Chapter 22
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding your migration options
Executing your migration plan
Organizing your data
Using the right tools to migrate data
Getting help
If you’re a system administrator, often your greatest headache isn’t configuring or customizing the system but getting your data in and maintaining it so that it’s useful. Nothing hurts a rollout more than complaints from users that their data isn’t in Salesforce, that information is duplicated in several records, or even worse, that the information is wrong. Your end-user adoption suffers if you don’t maintain your records after the rollout. End-users love to complain about poor data quality, but they’re often not initially motivated to be diligent about putting clean data in there, or they’re in too much of a rush to determine sources of truth with other business groups, forgetting that garbage in equals garbage out. If you’re not diligent, you can find yourself in the same mess that drove you to Salesforce in the first place.
If data maintenance is giving you nightmares, use the data management tools in Salesforce to easily import leads, accounts, and contacts. If you have in-house expertise or engage a Salesforce partner, you can migrate other critical data (such as opportunities, cases, and activities) by using proven third-party tools. When your data is stored in Salesforce, you can rely on a variety of tools to help you manage and maintain your database.
In this chapter, we first discuss basic options for data import. Then we show you how to use Salesforce tools to manage your data (including mass-transferring, deleting, and reassigning data). Finally, we touch on advanced concepts, such as mass-transferring and mass-deleting your data. Complex data migration and updates of data between your data sources and Salesforce are beyond the scope of this book, but we make sure to point you in the right direction.
Salesforce has easy-to-use wizards that step you through importing your campaign updates, leads, accounts, contacts, and custom objects. If you’re a system administrator or you have the right profile permissions, you can perform these tasks for your users. For other legacy data (such as opportunities, cases, and activities) that you want to have in Salesforce, you have to enter information manually or use the Data Loader, which is a data import and export tool that comes with Enterprise and Unlimited editions to automatically migrate data into Salesforce.
The Data Import Wizard for importing leads, accounts, contacts, solutions, and custom objects is conveniently located under the Data Management heading in the Administration Setup section of Setup. It has a user-friendly interface, showing in Figure 22-1, that walks you through importing or updating records.
If you’re an administrator, you also see links to the import wizard in the Tools section of certain tab home pages. For example, if you want to import your company’s leads, click the Leads tab, and then click the Import Leads link in the Tools section. Steps and tips for using the import wizard for different objects’ records are detailed in relevant chapters of this book, as follows:
Data migration is a tricky matter. The Data Loader is a small client application that helps bulk-import or bulk-export data in comma-separated value (.csv
) format. You access this tool by choosing Setup ⇒ Administer ⇒ Data Management ⇒ Data Loader. With this tool, you can move data into and out of any type of record in Salesforce, including opportunities and custom objects. The Data Loader supports inserting, updating, deleting, and exporting Salesforce records.
Several vendors also provide proven extract, transform, load tools (ETLs) that enable you to migrate records to (or from) Salesforce, automatically scrub and transform the data based on custom logic that you define, and append those records where appropriate.
During the preparation phase of your implementation, you need a well-thought-out and well-documented plan for your data migration strategy. That plan needs to include details on objectives, resources, contingencies, and timelines based on the different steps in your plan. In the following sections, we discuss some of the steps that you should consider.
The companies we’ve worked with typically have some type of existing contact management tool, a variety of spreadsheets with other customer data, and often, contact information living in users’ email inboxes and productivity applications (not to mention Word documents and sticky notes).
Clean it now, or clean it later. Some project teams like to “scrub” data before importing it into Salesforce. Identifying and merging duplicates makes finding the right record easier. Fixing inconsistencies in your data, such as ensuring that all State/Province fields hold two-character abbreviations, makes reports more accurate.
If your legacy system doesn’t make cleanup easy, you might prefer to bring all the records into Salesforce first and then use the Salesforce data management tools to clean data later. The risk is that people with the best intentions may still succumb to human nature and not want to focus on the cleanup effort once the data is already in the new system.
After you successfully analyze the test data results, you’re ready to import your file(s). Yes, that’s a simplification of what could be a complicated set of tasks, but the overall process is tried and true.
Similar to analyzing results of the test data (see the section “Analyzing the test data results,” earlier in this chapter), when the data has been loaded, run reports to validate a cross-sampling of records to ensure accuracy and completeness. If you can, compare screens in Salesforce with those of your legacy system. Make sure that data is stored in the correct fields and that values make sense. If you see an address in a phone field, you need to clean your data or fix your field mapping. Strive for perfectly imported data — but expect less than that, too.
Prior to rolling out Salesforce, take the extra step of manually or automatically updating some records to wow users and drive more success. When giving a demonstration or training, show users these fully entered examples and let them know the potential for Salesforce.
After you implement Salesforce, you need to make sure that you create processes for periodically updating and backing up your data. If you don’t, human error can lead to frustration and heartache. Duplicate records, dead leads, records that need to be transferred when a user leaves the company — these are just a few examples of data that needs to be updated.
Most of the data maintenance tools are accessible from the Data Management heading located under the Administrative Setup heading on the sidebar of Setup. (See Chapter 7 for details on deduplication options.)
If you have Unlimited, Enterprise, or Professional Edition, Salesforce offers a weekly export service of all your data that you can use to create a backup. Other editions have access to a monthly export, with similar behavior.
To export and back up your data, follow these steps:
Choose Setup ⇒ Administer ⇒ Data Management, and click the Data Export link.
The Weekly Export Service page appears.
Select the appropriate export file encoding from the Export File Encoding drop-down list and select the check boxes if you want to include files and replace carriage (hard) returns with spaces.
If you live in the United States or Western Europe, you don’t have to change the Export File Encoding selection.
