Enhance product quality with airSlate SignNow's Pipeline Database CRM for product quality

How to create outlook signature

[Music] hello everyone welcome to yet another episode of the crm mvp podcast this is episode number 90. and we're gonna be talking about data today um it's a topic that it can be boring at times i think depending on what you're talking about i think that for some people is regardless of what you're talking about if you're talking about data it can get pretty boring but obviously there's people that do this for a living they live off of it they love it they love to understand how data can help their business or how data can help them make better decisions for example and i think there's a big piece of data um which which is quality right data quality so i was starting thinking about you know i wanted to do a show about data and there's a lot of different things that i can talk about first i was thinking about maybe we can do a show about what are some of things that you should do if you're implementing dynamics 365 for example or powerapps um how do you prepare for that you know things like that but i think that if i look at the majority of the people that listen to the show will be people that either implement dynamics for 65 for a living or have implemented dynamics 365 i don't think we have a whole lot of people that are listening to the show that don't have dynamics and they're like listening to this to get pointers on how to implement it or something like that i don't think that's the case i do think that it will help implementers like solution architects and consultants functional consultants and technical consultants i think that it would help them if we do a show about how do you get data from point a to point b either you're going from on-prem to online or you're coming from salesforce or whatever it is what are some of the things that you should keep in mind essentially in those cases but the way i wanted to tackle this is i want to talk about organizations that already are in dynamics 365 that already have data and how can they essentially put something in place that will extend the value of that data they will keep it clean essentially they will keep the quality high on the data you know things like that so i put together a list of 10 things that i recommend organizations do if they want to keep their data up to date and valuable for them so i don't know if this is a top 10 you know data quality thing because i'm going to be talking about process i'm going to be talking about training i'm going to be talking about a few different things and actually what i did is i i put together also at the end of this episode and we're going to do it at the end there's there's a second top 10 or a second list of 10 things um because i wrote kind of a a data readiness test i i wrote 10 questions that i would ask any organization to see if they have kind of their data plan or the data retention or data quality plan data management i guess plan in order and i will give you those 10 questions and you get to answer them yes or no there yes or no questions super simple for your organization and then at the end i'll give you kind of a score that you can give yourself um you know to to see if you score on a b c or d whatever it is um you know based on on on the answers to those questions but first let's talk about 10 things that i recommend as an mvp i recommend you do these things if you want to kind of extend the value of your data i don't know how long this episode is going to be and by the way just to make things simple and i've been thinking about this by the way i i've been thinking about you know where does microsoft recently dropped the customer engagement name out of dynamics 365. i don't know if you remember until recently it was dynamics 365 customer engagement sales for sales or whatever it was microsoft has dropped that now they're called dynamics 365 sales and amaz365 customer uh service and field service and whatnot and i started thinking about you know for me i struggle a lot on the dynamics 365 crm applications essentially sales customer service etc versus you creating your own model driven app on top of cds which to me is still kind of dynamics 365 you're just doing everything custom and this is one of the things that we talked about last week during the crmg summit uh or dynamics 365 ug summit i co-presented a session with steve mardu uh that talked about kind of like the end of dynamics 365 as we know it because before this whole powerapps thing came to life we always started from one of those first party apps as our starting point and then you would add the things that you needed you customize it and then you remove the things you didn't need that's kind of the you know standard procedure for years and years and years but now that we can create our own model driven apps and we can start from scratch you can actually design the entire customer engagement or dare i say crm solution for an organization without ever touching the dynamics 365 applications at least the first party apps that microsoft put together so to simplify things for this episode and perhaps for future episodes i'm just going to talk about crm when i mention crm i'm talking about those organizations who implemented dynamics 365 apps and customize them and those organizations that started from scratch with a model driven application or more than one two multiple model driven apps and created their own customer relationship management solution from scratch regardless of how you did it it's we're talking about microsoft and cds and all of that so i will just talk about crm data management going forward so again that applies to dynamics 365 and powerapps as well okay so here's the the i i don't want to call it top 10. i'm so used to saying top 10 but it is my list of 10 things you can do again for data quality in regards to data quality and data management number one is you need to decide how much data do you actually need to have in crm i mean that is something that you do early during an implementation because for a migration most of the time i would say almost 100 of the time the customer implementing dynamics 365 or the customer implementing crm see i'm i'm already doing that the customer implementing crm will have more data than their their allowance essentially and as you know when you whether you're going dynamics 365 or power apps you get an allowance uh of you know 10 gigs to get started and i'm talking about if you have a power