Ensuring a Smooth Data Migration
Data migration can be a stressful and challenging process. The more complex your system is, and the longer you have been collecting data, the harder it can be to accurately understand, process, and transfer all of your essential business data. So, to ensure a smooth migration of your precious data to Salesforce®, you will want to make sure that you give your business a truly fresh start, and that means giving your data a deep cleaning.
Maybe you know your Contact List could use some cleaning up, or you need to remove companies that you are no longer associated with? You might also need to add new Leads to your existing data?
These can be some of the most frustrating and tedious steps on your way to CRM bliss. But they don’t have to be! Here are common issues AdVic encounters – and we fix – before starting any Salesforce migration project.
Emails
Salesforce is a great way to communicate with your contacts but to do so you need to have a way to reach them. Salesforce requires email addresses to be correctly formatted. If the email address is not in a recognized format, the whole record gets rejected. You could spend hours going through hundreds of thousands of records correcting email addresses. SQL data functions should be used to check for many data variations, like email addresses ending in periods, missing the “@” symbol, and excluding email addresses like no@email.com.
Phone Numbers
While Salesforce makes sure that email addresses are correctly formatted, you do not see as many issues with phone numbers. That’s mainly because there are so many ways to format a phone number, anything from (123)-456-7890 to 000-000-0000, with or without extensions, so Salesforce doesn’t typically reject a phone number. But there are ways to clean up fields and check for phone numbers you can’t reach, like ones with less than 10 digits, being all one number, and sequential phone numbers, like the example listed above.
Addresses
If you are like most companies, addresses are not one size fits all. From abbreviated states to full state names, a full address in one field, multiple fields for streets, and international addresses. We know this can be very challenging, but SQL functions can help with all of these issues. Using SQL, addresses can be standardized so they all are formatted the same. If you have states that are a mix of a full Georgia, GA, Alabama, and TN, they can be converted to be either full state names or the abbreviated name. When you have some addresses that are all capitalized and some that are not, those can be set to the address fields to the proper case or all capitalized letters for consistency. If you need to parse out your address to fit into Salesforce address fields, that can also be done. For example, if your address is 6525 Shiloh Rd., Suite D-300, Alpharetta, GA, 30005, then we would parse this into a street, suite, city, state, and zip code for an easy transition into Salesforce. Anything to make sure your contacts have reachable addresses.
Duplicate Contacts
Many of AdVic’s clients have sales representatives who maintain their own client contact information. When migrating those contacts into Salesforce, you could be dealing with multiple sales representatives with the same contact information and that’s a huge headache. De-duplication and merging functions can solve these issues. The best place to start is by determining what, based on your data points, identifies a record as a duplicate. Generally, this may be a combination of Name, Email, Phone Number, and/or Address. With deduplication, duplicates are identified and one record is kept. When merging, all duplicated records are combined into a single record, again based on the identification of what data is accurate.
So, remember, nearly every enterprise goes through a hectic data migration process at some point in its development. Just be sure to take the time to address the issues outlined above before you start. If you don’t, you are risking problems that can lead to slow user adoption at best, and major customer relationship issues at worst.
Ad Victoriam Solutions maximizes the top best data migration tools to facilitate a smooth and seamless data transfer to Salesforce. Since our consultants have decades of experience with many migration tools, they understand the complexities of migrations and are able to deliver the right solution for each business. Contact an AdVic Data Migration Specialist today!
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