With the fall season upon us, I’ll soon be out raking a lot of leaves.  You see, for some reason – the people who had my home before me were into planting trees in the yard – a LOT of trees.  I’m pretty sure there are more trees per square foot in my yard than in most forests.  Leaves are one of those things that are gorgeous while changing colors yet quickly become wet and disgusting after falling and laying on the ground for a couple of weeks.

The first year I lived in this house I let my leaves lie there – untended.  Winter came and snow covered them and I simply assumed some kind of magic whisked them away – but no, unfortunately those dormant leaves were still there when spring came.  That spring, no grass grew as the leaves that had sat on top of the lawn the previous 6 months had killed it.

A CRM like SalesForce is just like those leaves (see how I finally got to the point).  It starts off clean and if you’re a data and process guy like me, is quite beautiful.  But when fall comes (in the case of a SalesForce database, fall is typically an undisciplined sales or marketing department), the database begins falling apart.  For a while, you can still chug along and hope it magically will work itself out.  But inevitably, like my springtime grassless yard, you’ll find out that all of the data duplication and mismanagement that has went on for months/years has killed your sales pipeline and tanked your revenue.

So what can you do?  Just like I’ll soon be out in the yard raking up those fall leaves, you need to maintain your database processes.  When new sales team members come in and will be the database or a new marketing person arrives, you must go back to basics.  Each person needs to buy into what made the plan for the database beautiful in the first place.  Need help?  It just so happens we offer a service to get you back on track; we call it a CRM audit or a SalesForce audit.  We’ll look at where you are and how to get your database looking great again.