Janis Zech: Today is another special episode because we have no guest. It's just Philipp and me talking, so you have to listen to us for quite a while, and we try to make it as boring and slow as possible. Hey, Philipp. How are you?

Philipp Stelzer: I'm great. I'm looking forward to the next ten hours, and really, really appreciate the time that you're taking out of your busy schedule this week to do this.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, actually, you're talking a bit too fast. Please talk slower, so I'm gonna please stretch it out.

Philipp Stelzer: Okay. Let's get started.

Janis Zech: So today, we're gonna talk about Salesforce data hygiene because last week, we launched a cheat sheet on LinkedIn that got a lot of attraction with around eleven fifty comments. And it's a topic that we see every week. Right? We talk to RevOps leaders, CRO sales leaders every week, and we see a lot of different Salesforce instances. And it's a bit like an iceberg, right? You have the metrics on the top and then underneath there's a lot going on to get to accurate, reliable metrics. And so, you know, today we're going to talk about what's under the iceberg in the water, often hidden, but I think we, as RevOps passionists, I don't know if this is an English word, know that's really important and it often has to do with Salesforce data hygiene. So maybe to kick off with a few stats. So according to Gartner, fifty three percent of sales teams state that they have poor CRM data quality. I mean, I just want to put it out there. That's Gartner saying it, not us. But clearly, whether it's activity data or MEDDIC data or next step fields, you have it. I think we've all seen it and been there. There's other research saying that around sixty five percent of reps' time is spent on non selling activity. Out of that, eight percent is actually updating the CRM. You know, take it with a pinch of salt. There's other stats saying five fifty hours per year per rep. And, you know, also that the quality of the CRM data entered is often inaccurate or incomplete. I think when especially when you think about sales methodologies or qualification frameworks, you think about like an average conversation, thirty minutes. The average sales note is, I think, you know, fifty words and thirty minutes talked is around twelve hundred to sixteen hundred words. You look at, you know, MEDDIC or MEDDPIC or SPICE, right, any methodology or qualification framework, often data is missing there. Often the data that is in the fields is not very comprehensive. And it takes a lot of time. And so you are always in this trade off like, should I take more time out of the day of an anyways already busy schedule from a salesperson, also CSMs, right? Like, same thing. Or do I basically be a bit more laxed about it? Right? And I think what we wanna discuss today is common challenges we are seeing and then quick win solutions that you can apply so very tactical. Yeah. I'll stop here. Maybe let's kick off with the challenges. Philipp, what are some of the challenges you are seeing?

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Let's go through them one by one. I think you already mentioned one. I think it's missing activity tracking. So, obviously, activities are a great indicator for sales velocity and the likelihood of a deal closing or not closing, also for account health. And, yeah, I think this is one of the most common ones that we see and talk, you know, with customers and prospects about basically every single day. So that for me definitely is number one. Another big one here is data decay and outdated contacts. So quite often, information is simply missing either because you have no enrichment service or the enrichment service doesn't work properly and you need to swap it out. And so, yeah, just like regular data cleaning and updating contacts is just super, super important. It's also very tedious, but this is, basically, yeah, again, one of the most common ones. And then, maybe one more, is just the very inconsistent dequalification that often happens. So, sales reps having different interpretations of what a qualification actually means, and this then creates well, it creates data, but it creates inconsistent data. And if I've learned one thing over the past, I don't know, ten years is that it's worse to have basically incomplete, inconsistent, or inaccurate data than to have no data at all because then you have this illusion of like, oh, I have data and I can trust the data, but then if the data is wrong, that actually is worse than, yeah, not having the data and basically just, you know, like, making wrong decisions is, yeah, very unfortunate.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think the qualification goes beyond the lead. Right? So the same is true for opportunities, you know, accounts before renewals or renewal opportunities. So, yeah, I could expand that there. I think another thing, obviously, we're all very familiar with is duplicates, right? So duplicates of activities or duplicates of contacts, leads, due to missing unique identifiers or different services pushing those or creating those records automatically and then not being reconciled properly. So certainly something that comes up. Another one, right, like, I think we're all familiar with is, you know, basically end users of the CRM not updating the CRM according to the key standards. Right? Certainly a key challenge often also centered around, like, adoption challenges. And, yeah, I mean, certainly something that is not easy to solve. And then maybe last one from my side. I think overall, like CRMs are very good at structured data as a system of record, but the unstructured data, right, so call transcripts, email body, or clear text notes, and to essentially extract insights from those. Most CRMs are not great at that, so that's certainly another topic that yields a lot of wealth of interesting data that can be applied to the sales process.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. For sure.

