards play a pivotal role in providing visibility into your organisation’s data. These dashboards can be customised to suit different teams, enabling them to track performance, analyse trends and resolve issues quickly.

Maintaining accurate and updated master data ensures seamless cross-departmental workflows, improving collaboration and reducing errors related to conflicting data sources.

Master data management (MDM) ensures key reference data — such as corporate structures, product lists or geographic regions — is standardised across Salesforce, preventing inconsistencies in business-critical data, which can otherwise lead to operational inefficiencies.

Regular backups ensure your data is protected in case of system failures or data corruption. Equally, performing disaster recovery testing periodically ensures that, in case of a data loss event, your organisation can recover quickly without major disruptions.

A reliable backup and restore process is critical for safeguarding your Salesforce data. Salesforce also supports sandbox environments where backups can be restored to test systems before rolling out changes in the live environment.

Data privacy is a top priority in today’s regulatory environment. A well-defined privacy policy ensures customer data is used responsibly, boosting trust and maintaining compliance with global privacy laws.

On Salesforce, data privacy management includes configuring processes for handling subject-access-requests (SAR) and right-to-be-forgotten (RTBF) requests, as well as complying with regulations like GDPR. Salesforce also offers data masking techniques to protect sensitive data from unauthorised access.

Managing the full life cycle of data is essential for maintaining compliance. Data life cycle management includes setting processes for safely removing outdated records, optimising storage and ensuring adherence to data retention policies.

Salesforce allows organisations to define how data is created, managed and destroyed. Automated workflows can also be set up to track data from its inception to its end-of-life, ensuring proper handling at each stage.