Salesforce Data Cleansing: How to Clean Your Salesforce Data

Imagine 100,000 people visit your website every month, of which 10,000 share their information. You ask for name, last name, email address, company name, job title, city, and age. Meaning, that you collect seven pieces of data for each person — and 70,000 data points monthly. 

However, these people are likely to switch jobs, change email accounts, or move cities. So, the data won’t be reflective of reality forever.

In fact, studies show that 22.5% of data decays every year. Hence, at least 17,500 data points you gather each month may be useless after a year. 

But data decay isn’t the only reason to do periodic Salesforce data cleaning. 

If you’re collecting this data on Salesforce, you’re likely paying for such outdated contacts. This contributes to the yearly spend of $12.9 million in poor data quality each year.

Salesforce data cleansing can feel annoying. So, in this guide, we’ve explained how you can clean your Salesforce data efficiently within a matter of minutes. 

But before we dive in, let’s explore why it’s important to clean your data.

Why data cleansing is important

It’s important to clean your Salesforce data periodically because cluttered databases can: 

• Hurt your employee’s experience. A database that’s filled with outdated and duplicated information, makes your sales and marketing people double their efforts. For example, if you’ve got someone’s information on there twice, you might have two different sales reps duplicating efforts. Or, someone might spend hours trying to reach out to a lead who’s no longer using the same email.
• Make your sales team waste their time. Similar to the point above, having a cluttered database causes your team to spend time manually fixing errors as they find issues. For example, if they find an email with a typo such as “@gamil.com”, they might solve it quickly the first time. But, this adds up when they do have to clean the data multiple times a day.
• Cost you a lot of money. Unclean data is costly to businesses for various reasons. First, duplicated and invalid data take up space in your CRM, causing you to pay more. Second, your salespeople spend time trying to contact unreachable people, this time costs you money. Third, there’s an opportunity cost to not closing deals because your sales reps are dealing with a cluttered database. These reasons can cost businesses up to $15 million per year.
• Negatively impact your personalization. Using a database with poor quality to come up with insights and drive marketing personalization can lead you to poor results. Since your data might be outdated, you can’t really know whether or not your users are still holding the same position and have the same interests. 

Also, companies with huge databases have the responsibility of cleaning them periodically to reduce their carbon footprint. Here’s how to clean your Salesforce data.

2 ways to clean your Salesforce data

Gigasheet makes it a breeze to clean your Salesforce data. Before we jump in, make sure you follow these steps:

Create or open your Gigasheet account using your personal or professional email address. 

Upload your data to Gigasheet using a .csv file. Click on “New,” and then on “File Upload.” Find your file and open it. 

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Or you can import your data directly from Salesforce by hitting “Data Connectors,” and selecting “Salesforce Object” or “Salesforce Report” to get the raw data or a specific report, respectively. 

Here’s a quick video on how to integrate Gigasheet with Salesforce.

Open the spreadsheet inside Gigasheet. After you’ve uploaded/imported your data, open the file you want to click with a simple double-click. 

Next, start cleaning your data. 

1. Using Gigasheet’s salesforce data cleansing options

There are three things you can do directly on Gigasheet to clean your data:

• Remove duplicates to avoid having two rows with the same information
• Clean company names to ensure there aren’t two groups for the same company — e.g., Livestorm Inc. and Livestorm
• Localize Unix timestamps for sales reps to see at what time of day people sign up the most using a single time zone

You can find these three options when you click on “Data” and then on “Data Cleanup”.

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• For deleting repeated rows, click on the first option “Remove Duplicates'' and select your desired criteria. In this example, we’re only looking for duplicate email addresses. Then, hit “Remove”. Once it’s done, you’ll see a pop-up notification on the right side of the screen that shows you how many duplicates Gigasheet found and removed. 

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• Under the “Data Cleaning” option, click on “Cleanup Company Name”, find the right column, and hit “Apply”. Gigasheet will create a new column next to the one with all the company names with a clean version. What it does is that it removes all the suffixes to simplify filtering. 

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• Use the “Clean Unix Time” option under “Data Cleanup” to visualize the timestamps as hours in your preferred time zone. Select the column with the Unix timestamps and the time zone offset. Click on “Apply”. 

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2. Using Gigasheet’s enrichments 

Enrichments are add-ons to clean, validate, or improve your data. To find them, go to “Insert” on the menu bar and hit “Enrichments”.  You’ll see a list of options to explore and enrich your database. 

• Search for “RevenueBase” to complete missing information on your database. For example, click on “RevenueBase Person Email” to find a person’s email, phone number, name or any other personal detail that you’re missing from the data. You can do the same using a person’s or company’s LinkedIn profile or a website. In any case, you just need to select the required column and hit “Apply”. 

• Another enrichment for finding more information about a person is “Apollo People Enrichment”. To use this one, you’ll need to find the Apollo API Key and enter it when prompted. You’ll need to have some of the information such as: name, last name, email address, organization, and organization’s domain. 

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• Verify your Salesforce leads to ensure the email addresses exist. To do this, search for the “Email Validation” enrichment, click on the one powered by LeadMagic. Choose the column you want to verify and click on “Test”. Once it’s done, filter out all the invalid or catch-all accounts and export your data.

Save money and your team’s time with Gigasheet

Cleaning data coming from Salesforce reports is quite easy, you just need a Gigasheet account. 

Plus, with the Salesforce-Gigasheet integration, you can set your reports to update periodically. Meaning, that you won’t need to import your data every time. 

Sign up for Gigasheet and discover all the ways you can organize and clean your data.