Validity likes data. Validity might even love data. Olivia Hinkle, senior product marketing manager for DemandTools and Gridbuddy Cloud, surely loves data, which is why she’s the regular host of Validity’s Data in Sight webinar series! In our January edition, Olivia welcomed two data quality and CRM management powerhouses: Corbin Neike, senior Salesforce administrator at 84.51˚, and Branden Bellanca, director, consulting expert, at CGI.
While the full webinar is embedded below, here’s a few can’t-miss highlights to give a sense of the wealth of knowledge shared, to prove the webinar is beyond worthy of 45 minutes of your time.
To encourage adoption, get leadership buy-in early.
Your CRM isn’t going to use itself! Unless it does, then please share your secrets. Anyway, it’s incredibly important to ensure there is consensus and belief in the software and the process at all levels of the organization. To find your strongest advocates, get leadership to champion and support your efforts to promote CRM usage cross-functionally. They’ll relay what their teams’ day-to-day looks like and will help you identify where their teams will benefit by using a CRM. When you know what their needs are, you can find a system to increase users’ productivity, and leaders will feel invested in its success. Plus, the fact is…it’s hard to say no when your boss’s boss wants you do to it, right?
End user impact should guide all governance decisions.
Don’t forget the little people! Except in this case, they’re definitely not little; end users are some of the most important figures in your data quality and CRM goals. As you consider your governance plan, think about whether end users will find the decision positive, if it will negatively impact their process, whether it will help or hinder CRM adoption, and so on.
And data governance is not as negative as it sounds. It’s like checks and balances for your CRM, so when you include people who can articulate the needs of all the people using the system, the dedicated data governance team can promote adoption, lessen technical debt, and increase your CRM return on investment. Wins all around.
Minimize creating technical debt.
Debt is bad. No one likes debt, of any kind. So, when you’re managing your CRM data, you want as little technical debt as possible. Do this by documenting every process and flow, so you know what each field is used for, the purpose of each process and flow and why certain development decisions were made. And, for the times when you can’t avoid the tech debt, it helps you create a future plan to fix it. This is probably 3% of everything they covered in this webinar, so check it out below!