When you’re done, click the Start Export button.
The Weekly Export Service: Export Requested page appears. You’ll receive an email from Salesforce with a link to a page where you can retrieve zipped .csv
files of all your data. You have 48 hours to download your data, after which time the data files are deleted.
Click the link in the email and log in to Salesforce, if required.
The Export Service page appears, as shown in Figure 22-2.
You can also access the Export Service page by choosing Setup ⇒ Application Setup ⇒ Data Management ⇒ Data Export.
Click the Download link.
A dialog box appears, allowing you to open or save your zip file to a location accessible from your computer.
Although not required, we recommend that you schedule a routine data export of your data by clicking the Schedule Export button on the Export Service page (refer to Figure 22-2). This option follows the same steps as an immediate backup, but it also allows you to select when you want your backup to automatically occur.
A sales rep leaves. Sales territories get readjusted. You imported a file but forgot to assign records to the right owners in advance. These are just a few examples of when you might have to transfer records. Salesforce allows you to mass-transfer lead, account, and custom object records — and the processes for all three types are very similar.
When transferring leads or accounts, Salesforce automatically transfers certain linked records on the detail page.
To mass-transfer records, follow these steps:
Choose Setup ⇒ Administer ⇒ Data Management ⇒ Mass Transfer Records.
A Mass Transfer Records page appears.
Click the Transfer link for the appropriate type of record, depending on your needs.
A Mass Transfer page appears with a set of filtering options to help you search for records. You can use the filters to specify the set of data that you want to transfer — for example, all Accounts with San Francisco in the Billing City field.
In the Transfer From and Transfer To fields, use the Lookup icons to find the appropriate users.
With leads, you can also transfer to or from queues. See Chapter 7 for details on lead queues.
Define additional criteria to filter your search by using the drop-down lists and fields provided.
You do this by selecting a field from the first drop-down list, selecting an operator from the second drop-down list, and then typing a value in the field. For example, if you want to transfer all of one sales rep’s New York City accounts to a new rep, your criteria would be
When you’re satisfied with your settings and filters, click the Find button.
The Mass Transfer page reappears with a list of results.
When you’re done, click the Transfer button.
The Mass Transfer page reappears when the transfer is complete.
If you’re the administrator, you may want or need to mass-delete records. A couple of typical examples include deleting dead leads and eliminating accounts that haven’t had any activity. Salesforce allows you to mass-delete leads, accounts, contacts, activities, cases, solutions, and products — and the processes are very similar.
To mass-delete records, follow these steps:
Choose Setup ⇒ Administer ⇒ Data Management ⇒ Mass Delete Records.
The Mass Delete Records page appears.
Click one of the Mass Delete links, depending on the type of standard record that you want to mass-delete.
The Mass Delete Records page appears with a three- to five-step wizard for mass-deleting. The five-step wizard for Accounts is shown in Figure 22-3. The Mass Delete Accounts page has two extra steps based on opportunities that are closed/won or that aren’t owned by you. The Mass Delete Products page has one extra step to archive products with line items on opportunities.
Review the Salesforce warnings in Step 1 of the wizard.
Consider what other related records would be deleted and the consequences of that action. For example, deleting an account provides an option to delete its related opportunities. If this includes closed-won deals, this will impact any historical trend reporting covering that time frame.
Back up relevant data by generating a report and exporting it to Excel as part of Step 2 of the wizard.
See Chapter 23 for details on building and exporting reports.
Use the filters in Step 3 of the wizard to define criteria for the search.
You do this by selecting a field from the first drop-down list, selecting an operator from the second drop-down list, and typing a value in the field.
You can see an example of this in the preceding section.
Click the Search button.
The Mass Delete page reappears with a list of possible records at the bottom of the page. Do the following:
When you’re satisfied, click the Delete button.
A dialog box appears to confirm the deletion.
Click OK.
The Mass Delete page reappears, minus the records that you deleted.
Salesforce can merge existing duplicate records. The hard part is less about the technology and more about your coming up with some foundational guidelines to determine whether data in a field is accurate. Some companies rely on data that is synced with a specific third-party service, like Dun & Bradstreet or LinkedIn. Whatever you choose, you need to establish a tie-breaking source of truth, because salespeople often find differing data from other sources that they may reference to justify moving that account into their territories. When you’ve established the guidelines, finding and merging duplicates is possible and can be woven into the part of a regular sales process.
For example, an inbound sales development rep may have to wade through dozens of inbound lead records a day from users who sign up for product trials. One of the data quality steps that should be ingrained in a rep’s day is clicking the Find Duplicates button on a lead record to see if the person already exists.
To find duplicate lead records, follow these steps:
From any lead record, click the Find Duplicates button.
The Search for Duplicates page for that lead appears.
Check which fields should determine if another record may be a duplicate.
Salesforce defaults to looking for duplicates that match by name, company, email address, and phone number. It returns matching leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities based on the default criteria. If you change the criteria, click Search again to refresh the results.
Click Merge Leads.
The merge page for your records returns, listing all fields for that object, and the contents of each record for those fields. This is where your predefined guidelines come in. Salesforce highlights which fields have conflicting information, and suggests which record should be the master one, as shown in Figure 22-4.
Use the radio buttons on fields with conflicting data to confirm which record is the source of truth for a particular field.
Reference your pre-established guidelines.
Click Merge.
This action can’t be undone.
The merged record appears.
www.appexchange.com
and search using the phrase data cleansing in the search bar.http://developer.force.com
), click the Community tab to talk to a community of developers who have wrestled or are familiar with your data challenges. These forums are of a technical nature, but if this is what you’re looking for, you might find it here.