apps per user plan where they have multiple access to multiple apps or you have dynamics 365 first party enterprise for example license you start with 10 gigs of storage and then depending on what kind of license you have you'll get a you know another allowance per user which is typically 250 megs of crm storage and then two gigs of file storage and there's some more details um you know in terms of that this is not a licensing episode i'm not gonna go into that but the point is you do get an allowance let's just say that for the sake of arguing your allowance after all your licenses and all of that is 30 gigs all right 30 gigs of crm data now you're gonna have a bunch of other gigs for files and you know a few gigs for um logs but for crm data meaning accounts contacts all that stuff you're gonna have let's say 30 gigs most of the time if a company has 30 gigs of allowance you know in terms of storage they are coming from a lot more unless they're coming from salesforce typically when they're coming from salesforce to dynamics they have way less because salesforce you know gives way less in terms of allowance and it's the extra storage is way more expensive than microsoft so typically when i transform users or customers rather from salesforce to dynamics i don't really struggle that much with storage but for everyone else pretty much um storage is a big deal especially from on-prem because on-prem you're just adding servers left and right you know you have a bunch of data next thing you know you have terabytes of data and now you realize that all you get is 30 gigs of you know your allowance uh in terms of data or data allocation that you have based on your licenses and that is a problem so a lot of organizations have done that when they migrate to crm whatever solution they have decided to implement on the you know on the cloud the problem is is that they forget that these data you know allowances or or this data limits that you're imposing yourself let's just give an example of okay we're gonna bring the last 12 months of leads and the last three years of opportunities that we've won and orders and quotes and stuff like that and you know all of our accounts and all of our contacts or maybe all of our active ones uh or maybe all of the ones that we have talked to on the last two years or whatever it is you this you you know you make a a a rule and this is something that is you know different on a business per business basis this is never the same on a company by company basis uh some companies you work with and they want to keep everything they don't want to get rid of anything but the whole point is you make a a plan on what to move to crm and then that plan has to continue now it can be adjusted you may say look i know we brought i don't know all of our accounts and contacts or maybe we brought only the ones that we have talked to on the last two years but going forward i want to keep them all something like that you can adjust it once it's in place but you actually have to come up with a plan a data management plan how much data do we actually need in crm do you really need to see the last 15 years of invoices i i just don't think so do you really need to see the last 10 years worth of cases for a company like you're gonna go back and look at something you resolved back in 2012 like for what i mean and i assume of course it's hard to call the shots because in some cases for some companies they use heavy machinery the you know things last 30 40 years so maybe make sense for them and that's why i said that every company is kind of different but for most organizations i think most organizations have too much data too much data that is useless for them in terms of making a decision right now in terms of supporting their business process right now so you have to make a plan and not only you have to make a plan for an ongoing basis of data retention and all of that and sometimes by the way these plans are dictated by the industry that you're in like sometimes if you're in certain industries you have to keep the last 12 months or 24 months or whatever in some cases i've worked with customers have to keep it for 20 years they have no choice they don't need it they don't want it but they have to keep the data and we will talk a little bit about that you know later on in the episode about what can you do how can you keep data but not have it sitting in in crm and we'll talk about that in a second but once you come up with a plan it is important that you enforce set plan right you know companies come up with plans all the time about how much data they're going to keep what fields will be required because we really need to make sure this data is captured which fields should be on the form so all of our users can provide this information if they have like they really spend time you know crafting this data management and data quality plan and then they don't enforce it they don't ask people to enter the data when they close the deal they don't enter it when they lose a deal they don't enter it because they lost it you know if your plan depends on understanding the reason why you're losing deals so you can make investments as a company to change that to to change the tide right of you know let's say that you're losing a bunch of business on a district because you don't have local presence there or on a territory you don't have local presence there well if you lost five million dollars worth of potential business and it costs you as a business a hundred thousand dollars to get presents in there maybe acquiring a local firm or something like that maybe you look into that but if you know you have determined that it's important to know when we lose business and then you don't enforce it so people are not entering that information then you just wasted your time there's no point on coming up with a plan if you're not going to enforce the plan all right so that is number one on the list number two you need to standardize how you capture everything in dynamics the names of companies so if you capture let's say coca-cola it's just coca-cola or coca-cola comma inc or coca-cola inc with a you know a period or whatever it is you have to come up with a way to standardize names standardize the way you capture job titles standardize the way you capture phone numbers standardize you know the minimum amount of data that you need to create a record and that one is easier because we can enforce minimum requirements in dynamics or in crm however there is you know