How to prepare your data for AI?

Prepare your Salesforce CRM data for AI deployment by fixing the data complexity in your systems.

When starting to work with a new company we, at Revenue Wizards, often hear that the state of data could be better. Sometimes it is an exaggeration, but most often it is not. Working with clean data has lots of benefits. Working with messy data at the same time has lots of risks for the business.

As a Revenue leader keeping your data clean and intact is a very low-level operational thing to do. It does however have an impact on the leadership decision making. The insights phase is impossible if your company ignores good data practices and hoops over the data phase. So oftentimes it cannot get to the insights phase and in the worst case it might steer you away from the good ones. Also, forget all the fancy AI tools that sit on top of your dataset. They will simply crash against the brutal reality of the unprepared data or they say in development 💩 in -> 💩 out.

Remark here.

Although the steps below are something we do on the operational level when onboarding a new client, we always drive attention toward the state of data to the leadership team. It is the fundamental part of the leadership toolkit and can be a huge blocking point down the road.

And we all want our data to help us guide our decision-making. However, quite often this is not the case. The reasons are multiple:

• years of freestyle and ad-hoc mentality in CRM
• no proper implementation has ever been done
• no clear architecture of the tool stack
• absence of an in-house expertise
• undocumented legacy setups
• behavioral factors
• too many admins

The list goes on!

If you are deep in the RevOps trenches, need external expertise, or simply want to escape the RevOps operational treadmill; check out the Revenue Wizards offerings below. There are a couple of ways we can help you:

3 Ways to become a better RevOps

1. RevOps Services: We help B2B companies in their journey to $100M by building a solid foundation for scale, fixing the gaps in revenue processes, and ensuring good data practices.

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3. RevOps & SalesOps Mentoring. One-off or recurring private sessions to answer your RevOps riddles.

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So let's dive into the step-by-step solution to fix it.

For us as an external team, a new client's data is also a black box so we cannot always assess its state beforehand. Most of the time the true picture reveals itself when we are fully deployed. There are however some methods and tools that allow us to better understand the setup, audit it, and draft an action plan to remove all those blocks caused by poor data.

Below are some easy step-by-step techniques and tools we often use to help resolve the blocks. Use them if you just joined a team or need to go through self-onboarding. But also if you've been with a company for a while, it might give you a refreshing overview of the real state of affairs under the hood.

Understand Data Schema

Here, we try to establish the objects, fields, and their relations.

• What default objects are in use?
• Are there any legacy custom objects?
• What is the field count per object?
• Are there any redundancies across objects and fields?

There might be cases when previous admins implemented an object for a poorly designed process that ended up not being used, tested something directly in production, or were simply not aware of how lookup fields work. In any case, there can be unnecessary constructions both on objects and fields levels that clutter the setup. 

Salesforce Schema Builder is a good tool for understanding the objects used. What is more useful is the FieldTrip package. It is a great free tool for Salesforce that gives you summary stats on the data per object. (Remember to read the Terms and Conditions before installing anything in your production) For Hubspot, you will need to purchase Hubspot Operations. Trial version should be enough to do the initial setup audit.

Check Data Completion

If you are an in-house RevOps, chances are you are more or less aware of the first step, but digging deeper might reveal some more interesting findings. So let’s check the Data Completion

• What is the completion rate of those fields?
• Are the fields used in any legacy automations/formulas?

In this step, we are figuring out the legacy baggage of the setup. We try to understand here what is the relative completion of fields to the total records count. Sometimes we find instances where an Account object might have 400+ fields. It is okay if these 400 fields were created intentionally and are being actively used but in that specific case that was the case for only 40% of the fields. So it is a completely different story if they are sitting in the system clogging the instance because someone created them back in 2015 and now no one knows what they are for. The risks here are broken processes, imprecise reporting, team enablement, and readiness of this data for the insights phase.

So how to determine the completion of the fields? Again, the FieldTrip package is your best friend for Salesforce here, and for Hubspot see Operations Hub.

Illustration of data completion in Salesforce

Understand Automation & Flows

Let’s move to the next one. This point relates to the automation, integrations, and dependencies in the systems. There is 99% confidence that you do not want to purge the flows, installed packages, or automation that are being used. There is also a high chance that some of them incorporate old fields or objects that are no longer relevant. Another reason to check all of the above is to ensure no field updates are happening that might overwrite relevant data. Some questions that help to navigate here:

• Is there automation that no one in the company is aware of?
• Are there automations that were created 2/3/4+ years ago?
• Are there any installed packages that are no longer used?
• Are there any external integrations that overwrite data?
• Are the automation missing descriptions?

The best way to go about it in Salesforce is to start from the good old Process Builders. They are soon to be phased out, so this is a good point in time where you can get rid of them altogether or convert the ones you need to flow. Next check field updates, email alerts, and then flows. Understand which of them have been last modified, this could be a good starting point. Like in the screenshot below, some of the flows have not been touched in 7 years.

Illustration of outdated automations in Salesforce

Draft a forward-looking Action Plan

Like in psychology, recognizing the issue exists is great progress! But the real work and possibilities it opens are still ahead. The goal of this step is not to finish with a problem definition or brush up on your data (although it is a big chunk of it). It is to create a forward-looking plan of action to ensure the accumulation of necessary and good-quality data.

This is the place where you as RevOps need to think strategically as a business owner. The questions at this stage are harder to formulate. Generally, they revolve around the goals of the business and aligning those to the data and processes. Some questions to start with could be:

• What are the questions we want to have answered for business growth?
• Do we understand our key business drivers?
• What questions can this data point answer on the business level?
• Can we derive/proxy this information from the existing data points?

Do not neglect and underinvest in the quality of your data. It is one of the routine foundational things that if treated right will ensure you avoid lots of other issues and ad-hoc fixes. Invest in data orchestration tools that would help you routinely manage data, keep it clean, and always be ready to provide answers.

Revenue Wizards is a hands-on Revenue Operations Consultancy for growth companies focusing on efficiencies. We provide GTM & RevOps support with the goal of Revenue growth, GTM cost reduction, and Profitability. You can learn more about Revenue Wizards here.

Zhenya Bankouski is Co-Founder and Revenue Operations Partner. You can follow him on LinkedIn 🔔 where he posts regularly with practical advice on building efficient RevOps teams and truly data-driven organizations.

Haris Odobasic is Co-founder and Revenue Strategy Partner. Enjoys bringing strategy to life with RevOps.