Janis Zech: And let me just add to this. Many may not be aware, but long text fields in Salesforce are not queryable for an API. So you have that long text field in the CRM. It sits there. You cannot do anything with it on an automated basis. So you just have, like, a lot of data in there that you can't properly extract. It's a big problem. So if you can, do avoid long text fields. It just creates problems further down the line. Obviously, for, like, you know, next step, okay. For that, it might be okay, but for anything else, just don't use it. Just just just don't. Maybe to add to that, just generally, don't add too many fields to your CRM. If you hit, like, the limit of custom fields you can add to your CRM, you know it's time to just throw the whole CRM into the trash and start a new one because that's just the place where you never wanna be. If you have too many fields, it just will overwhelm not only the sales rep, it will overwhelm everyone in your organization. It will overwhelm your IT team. It will overwhelm, like, any third party solution that you're using.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. More fields, more problems, basically. And, finally, and I mean, I think this is near and dear to our heart is, having multiple systems of records, is also something we quite commonly see. You have a CRM. Right? So, that should be your system of records. That's like your gold standard, and you should use that. Of course, like, sometimes you may need, like, you know, like, Power BI or something like this for very complicated issues. But, really, I mean, that's what a CRM is for. So, try to turn it into your system of records, and don't create, like, an overlap of multiple tools that all basically have the same data in it because then you'll have different people looking at different tools, and then there will always be a little bit of difference and gaps in that data that you have in these tools. And, yeah, again, just more tools, more problems here, I think, is very fair to say.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think it's going back to siloed data. The typical setup is you have, you know, your emails, meetings being mostly done in either Outlook or Google Workspace. Right. You have some call transcripts sitting in some transcription services. You have, you know, often spreadsheets where the forecasting is happening. You have BI tools. And then you have, you know, up to twenty or thirty amount fields, and suddenly it's very complicated. Right? So just to stay — that's the thing. Real real examples. Right? So I think, obviously, it's actually one of the reasons why we started Weflow to automate Salesforce data capture as much as possible with controls, but really making it reliable and high quality. And so maybe let's dive into the quick wins and let's start with the product we also offer, Weflow Activity Capture. So Activity Capture, we ran a poll on, you know, how companies are using Activity Capture. And so the answers were basically like this. Thirty percent use Einstein Activity Capture. Biggest challenge with Einstein Activity Capture is that the activities are not stored as records in Salesforce but on a different Hyperforce server, which basically streams it into the activity timeline, which means you cannot query it, so you cannot use it for flows. You cannot report on it outside of the standard, say, like, basically, the activity reporting that Salesforce provides, and you cannot export the data. And then there's a variety of other issues around custom object logging and also the ability to map properly to the right objects in Salesforce. We actually recorded an entire episode about Salesforce activity capture, so I won't go into all the details. There's also a cheat sheet on Salesforce activity capture, but, yeah, EAC is one way of doing it, and that's thirty percent. Then thirty percent use something called Salesforce for Outlook or Gmail, which is the extension that sits in Outlook and or Gmail on the right side. Users need to authenticate with their Salesforce account, which often, you know, breaks, so they need to re-authenticate, and then that often doesn't happen. And then it logs the outgoing emails. It doesn't log incoming emails. And for every email that gets logged, users need to then manually search for the right records and click log to Salesforce, which essentially is a very tedious process and often, you know, in our experience, has very limited reliability in terms of activity capture. So this is the other thirty percent, and then the last thirty percent is third party tools like Weflow. There's also others out there that are specifically focused on what I would call advanced activity capture that combines automated activity logging that stores with manual controls in either Outlook via an Outlook add-in or a Gmail and Google Calendar extension. And, basically, what it does, it automatically captures emails, meetings, if you want to, attachments and contacts. So that's optional. It allows you to, you know, permanently store those activities into, you know, either the email message or task object. It allows you to, you know, capture events, meetings in the event object. And then there's a bunch of configurations. All this can be set up in the background. There's almost no change management needed. It's centrally controlled, administered, and the users are also centrally enrolled and managed. It can be done via an integration user. So there's different expert settings you can set up to do this well. And then the users can have an extension that sits in Gmail or Outlook that allows them to see the suggested mapping, which is based on a mapping algorithm and adjust the mapping and also decide not to log, which can also be restricted via the configuration. Yeah? So this is like the high level description of advanced activity capture. Those products come in at a price point around twenty USD. So it's actually fairly inexpensive compared to some of the other products. And I think it's one of those things that probably is the tool that requires the least amount of change management when you think about the entire tool stack out there that is really easy to set up, procure, and get started with. And yeah, I think always run a free trial if you consider such a tool. It's something that has a lot of details. I sometimes show Activity Capture as this kind of checkbox item a lot of companies offer, but very few do very well. So, yeah, the devil is really in the detail as always. But yeah, it's one of those, I would say, quick wins. If you start a new role, if you see challenges on your full funnel reporting or activity reporting, that's really an easy one and fairly inexpensive compared to some of the other projects like CPQ or, you know, marketing automation. You know? Let me stop here. Now I had probably a very long monologue. Philipp, what's another quick one you would think about?