in some cases where companies say look i don't wanna i don't really wanna you know let's make it recommend that i don't wanna force people to have to provide a phone number if they don't really have it okay you know you can make some concessions here and there but the bottom line is we want to standardize how we do stuff in crm regardless of the solution that you're using you want to understand what's the process to get some records created what is the minimum data and how does the data look okay and by the way sometimes the process to create data doesn't start in crm or doesn't end in crm perhaps you create the record in crm because they're a prospect right maybe it's a lead that you qualify into a prospect or something like that and then they become a customer so now the record has to be created in our erp system or accounting system so we can now invoice the customer and all of that so maybe the record started in crm but it needs to go to your erp system that erp system probably has a standard on how the names of customers and all of that should be entered so start by enforcing that standard in crm that way when that data moves to erp looks good it matches the standard right so standardize how you capture data inside of crm is number two number three train your users how to actually use the plan that you came up with right how do they use these standards that you have agreed on where can they find them right i don't remember if i really have to enter data you know when we get and by the way you know in some cases that standard is kind of self-explanatory if you're going to create an account and there's you know six fields that are required you understand that that is the minimum amount of information you need to provide in order to create an account i get it in some cases it's automatically enforced but in some other cases like for example when to create a record is not really enforced like you can enforce something that doesn't exist right so like i was just talking about earlier about an opportunity that you lost you reach out to the customer you told them yeah i think it's gonna be this much or something like that or you know i can ship it to you because we don't have a local presence and they say yeah never mind like when are you going to enforce that when where are the rules of the game essentially can can your users find them that's what i'm talking about train your users on how to use those standards you come up with and where can they find them if they really need them it's very important next number four train your crm administration staff your it staff your technical staff i'm not really sure who's administering crm on how to deal with the data that is not following the plan because once again you can train your users you can tell them where to find this plan that you came up with but in some cases you know whether it is on purpose or by mistake people can enter wrong things for example maybe you decide that as a standard you will be entering phone numbers with extensions in the business you know number field but then some people are just entering the phone number no extension or entering the extension as notes or whatever like whether they're doing it on purpose or not doesn't matter your crm administration staff needs to know how to deal with that right they need to have a plan on how to make that happen because a big piece of this it's actually number five you need to clean your crm database and i've talked about this in previous episodes i believe that data quality is super important data quality is a prerequisite so you can make accurate decisions based on your business intelligence reports and dashboards right you can have the best award-winning beautiful customized amazing dashboards in power bi dynamics you name it you can have the best thing ever like the best reports ever but if your data it's crap no one will trust what those award-winning dashboards will be reporting or reports or whatever it is they will not trust it you have to clean your crm database data quality breathes trust from users people can look at it and say you know how much uh it's my pipeline 42 million dollars cool i trust that you don't you never want to be in a position where people look at it and be like 42 i don't know about that because they don't trust the data right so make sure you clean your crm database your admin staff has to be trained on how to deal with things that are outside the plan and make sure that database is clean they're all connected number six especially if you're using integrations always use unique ids don't integrate with other applications by just using the name or things that users can modify you know super easily or they can be repeated you know the there could be multiple aaa insurance company out there a lot of companies start with the you know aaa on their name because it was you know back in the day with phone books and stuff they wanted to be first on the list and the yellow pages and whatnot so a lot of companies can have the same names you know my company elevate solutions i bet there's at least like 10 elevate solutions in the u.s um you know a lot of people have the same idea and the same names and you know they name companies the same i'm sure i named my company elevate solutions after some other companies who knows where was called elevate solutions and i bet there's some other ones that name their company after mine was created as well back in 2014. so you know you don't want to use something that seems to be unique to you but it's not you know create generate unique ids you can concatenate fields together you can generate account numbers and things like that the point is you have a unique id behind the scenes so when you're doing integrations and you're referencing records from one to the next they are unique unique way to reference and connect them with each other so always use unique ideas is number six number seven don't integrate and i'm talking about data integrations with erp and other systems like that don't integrate too early and don't overdo it all right i don't know why people feel like in organizations feel like it makes sense to implement crm in faces and take it slow and perhaps take you know one department live and then once the department is live and you've gathered some information let's take another department life or if it's a big implementation for a multinational organization let's go with one city or one country and then grow to more cities and more countries and whatnot and