Since the beginning of contact management applications, the effectiveness of CRM has always been dependent on the quality and comprehensiveness of the data within the CRM system's database. The better the data inside, the better the ROI.
Incomplete or inaccurately collected data can cancel out any productivity gains CRM might provide if a sales team is spending a great deal of time tracking down correct information about a prospect, or spending time chasing down prospects who are difficult to find or no longer employed by the organization being pursued.
In addition, enhancing the existing, basic data that exists within CRM systems with additional data points about a prospect can enable all kinds of processes such as lead scoring, segmentation, lead nurturing, business intelligence, and other data-driven activities that can greatly increase CRM ROI, and therefore provide a greater amount of success to the organization that leverages these processes.
Salesforce.com is no different. Its Software-as-a-Service paradigm change still is just as reliant on the actual CRM data within it for success as its precursor enterprise software solutions.
StrikeIron is aiding significantly in this cause to provide a much more effective Salesforce.com experience as a result of better, more complete data within the system. Using Force.com, we have natively integrated several of our data quality and data enrichment Web services seamlessly into the Salesforce.com environment. We have provided a very simple way to map Salesforce.com fields, including custom fields, to an organization's Salesforce.com instance, enhancing and verifying data record by record.
Now, this also includes batch processing, meaning with a few clicks, the quality and comprehensiveness of the entire Salesforce.com database can be substantially increased.
With the following screen shots, you can see how easy it is to map fields from a Salesforce.com instance to fields matching StrikeIron Web services that are currently in 24x7 production use with thousands of different organizations worldwide who are currently leveraging external data in real-time across the Web for a broad range of applications.
Once set up with the simple configuration tool, the entire process of invoking StrikeIron Web services using data within the Salesforce.com system to validate and enhance that data is then completely automated from that point forward.
The following steps demonstrate how quickly and simply the StrikeIron Salesforce.com application can be configured to achieve better data within Salesforce.com:
Step 1 - Set up your StrikeIron authentication information. This information will be used to authenticate with StrikeIron servers when the data is being checked and enhanced during processing. You can get a StrikeIron UserID and Password simply by registering at our Web site or contacting one of our account managers.
Step 2 - Provide your Salesforce.com authentication information and the query string for batch processing (we can help you set this up, but it's a pretty basic query to determine which records will be verified and enhanced if a subset is desired).
Step 3 - Map which fields within Salesforce.com will be used as input parameters to the StrikeIron Web service. This is the data that will be verified and/or enhanced and will be used as the lookup keys to the data sources that we constantly update on our servers.
Step 4 - Select the Salesforce.com fields (any fields, including custom created fields) from which the response data will be mapped to and inserted into the Salesforce.com database for each record.
Step 5 - Set up any necessary or desired options.
Step 6 - Begin processing and watch it work!
As you can see, it is now quite straight-forward and quick to perform mass verification and data enhancement processes within Salesforce.com, providing better data, leading to a more efficient and effective sales team, and therefore better ROI with your Salesforce.com investment.
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