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I think I mean, just to add to the activity capture piece, obviously, emails and meetings is sort of like the first step. I think the second next step that you can easily add on top of this is also to capture the conversations more reliably. So basically call recording. So you have like a recording bot, recording agent joining your meeting on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and so on. Probably those are the big four that truly matter for most. And then, ideally, this recording agent does not only record the meeting reliably, also creates a transcript reliably in multiple languages as needed for your business, but then also takes the transcript and turns it into an actionable insight. I think just the call recording and the transcript nowadays, I think, is a bit outdated, at least since, you know, late last year, I would argue. But now there are modern LLMs, and, hopefully, those will be able to create, like, a proper summary for you. And, yeah, just quick plug, but, I mean, obviously, this is also something that we've added to Weflow here. So we not only create an AI summary for you, based on the call recording, you can also customize the summary. You can create different prompts. We built, like, a whole library of, like, fifty different prompts that make it easy for you to create different summaries of the same meeting, like a coaching feedback, like a follow-up email that will be generated for you, feedback based on different sales methodologies. Right? Because I think it's not enough to just create, like, one standard transcript, add someone's standard summary, it needs to, again, fit to your business process and business needs. So I think this is, you know, like a useful addition, and it typically makes sense to bundle this into one solution because, you know, you anyway then already have, like, an activity capture solution that has access to your calendar and to your emails. So to make it easier for your IT team, for your admin team, and your system admins, and so on, to maintain all of this, you know, the idea is that you have a solution that also does call recording then. So, for me, that's, like, a very easy quick win. And, you know, as someone who's also spending a lot of time selling, I actually don't wanna go back to a time where I don't have automated summaries of my meetings because the reality is when I have five back to back meetings, each of these, like, thirty to forty five minutes long, and I speak to basically ten different people, then, yeah, it's just no chance I can remember everything. So I need that. I need to have that automated summary. It's the only way for me to have a guarantee that I'm actually able to put in the data properly into the CRM, write, like, a proper follow-up email and remember the day after or three days or five days later when I do the follow-up what the conversation was actually about.

Janis Zech: Well, so first and foremost, never do the follow-up three days later. Right?

Philipp Stelzer: No. No. Like, the follow-up. I mean, the follow-up.

Janis Zech: But, yeah, I think as this is Salesforce data hygiene. Right? Like, why are we talking about this? Because as you remember in the intro stats, right, like, a lot of that data is actually completely lost.

Philipp Stelzer: Yep.

