Data.com Clean in Salesforce is a robust feature designed to maintain the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of your customer data – specifically accounts, contacts, and leads – directly within your Salesforce CRM. It leverages a vast external database, primarily from Dun & Bradstreet, to automatically compare, identify discrepancies, and allow users to update their records with the most current and verified information.
This powerful tool ensures that your sales and marketing teams always have access to high-quality, up-to-date data, which is crucial for effective outreach, targeted campaigns, and informed decision-making.
How Data.com Clean Works
Data.com Clean operates by systematically comparing your Salesforce records against its extensive database to ensure data integrity. Here’s a breakdown of its core functionalities:
- Matching and Comparison: It automatically identifies your Salesforce records that correspond to entries in the Data.com database. Once matched, it highlights any differences between your existing data and the verified information.
- Data Standardization: Data.com Clean helps standardize data formats, ensuring consistency across records (e.g., standardizing address formats, company names).
- Data Enrichment: It fills in missing fields in your records with accurate data from the Data.com database, providing a more complete 360-degree view of your customers and prospects.
- Automated Updates: Through "Clean Rules," administrators can set up automated processes to update certain fields when discrepancies are found, reducing manual effort.
- User-Initiated Cleaning: Users can manually review proposed updates and choose to accept or reject them, giving them control over their data.
Key Benefits of Data.com Clean
Implementing Data.com Clean offers significant advantages for any organization using Salesforce:
- Improved Data Quality: Ensures your customer data is accurate, up-to-date, and free from errors, leading to more reliable insights.
- Enhanced Sales and Marketing Effectiveness:
- Sales teams can trust their contact information, leading to higher connection rates and more productive conversations.
- Marketing teams can execute more targeted campaigns with accurate segmentation, improving ROI.
- Reduced Manual Effort: Automates the laborious process of data maintenance, freeing up valuable time for your teams.
- Better Decision-Making: Reliable data provides a solid foundation for strategic planning, forecasting, and business intelligence.
- Compliance: Helps maintain data accuracy, which can be critical for various regulatory compliance requirements.
Understanding Data.com Clean Components
Several components work together to deliver the benefits of Data.com Clean:
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Data.com Clean Engine | The core functionality that compares and suggests updates for accounts, contacts, and leads using external data. |
| Clean Rules | Configurable automation rules that define how records should be updated, either automatically or with user approval, based on defined criteria. |
| Clean Status Field | A standard field on account, contact, and lead records that indicates the current cleanliness status (e.g., "Clean," "Not Clean," "In Sync," "Reviewed"). |
| Data.com Clean Reports | A specialized package containing reports and an associated dashboard. This package is freely available for organizations that subscribe to Data.com Corporate or Premium Clean. It provides valuable insight into how Data.com significantly enhances the quality and completeness of your customer data over time. |
Practical Application and Example
Imagine a sales representative trying to reach a prospect for a critical deal. If their Salesforce record contains an outdated phone number or email address, it can lead to wasted time and missed opportunities.
With Data.com Clean, Salesforce would automatically flag this record as "Not Clean" or suggest an update. The sales rep can then, with a single click, update the contact information to the latest verified data from Data.com. This ensures they connect with the right person, at the right number, boosting their productivity and success rate. Furthermore, the Data.com Clean Reports allow sales operations to track the overall improvement in data quality across the organization, demonstrating the tangible value of the investment.
For more detailed information, you can refer to Salesforce's official documentation on Data.com Clean.
