Imagine trying to buy a gift for someone you’ve never met. If you know someone who knows them, you might ask what the gift receiver would like to try and figure out the best gift to buy. Now imagine that the person you ask gives you incorrect information – unless you get really, really lucky, you’re not going to buy a great gift.
Wondering what this has to do with sales and surveys? Well, planning your sales efforts based upon unhealthy data is the same as trying to buy a gift for someone you’ve never met based on an incorrect assumption of their personality. If you want your business to be successful, you need to ensure that your data is up to date and healthy.
Measuring the State of Your Data
Recently, Salesforce published a post on 5 Ways to Measure the State of Your Data. The five sequential can be summed up like this (although the original article is definitely worth a read):
- Figure out who in your organization uses data to make decisions or adjust strategies.
- Determine what aspects your business needs data for – are you planning a new sales campaign or working on higher customer retention rates?
- Consider what types of data are being used the most often by employees – the data that is used the most often is likely the most relevant.
- Analyze how data is being used by both your internal team and your customers.
- Finally, ensure your data’s healthy. This means going through it with a fine-toothed comb and checking its age (older data is less relevant), completeness, and removing any duplications.
The only thing this article doesn’t do is give you concrete advice on how to start improving the health of your data immediately.
Now, you could appoint an employee to take on the arduous task of giving your data a healthy check up. It is possible to have someone go line by line, prospect by prospect… Or you could use Alchemer’s native features to help automate and verify this process.
Alchemer and Healthy Data
Alchemer features Salesforce integration, which allows you to easily keep your data up to date and healthy. This means that when you try to make a decision based on the data you have, you don’t have to spend time questioning whether your data is correct.
In other words, you’re trying to buy a gift for someone you know, rather than someone you’ve never met!
Keeping Data Healthy With Surveys and Salesforce Integration
Alchemer has been designed to integrate with Salesforce because we know how important it is for you to have easy access to correct data.
This integration is pre-built. All users have to do is connect the accounts. You don’t have to spend extra time fiddling around to try and make things work or struggling to understand how to complete simple tasks.
Integration allows for both services to communicate with one another, including push actions, pull actions, and automated email surveys. Each of these can be invaluable in aiding your business towards success.
Sending Sales Data to Salesforce
Simply defined, a push action is when you send data to Salesforce. Depending on the circumstance, you can push your data to different places. Essentially, you push data whenever you insert new records or update existing records. Previously, updating existing records could be problematic, depending on your service provider. Sometimes new records overwrote the wrong old records or caused old records to disappear entirely. In some extreme cases, you had to manually search through your data to figure out whether you needed to update an old record or insert a new one. Thanks to Alchemer’s upsert feature, the process has been streamlined.
Insert and Update Data All at Once
As you might have guessed, upsert is a combination of insert and update.
Rather than trying to figure out whether you should update an old record or create a new one, upserting allows you to do both without you having to choose. For example, if you receive a survey response and upsert your data, Alchemer will automatically determine whether the new information should update an old record or insert a new one.
Essentially, you can update or create a new record in one simple step – without having to dig through the archives in order to make the correct decision. And best of all? You don’t have to worry about losing any data in the process.
Pulling Data into Alchemer
As the name says, a pull action is when you use Alchemer to pull data about a particular record from Salesforce. Perhaps you only need to find the responses to a particular survey, or you’re trying to get information about how a particular demographic sees your brand.
Once you’ve pulled the data, it is stored, displayed, used, and reported in Alchemer. Now you can look at the particular record and make any required adjustments based on only that select piece of data. This is a great way to gather the data needed to make specific choices that will only impact a small subset of your market.
Streamline Systems With Automated Email Sends
The best time to send out a survey is after a particular action has been completed – your customer’s experience is fresh in their mind and they’re more inclined to help you and voice their opinion.
When a case is closed in Salesforce, you can use Alchemer to automatically send out a survey. This draws your customer closer to your business and allows them to provide immediate feedback on what they feel is and isn’t working. Rather than waiting for molehills to turn into mountains, you can look through responses and make any adjustments that need to be made. Best of all? Everything is automated, so all you have to do is sit back and watch the data roll in.
Healthy Data for a Healthy Business
The health of your data will determine the health of your business. If you let your data stagnate and become out of date, then you’ll be making business decisions based off of falsehoods. It’s easy to see how this could result in a business that struggles to stay competitive. However, if you use Alchemer and its Salesforce integration, you can keep your data healthy with minimal effort.
The next time you try to make a decision, you’ll be prepared with all of the relevant facts, so you’ll be able to make the choice that helps your business thrive!