Janis Zech: And so, you know, the current challenge with a lot of the CI providers is that the Salesforce integration is not great. So you might have an activity capture provider that writes the meeting back into Salesforce. And then you have a conversation intelligence or an AI notetaker provider that also writes the meeting. But those are actually two separate meetings. So suddenly, you have duplication of meetings. So if you now wanna report on how many meetings per rep or how many meetings per opportunity closed, you actually have duplicated data. And, yeah, this is actually a big problem. And then, ideally, you have, obviously, the AI summary being written into Salesforce into the same meeting, into the one unique meeting activity that actually happened. Because, obviously, if you record a meeting, it's not another meeting. It's the same meeting. And then in the meeting, there are participants. So you wanna obviously be able to log to multiple Salesforce records on the contact or lead side. And then you also wanna assign it to either an account or an opportunity. So that's really important. And as an example, like, what we build is a custom object, a recording object that lets you break out the recordings from the activity timeline so you can easily see the recordings as a Lightning component, which is just one way of doing it. But again, it goes back to the depth of the Salesforce integration.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. And just one thing I want to say maybe like last point from my side on conversation intelligence is this is like a technology that I think is not easy to build still, so there's a lot of like details to it, but it's also not a technology as it was like ten years ago, so I think, you know, if someone is trying to sell this to you and they charge you like five thousand dollars as a platform fee and then, you know, one hundred, two hundred dollars per user per month, that's, I think, nowadays not acceptable anymore. Just you also wanna say it. Right? So I think for a solution like this, I think the price point I would argue that is fair is something between forty to fifty dollars for a combined solution for activity capture and conversation intelligence. And if you just buy the conversation intelligence piece, I think thirty, you know, is fair if it has, like, a proper set of features and a deep integration into Salesforce. Anything else above that, I think it's just not, you know, going with the times, I would say.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That's a great point actually. Talking of quick wins, right, like you join an organization, you come there, and then the first thing you do is spend fifty grand or one hundred grand to just introduce CI. Maybe not the best way to introduce yourself to the CFO, but that's a different discussion. I think there's one other thing that is becoming pretty standard now, I'd say. Really, really important factor is to be able to map Salesforce fields to basically prompt workflows that extract data out of the transcript. Speaking more plainly here, you have MEDDIC and the AI automatically extracts the MEDDIC fields that they basically capture from the meeting. The reps have the ability to review and adjust those so they compare what's the current value of the fields, what's the new suggested value of the fields. They can edit it. They can disagree, and then they can update all those Salesforce fields with one click. That is something that we call AI field updates, something that a lot of people are very excited about. And I think rightly so because it obviously goes back to what I said initially, right? Like, yes, you might have MEDDIC, you might have fields, but to really create a good MEDDIC entry for the decision criteria or for the metrics and economic impact, negative economic impact, that is usually more than just a one liner. And so this obviously feeds back into the visibility of the organization and the idea of being data driven and having data driven deal reviews, data driven deal execution, all these ideas, right? That's basically the context here. And so, yeah, something you should definitely also look out for when evaluating those solutions. As you know, there's many solutions out there, including us. Look at the Salesforce integration, trial it. That is often something that most CI providers don't start with. They see it as an afterthought. And I think it's making it really, really hard to have a reliable and in-depth integration into your Salesforce to, you know, go after the system of record excellence we're all looking for. Maybe we could probably continue to speak about this. Maybe we'll do a separate session on, you know, just CI and what you can get out of it. But let's talk about the whole topic around, like, sales process compliance and, you know, setting up required fields and validation rules. Like, it's obviously also another topic that, you know, can be a quick win. If not done, Philipp, do you wanna kick it off?

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. For sure. For sure. Yeah. Exactly. There are more best practices here. So I'm not a super big fan of required fields, but I think if you have a few that are relevant, like, for example, obviously, the email address on the contact. Right? So I think that should definitely be a required one. Too many contacts without email addresses there. Same goes for leads, in my opinion. So that will be a good example for a required field. And then anything beyond that, I mean, definitely seriously think about it. I think a better approach here is to create more like validation rules or field dependencies that depend on a specific stage of the, like, the status or stage of an opportunity or an account or contact or however you're working. So, basically, to have, like, a check that says, hey. When you move, like, an opportunity, let's say, to the stage procurement, right, but no amount has been set or no champion has been identified, there are no decision criteria for how the organization is gonna actually make a purchasing decision, that's a red flag to me. So I think there should be a dependency here. If you don't wanna create a dependency, then I think another way to handle this is to create automated warnings. So that's all something we baked into Weflow is just to make it easy that, you know, if you have, like, I don't know, like, again, with this example, deal moves into the stage procurement, but no amount has been set. How can it even be in procurement? Right? So then, obviously, an automatic email should be triggered. Hey. Something is wrong here, and the rep should be notified or the manager should be notified just to make it easy for proper deal inspection, deal reviews. That then also feeds into things like, first of all, giving feedback to the rep themselves, so coaching, but then also for forecasting. So that's how I'm thinking about the topic. I really wouldn't overdo it, and I would take it step by step. I think you start with, like, two or three dependencies and validation rules, and then you see how it goes. And if this, like, leads to high quality data already, then just stop there. Don't, like, don't go crazy because this creates, like, maintenance efforts. This will create other problems with other integrations that you may have. So don't go overboard, but definitely seriously think about it and set up, like, the minimum requirement that you need to have for your business purpose, process and to enable proper feedback and coaching.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I really, really like that point around, like, you know, you have your new logo, expansion, renewal opportunity, record types. Right? And then you essentially have your sales process for each of those that might be different. And then you really think about the stage entry and exit criteria. And you try to make that very visible for the reps to understand and follow. And thinking about that, right, like and this can be based on a methodology, can be based on qualification frameworks, be on the DIY framework. Often I think these qualification, there's difference between the qualification, the sales methodologies, but obviously, I'd say often it's a mixture and the mixture also makes sense and is good for your business. Really thinking about that sales process that way, I think is really healthy. And then I think the rest ideally try to automate as much as possible, right? Like that's the other piece. Obviously all the scale ups and more enterprise companies we work with, they typically have enrichment services, whether that's, you know, one waterfall enrichment service. And so, ideally, you'd use enrichment services and then you also, you know, ideally streamline that across different object types. Right? So account to opportunity is often a good example. Right? Like, that can be quite tedious as well. Probably could also do another session on that one. But but, yeah, I think, certainly a really important one. Okay. I think we have two short ones, and then we're done here. Philipp, do you wanna take the next one?