grow over time they follow that very well in a lot of cases when it comes to the crm implementation but as soon as they hit data integration they want to integrate everything at once let's integrate with all the systems at once two way one way everything let's just do it all at once and i think that if you're going with the concept of not boiling the ocean which is a good one to have by the way you should apply that to data integrations as well another mistake that people make and this mistake also happens with security by the way security configuration is that they do it too early you know dynamics or salesforce or whatever application you're using will evolve your crm solution will evolve because when your users are using it you start realizing that man it's taking a lot of steps to do this maybe i can simplify it this way or we're not capturing enough information i need to add more fields or i need to add a custom entity or oh i thought i could use that entity for that but that's not gonna work i'm gonna have to create a new entity instead things will change right we call this period after going live user adoption period all right and depending on the project like the bigger the project the longer the period the longer it takes for users to get involved and go through all of the functionality the idea is if it took you you know six weeks to implement something there's obviously not a whole lot of customizations and stuff in there because it was a quick project so there's not a whole lot to go through and find issues with it with it so your chances of having to modify your architecture and all of that decrease tremendously if it's a small project but if you're doing something that is a year long 10 people involved multiple teams customizing on all of that your chances that you will have to make changes after go live are skyrocketed right there it's going to happen so what you don't want to do is you don't want to integrate a bunch of stuff and then realize that the things that you were integrating are not going to work because now it's going to be a custom entity and you're going to have to overdo it again some of these integrations are expensive you know i've i've seen many many projects where the data integrations are six figures there are a lot of money to get these data integrations in place and you don't want to get to a point where you release these data integrations and then you realize that you have to you know spend now six figures to fix them because you did it too early so just take it easy and don't overdo it right start small maybe synchronize one way read only kind of thing and then after that you know push it and and grow it and add more functionality to it the same thing applies to portals the same thing applies to a lot of things like start small and grow don't start too early again your crm will evolve over the first few months because of user adoption and the data integration may have to be adjusted or redesigned to deal with those changes so again take your time you know nail that design and once you can see that everybody's working and you know quotes are being created and everything looks good then you can focus on turning on integrations and stuff like that they're less likely to fail they're less likely to you having to fix them and stuff um because you didn't wait long enough for them to give it a shot and you know start using it and perhaps even go live before the integrations are in place and again like i mentioned this also happens with security people will go ahead and create a bunch of security roles and teams and business units and all of that before they even have all these you know entities and stuff so now you have like 18 security rules and every time you add an entity you're gonna have to go to each one of them and like add the entity manually like you could have just waited till the end see how everything is looking and then you can clone the roles you know 18 times or whatever but now you've added most of the functionality right now you're going to go live and to go live you need security rules i get it but what you don't want to do is again start too early in the process to do stuff like that data is the same way number eight and this is you know a big mistake a lot of companies make as well they really take it seriously when it comes to duplicates and stuff like that but they do not subscribe to any data service in order to either augment their data or to make sure that it's kept you know up to date you know one good example is if you're subscribed to linkedin any changes or things like that you'll be notified of hey they just moved they changed their phone number whatever it is there's a new ceo you keep your data more accurate by subscribing to some of these services down in bradstreet has also a good service that allows you to keep you know up to date with changes to your customer base and actually speaking of dmb or dun and bradstreet they they put together a report a few years ago and you know they have a a super nice table that i wanted to mention i wanted to give them a shout out on this because i thought it was pretty interesting now again i don't know the accuracy of these numbers and the reason for that is because the numbers are whole numbers um so they're either rounding up right rounding down or you know they're just taking a stab in the dark but it's an interesting nonetheless so they put together this report and one of things that they mentioned is the rate of u.s and again for those of you listening overseas i apologize this is just in the u.s but it says the rate of u.s business information churn so how often does information for businesses change okay so check this out in a 12-month going basis they they did a study and they realized that for the average organization okay business addresses will change for their customers a hundred and twenty times in a thirty minute period all right so for organizations in the us all of the companies in the us there are a hundred and twenty business addresses changing every 30 minutes and that is half a million annualized number of changes for companies in the us there's a lot of businesses in the us half a million changes happen every year or 120 every 30 minutes now obviously these are not happening to your customers but if you have thousands and thousands of customers you know chances are out of those half a million some of your customers have are going through a change okay telephone numbers every 30 minutes 75 telephone numbers change