I often get asked this question from sales operations: “What do my sales reps need to succeed?” Some managers think it’s training, building out a playbook and defining your total addressable market. None of these are wrong, but there’s one critical ingredient that’s missing: clean customer data.

I’ve never heard a sales manager say that they like dirty data. But today, the need to be a data neat freak has never been more important. Companies often know they have a data problem, but they don’t know how bad it is. This is a major problem because customers now expect companies to deliver personalized, 1-to-1, real time experiences. The only way to deliver these experiences is with a foundation of clean, rich customer data. Having the right data at the right moment gives your sales team a competitive edge.

With data quality in mind, Salesforce is excited to announce that it is continuing to help businesses build long-lasting customer relationships by introducing two new capabilities in Sales Cloud Lightning: In-App Data Assessment and Data.com Clean Company Info for Leads.

In-App Data Assessment: Determine the Health Status of Your CRM Data

With the new In-App Data Assessment, Salesforce admins can now monitor their company’s data health and receive a snapshot of their Account data quality with a score from 0 (poor quality) to 100 (great quality). This free tool in Sales Cloud Lightning identifies account data issues affecting sales productivity -- including invalid emails, wrong phone numbers, misspelled names, etc.

Want to segment your account records by top industries, revenue tiers, and location? Data Assessment can do this too, helping admins gain a better understanding of their customers and prospects. This awareness is the first step to achieving a foundation of clean data that helps a sales team sell faster and sell smarter. As the next step, sales teams can turn to Data.com Clean to help address their account data issues.

Data.com Clean Company Info for Leads: Prioritize Leads With Real-Time Data Enrichment

With the new Company Info for Leads in Data.com Clean, sales reps can say goodbye to days spent researching a prospect and struggling to identify the ideal contact to include in a targeted email campaign. With just an email or a business name, Company Info for Leads instantly enriches this info with important company facts such as location, company size, the technology used and more. This not only saves sales reps time, but also enables more precise marketing campaigns and increases the potential of reaching a lead who is willing to buy.  

For example, if you enter “Acme Corporation” into Salesforce as a lead record, Company Info for Leads automatically evaluates the name “Acme” against Data.com Clean reference data to provide more detail on this potential customer, such as industry, location and employee number. Now that you have this company info, you can easily put Acme Corporation into the right type of targeted campaign instead of a general queue.

Company Info for Leads is a sales rep’s new favorite time-saving tool because it’s the first Data.com feature to highlight the possibilities of real-time, constant data enrichment. By freeing up time that used to be spent researching leads, sales reps can now focus on what really matters—quality connections with customers and prospects.

Availability & Cost:

• In-App Data Assessment is generally available today at no added cost for all Sales Cloud Lightning users in the U.S. and Canada.

• Company Info for Leads is generally available today for Sales Cloud Lightning users with Data.com Clean, which is $25 per user, per month.

• Sales Cloud Lightning is generally available now and editions start at $75 per user, per month.