How to Ensure Data Validation in Your Salesforce Records

Businesses know the value of maintaining a clean and accurate database. Contacts are leads that might convert to customers. But if the information in your database is inaccurate, that’s a lead you’re not going to convert. According to a study by Market Force, 30% of contact lists and databases are outdated after 3-6 months. Additionally:   

• 35% of lead data submitted on forms is flawed   
• 30% of processed leads have wrong phone numbers   
• 28% of processed leads have wrong emails   
• 27% of processed leads have wrong names   

Data validation is crucial to ensure that your Salesforce data is not filled with incorrect or outdated information. People move, relocate, or change jobs and it is difficult for companies to track these changes in a timely manner. Unfortunately, Salesforce, by itself, cannot fully maintain data validation in your database.  

The only way Salesforce helps you validate customer contact data is by creating contact validation rules. However, these rules can only verify that the data a user enters in a record meets the standards you specify before the user can save the record. So, for example, let’s say you would like the zip code to be in the following format: 99999-9999. You would need to create a rule for that. If you want the phone number to be in the international format, which is 1-212-456-7890 you would need a separate rule for that and the same would hold true for every single field.  

In addition to the data validation offered by Salesforce, you also need cross-reference validation. This can only be provided by a third-party app that can match user entered data with a with a known look-up table or directory information service. In order to accomplish this function, businesses of all sizes need a data validation tool, like DataGroomr.   

In the article Why Salesforce Data Validation Capabilities are Not Enough in Salesforce Republic, we take a closer look at the costs of having incorrect data, why Salesforce alone is not enough to clean up your data, and the benefits data validation tools can bring to your business. We also show what contact validation rules look like. DataGroomr’s machine learning algorithms enable Salesforce administrators to bypass tedious rules and get back to business. Read on to learn more.