in the us for businesses i'm not talking about per person like oh i just need a new phone or whatever now talking about companies out there right u.s business information churn 15 company names change every 30 minutes 30 new businesses are formed every 30 minutes so one per minute 10 businesses close every 30 minutes and 20 ceos leave their job every 30 minutes as well so the numbers are staggering again they even say that these calculations are based on eight hour work days five five days a week essentially 52 weeks a year so they determine that for organizations in the us all of these changes are constantly happening now again depending on how many customers you have this will hit you one way or another the point is i want to illustrate here is that this information changes all the time it changes constantly and you need to stay on top of it so yes your information looks pretty the fields that you have as minimum requirements are filled the data is entered correctly the names the job titles all of that but the job title that you enter correctly no longer applies because the ceo left you know that kind of information is important to have so subscribe to one of those services i'm not pushing you to you know get linkedin no matter what or done in bradstreet no matter what there's a bunch of them out there um just having some kind of service that you trust that will send you information and keep it up to date is very very valuable so that is number eight on the list number nine on the list is check which fields are actually being used you know it's interesting to work with customers that have a ton of fields in the system and they're always you know saying that they well we absolutely need these fields um you know i am a very minimalistic kind of user i like the idea that you go into a form and it's very clean very easy to understand and it gives you the information that you need that's why i'm such a big fan of custom apps and custom forms depending on who you are when you log in into a record you know you only see the fields that are meant for you essentially you don't need to see everything else but a lot of organizations have no idea which fields they're actually using so there's actually a tool which is called the attribute analyzer on the xram toolbox that you can run against your entities and it will tell you which fields are being used and how much are they being used are they being used five percent of the time are they being used a hundred percent of the time 50 40 whatever it is it gives you a report on a entity per entity basis it works great if you want to see how it works go to crmmvpmedia.com if you're not a subscriber of our youtube channel already and every week we have a two minute tuesday tip the tip number 144 we've done it for 144 weeks in a row tip 144 has me essentially walking through the process on how to launch the tool connect it look at the report all of that stuff in less than two minutes it's two minute tuesday so check it out tip number one for four on the crm mvp media youtube channel so run the report this will help you essentially remove fields of forms that you're not using at all and i know i understand take it with a grain of salt you may have information on a you know there might be a field that is reporting 100 but it's a two option feel which means that it always has data on it like it's not a hundred percent accurate but it it's eye-opening for sure in a lot of companies you know a lot of companies add a feel that people were you know asking for like we really need these multiple lines of text field so we can enter some notes or whatever and then you run this application and realize that only 27 of records have it or something like that so it's i think it's interesting so check it out really really useful stuff okay and number 10 on my list of you know i guess things to follow if you if you're a fan of data quality and data management is to never delete data now this is interesting because i talk about deciding how much data do you actually need in crm for rule number one so rule number one and ten kind of sound like opposites but they're not so never delete data means you need to deactivate records rather than delete records if you are on crm online right whether you're using dynamics or model driven applications if you delete something out of crm it's pretty much gone forever there's no recycling bin there's no way to undo that you can restore from a backup or whatever but that's a that's a huge headache so you don't want to do that so the point here is you want to deactivate data instead of deleting data you can always bring data back up that is inactive um if you delete it it's pretty much gone unless you you know restore from a backup is it's just a pain now there's other data right that falls off the plan your data management plan you may say we don't need leads that are older than a year old for example a year old lead makes no sense for your business so you delete that record or not it all depends you know it's been really useful for me to be able to go back and looking at all leads in some cases you know we have customers who come to us because you know their sales force for example contract is about to expire and they talk to us and whatnot and then they decide you know what there's not enough time it's gonna expire in two weeks i have to do something so let me renew for two more years or three more years and then i'll get back to you in a lot of cases i'm like i'm never gonna see this or hear from this person again but in a few other cases they have come back and i'm glad that i can go back and look at those disqualified leads or those lost opportunities depending on how far we got in the deal and be able to read all my notes and my emails and all of that stuff so in some cases it makes sense to keep your data as long as you have enough storage for it you should be able to do it however if you don't have enough storage for it there are ways for you to back that up you know as you know dynamics 365 has dual use rights you could have an on-prem version of dynamics and store that information off-site or you can store it in some other database in some sql database excel spreadsheet you can always surface even that information in dynamics via data integration or via uh not a data integration because you don't want to duplicate the data but via virtual entities for example so you can use virtual entities show the information like i don't know all you can call it all leads or whatever in