Executive Summary

An effective plan for entering, cleaning and updating the data for your salesforce.com (SFDC) system is critical for achieving success with SFDC. According to industry experts poor planning for managing the data entry/data quality issue has historically been one of the largest reasons for failure with CRM systems.

The data entry/data quality challenges faced by a SFDC customer, and the corresponding solutions and best practices to be considered will vary depending on the company sales process and size. However applying data management best practices can be instrumental for creating revenue growth and a competitive advantage with your SFDC investment.

Why Does Data Quality Matter for Salesforce.com Customers? This whitepaper concentrates on the data impact and benefits to sales and marketing users selling to other businesses. Although SFDC is used by a variety of other company functions, such as service and support, this analysis focuses on the best practice recommendations for sales and marketing.

There are two main reasons why current stakeholders in a SFDC project should have a strategy for addressing the quality of data in their SFDC system.

1) Historical Lessons Learned from Prior CRM Project Failures:

There is a growing body of research from industry analysts that