Managing Your Salesforce Data to Harvest the Fruits of Customer 360

In this chapter of Part 4, The Continuous Improvement Phase, of your Salesforce program, we will cover how to manage your Salesforce data and how to leverage it to maximize the value of your Salesforce investments. First, we’ll introduce the life cycle of your Salesforce data and how to govern its quality, access, and usage. Next, we’ll explore the many use cases for leveraging your Salesforce data across different domains, using different Salesforce features and technologies to provide better user and customer experiences. Finally, we will show how you can inspire peers in your organization by showing the value of a successfully implemented, run, and leveraged Salesforce program and platform.

You will learn what it means to manage the life cycle of your Salesforce data in order to optimize the user and customer experience and the performance of your Salesforce org and ensure business continuity. You...

Managing and governing your Salesforce data

Data is the business currency of the present and the future. Some might even argue it is your organization’s most valuable asset, other than your employees, of course.

Important as it is, many organizations struggle to truly leverage the data they have at their disposal. Next to siloed data, I would argue that data management and the governance of the quality of their data is the biggest challenge preventing organizations from reaching their full potential with Salesforce.

Let’s jump right in and look at your data life cycle.

Managing the life cycle of your Salesforce data

To be able to effectively manage and govern your Salesforce data, we first need to understand a few definitions and concepts.

Let’s start by understanding the different data categories you manage in your Salesforce org:

• Master data: This is data that is typically part of many types of systems within an enterprise, and as such...

Leveraging your C360 data to maximize the return on your Salesforce investments

Let’s get down to business by first assessing your organization’s data leverage maturity.

There are different ways in which you can leverage the data at your disposal. If you think about how you use your Salesforce data, you will likely be able to allocate this to one of the following stages:

• Descriptive: Knowing what happened
• Diagnostic: Knowing why something happened
• Predictive: Foreseeing what is likely to happen
• Prescriptive: Suggesting actions to manage or leverage what is predicted to happen
• Cognitive: Acting based on events occurring and/or based on anticipation

Important note

You can’t jump from descriptive to cognitive analytics. You have to progress through the stages. The critical success factors for mastering and gaining value from each level are quality data and the continuous validation of the accuracy and value that the initiative...

Leading and inspiring the peers in your organization

When you deliver value to your stakeholders, the word will spread that your platform, your program, and your team(s) are delivering improvements for your organization.

Likely, when this starts to happen, you – and your Salesforce program and team – will have evolved the capabilities of delivering new functionality (DevOps), as well as analytics, and potentially AI services (DataOps and AIOps).

Take the praise humbly and share the knowledge and learning from your journey to get where you are; you have arrived at the spearhead of your organization, leading its elusive digital transformation.

Let’s wrap up this chapter!

Summary

We covered a lot of topics in this chapter of the continuous improvement phase of your Salesforce program. First, you learned how to manage the life cycle of your Salesforce data and govern its quality to set your analytics and automation initiatives up for success. Next, you explored the many use cases for leveraging your Salesforce C360 data.

You have now gained insights into the methods and activities you need to continuously execute and evolve in order to maximize business value from your investments in Salesforce, data, analytics, and automation initiatives.

Successfully delivering on those initiatives will help you inspire your peers within your organization and allow you to take on broader and bigger initiatives.

In the next chapter, we’ll discuss typical issues you may encounter in the continuous improvement phase of your Salesforce program, and how to mitigate and overcome them. We will also provide a checklist for evaluating the state of your Salesforce...