By far, Accounts and Contacts are the most popular set of records to be imported into Salesforce.com when you “move in.” Most likely Accounts and Contacts are your customers, but very well may also include your partners, vendors and even your competitors! Importing legacy data is typically the very last step prior to training end…
A concern I hear when moving into the cloud is “what if I want to make a change later to another CRM, how do I get my data easily out of Salesforce?” Or, “our IT department has a policy that they retain a local backup of all our business systems.” The good news is that…
I recently needed to identify duplicate Contact records in a Salesforce.com org that contained over 40K Contacts. The amount of duplicates were not horrible (~5% of their Contacts) considering the sales reps had not been trained to watch out for actions that would spawn duplicate records. However the situation was bound to get worse without…
In our never ending quest to reduce duplicate records in Salesforce, before you convert a Lead into a Contact, as a best practice, you will want to (1) check for other Lead records that may already exist for that person, and (2) check to see if the Contact already exists in Salesforce prior to converting…
If you have ever seen me train new Users on how to work with Salesforce.com you’ll hear me say at least a half dozen times “Search before you create!” Inevitably your Users are going to create a duplicate Account or Contact in your Salesforce instance. Don’t panic. Salesforce has some easy-to-use wizards that can help…
Salesforce acquired Jigsaw on May 10, 2010. So what does the Jigsaw acquisition mean to users of Salesforce? Jigsaw offers a database to supplement and enrich your contact and lead records – to see if it is up-to-date and missing any key information. More on that in a minute, but first some quick stats on…
In Saleforce.com you have two types of storage – File and Data. File storage includes attachments, items you’ve upload into the Documents tab, and Salesforce CRM Content. Everything else, including activities, is considered a record and counts towards your Data Storage allocation. A record in Salesforce.com uses about 2K of storage. So, 250K records =…
When you really dig in you’ll be shocked to discover all the places customer data resides – ACT! and Goldmine databases, Microsoft Outlook, mobile devices, day planners, spreadsheets, legacy accounting systems, Rolodexes, home-grown company databases, SQL databases that run your back office systems, old CRM software, and stacks of business cards secured by an old…