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Sure. Sure. Yeah. I think the next one, pretty easy. Schedule, like, a monthly data review, data cleansing session with, you know, whoever I think is, like, the best team or best people to do that with, probably within your reps organization somehow, and, yeah, and then just go through it. Right? I mean, it's just work that needs to be done. Ideally, again, you sort of, like, have, like, a report prebuilt, either, like, a native Salesforce report or in some other tool, and then make sure that you have a good overview of tools that enable you to do bulk updates really quickly. So, obviously, that's the data loader. And then for, you know, anything, like, below two thousand records that you wanna edit at a time, there are extensions for Salesforce themselves that you can find in the AppExchange. Weflow, again, also allows you to do that quickly and easily. So, yeah, schedule a monthly data cleansing session. That's, I think, the next one.

Janis Zech: And, maybe just to build on that, I can also add to the next one is if you wanna make your life easier there, then also just build a hygiene dashboard. And that actually just comes with exactly the examples of the validation rules, actually. So it kind of, like, goes back to that. Just build a hygiene dashboard that automatically lists all the deals that look suspicious. So again, right, stage is x y z, but specific fields have not been filled out. Right? So then just have filters prebuilt and a report that make it easy to surface these so you don't need to go hunt for them or search for them. You just immediately see them and then, you know, have some prebuilt templates where you can then flag those to your reps, to the managers of the reps, or even make them aware publicly. You know? That's, you know, that maybe sounds bad, but also I think this is some kind of transparency that sometimes is helpful. Not to shame people, maybe a little bit, but, you know, just to make it also easy for them to see what is currently not in the best state.

Philipp Stelzer: A positive encouragement.

Janis Zech: Yeah. And some obviously create a hygiene score, and that can be useful, but then it also needs to lead to what needs to be changed. Right? So it needs to be actionable. Also important. Some do leaderboards. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff you can do here. I'm sure you all think of creative ways. Yeah. I think this was actually already it. Today, we don't need to do any book recommendation. Philipp, do you wanna do a book recommendation?

Philipp Stelzer: Oh, okay. So, I mean, what I'm reading — I had to take a break from all the business books. I'm honest. And so I'm reading Hornblower and the Hotspur from C. S. Forester, which is an amazing book about a British captain in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Janis Zech: So if you don't know Philipp, Philipp is very big into history, revolutions, you know, how society has changed, and also product, and also Salesforce, and also many other things. So one of those few people on earth that just have very, you know, big hunger for learning and knowing, which is awesome. And, yeah, I mean, go check out that book. It will probably not help you on your journey to become a better RevOps practitioner. Definitely not. But maybe in terms of command, I don't know.

Philipp Stelzer: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I just — from what you shared, it might be possible. But look, we'll do these sessions, deep dives more often on different topics. If you like them, let us know. If you don't like them, also let us know. But, yeah, continue to, you know, feature more awesome guests. And, yeah, maybe a big short — big thank you to all of you listening, supporting, and, you know, interacting with us. We absolutely love it. It's been a lot of fun, and, yeah, I really appreciate all the feedback. And yeah. So thank you for that.

Janis Zech: Thank you.