Top Three Salesforce Data Management Strategies

A few years ago many top industry leaders anticipated the beginning of a new age called the ‘era of big data‘. A lot of them predicted that the future existence and growth of any company will largely depend on how they collect, store, retain, access & use their data. Today if we see the success story of any progressive global enterprise, there is always a factor that plays a crucial role called efficient data management and analytics. 

Today, one of the biggest challenges for a majority of the enterprises is even if they understand the significance of data for business success, they actually struggle to collect & store a large volume of data as there are various complexities. But there are also enterprises that have adopted advanced data management strategies to improve business efficiency & cost performance. 

We all know the vital role that Salesforce as a platform is playing in the growth journey of over 150,000 companies across the world. Salesforce has been amazing in helping enterprises drive innovation, customer success & digital transformation. However, if you are a Salesforce admin, your life is not that easy when it comes to managing the data considering the massive volume & limited storage. Things become a little more difficult if you are from highly data-driven industries such as healthcare, financial, government, telecom, high-tech, education, etc. So, the question here is what could be the best ways to manage Salesforce data considering long term accessibility, storage cost savings, and sustaining higher performance. 

Here are the top three Salesforce data management strategies that every Salesforce admin can follow to optimize the data storage. 

Analyze Operational Data Set Periodically

As a Salesforce admin, you should ask yourself ‘Do I really need these records, fields, objects’? If you have multiple orgs, you might be having hundreds of records, fields, or custom objects that you may not be using. Identifying those unused record types, fields, and objects and deleting them won’t impact your business performance for sure, but it will certainly reduce the load on your orgs. Before deleting them, make sure you communicate with the relevant teams and data owners. 

If you are from a highly regulated industry like healthcare, government, or financial, where you need to keep data accessibility for a long time, you might consider archiving them somewhere. While archiving, the related records may not come automatically. You have to implement some sort of strategy like creating unique ID numbers to complete the archiving. 

The idea of periodically analyzing your operational data set will definitely improve the overall data quality. However, as this is a manual process, you have to invest a lot of time & consciousness into this. Any kind of mishap can impact your business continuity. 

360-degree view of Customer Data

A successful business largely runs on customer data. Customer data not only helps you drive business revenue but also plays a vital role in making decisive business decisions. Sales & marketing teams build sustainable customer relationships using the data. Businesses use multiple systems where data resides. It is extremely important to bring data from various sources and put them in a single view. 

Disjointed data is a big liability. Combining data from third-party systems, social channels, events, campaigns and bringing it to your Salesforce system is the key to business success. This will not only give you a 360-degree view of each customer but also helps sales & marketing drive a high level of personalization. Though this will bring a lot of success, it is also a complex & costly endeavor. As an admin, you might require to use robust big data technologies and massive data management strategies to make this work. 

Data Archiving

You have now quality data which is huge in number. You believe if managed properly, this data can help your business thrive with more lead flow, more closures, and ultimately more revenue. But considering the platform limitations, it is a daunting task for a Salesforce admin to retain data with such massive volume. As we told early in the first point, archiving could be the best adopted strategy. 

However, archiving comes with its own set of questions such as where to store, how to maintain data integrity, how to run analytics, what about the security aspect, the archiving approach, and much more. But one thing is certain that a Salesforce using enterprise without a robust archiving roadmap & solution will end up dealing with massive data that has its own massive storage and maintenance costs.

To make life easy for a Salesforce admin, DataArchiva is a must-have application. Listed in the AppExchange, the solution is the only native app that helps you archive all your legacy data automatically in Salesforce’s own big data-based storage systems called Big Objects. This ensures top-notch security as data won’t go out of the system with any time seamless accessibility. What else? Big Object storage cost is way too cheaper than Salesforce data storage costs. This guarantees 85%+ storage cost reduction. When your Salesforce storage becomes lean, this drives better performance along with data governance. Moreover, you can also use analytics to get better visibility, set custom archiving policies, one click restore, audit data management etc. 

If you want to know more in detail, let us know. We can help you drive through DataArchiva and show you how archiving is one of the best strategies to manage Salesforce data which is being widely adopted across industries. Set up a demo here.

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DataArchiva is an enterprise data management application built for Salesforce that offers complete data management solutions including archive, backup, and seeding.