the case of leads but it could be invoices or cases or you know work orders whatever you can show that legacy work orders um store in a database somewhere else so you don't have to pay every month and it's not eating up your crm data allowance but then at the same time you are showing it you can query it you can use advanced advanced find for it do reports whatever so really really useful so that is number 10 surprisingly enough never delete data pretty cool stuff all right so i just went through uh the list of 10 things as i mentioned when we started this episode i don't think this episode is going to be very very long so what i wanted to do is i wanted to give you a list of 10 questions that you should ask yourself or you should ask um i guess your organization and then come up with an actual like grading right and i will give you i'll give you kind of your scores and your grade and what they mean so here are the 10 questions so please take notes and maybe you don't want to write the whole question maybe just write a yes or no for the answer but i want you to write them down and most importantly write your points for every one of these questions that you answer you know either yes or no most of them are yes yes means one point there's only one question where no means one point which is question number nine so the first eight if you answer yes give yourself a point if you answer no then don't give yourself a point super simple all right so highest possible score ten lowest possible score zero so let's go number one does your company have a crm data management and retention plan do you actually have that how much data is making it into dynamics how much data do we save and again don't confuse this with your industry mandating that you have that you have to keep two years worth of data or three that's not a plan that's just rules that you're following right do you actually have a crm data management like how do we deal with duplicates how do we do you know all those things do you have a crm data management plan or a data retention plan is that if that's a yes give yourself one point question number two have your users been trained on set plan have your users been trained on the plan and is it easily accessible okay once again yes or no if the answer is yes yes i've trained my users and yes it's easily accessible you can give yourself one point now if an answer to the first one the first part of that question is yes but it's not easily accessible then give yourself half a point half a point is fine um i'll allow that all right so if you said yes to have your users been trained yes is it easily accessible not really it's a video in our sharepoint and no one watches it okay you can have half a point number three or if in the other sense if you have an easily accessible plan but you never train anybody you can give yourself a point although i'm leaning more towards you shouldn't give yourself anything because you should have trained your users for sure all right number three third question do your users understand why the plan is in place and why it is why is it important okay why do we have to provide this six things when we're creating an account why do we have to enter this information in a standardized fashion right all of those things are part of your data management plan so do your users understand why why do you have a plan and why is the plan important like for example do they understand that the pre the quality of the data is a prerequisite to accurate and trustworthy reports do they understand that part because if they understand the why they're more likely to comply with with the plan okay so once again do your users understand why the plan is in place and why is it important if the answer is yes to both of those give yourself a point if the answer is yes to only one of them you can have half a point as well now if you answer no on the first one then you're pretty much at zero at this point because you didn't have a plan to train your users or you know even explain the why behind it all right question number four is the plan enforced by the organization and one thing is to have a plan one thing is to train your users one thing is for them to understand why it's important but if they actually don't follow the plan because you know again human error or on purpose and you don't enforce it then you should give yourself zero points on that okay so is your plan enforced by the organization if the answer is yes you can give yourself one point question number five does your company have an ongoing data deduplication procedure something they follow in order to look for duplicates and deal with them either deactivate them or fix them or get the person who try to create them you know the information they need so they can whatever it is do you have an actual deduplication procedure that you follow is it every week every two weeks every month like is there a process that your technical team follows if the answer is yes you get one point number six has your crm admin staff being trained on these procedures and understands how to handle duplicates and incomplete records in some cases some records are not necessarily duplicate they just don't have enough data right so if you're following your plan and let's say you say you know we don't want to create uh phone calls without notes because just to say you call somebody but don't say what they talked about or even if you left the voicemail if we don't have any notes they make no sense you know making the description required is not a good approach i think i've talked about this in the show before where you know i had a customer that said we absolutely need notes in the phone call make description require that will force them to enter notes and they would just enter gibberish and straight up garbage on the notes because it was a required field but they you know they just key just you know just ro roll their hand over the the keyboard they would enter nothing because the company was also not enforcing the plan or checking up on those notes that were being entered on the phone calls so that is part of do does the crm admin staff know how to deal with this right incomplete records that not entering the data that they that you need they're not providing the information that you need to be able to move forward whatever it is is your stuff ready to you know process those so once again give yourself a point if the answer is yes number seven do you have a mechanism or a solution in place to keep your data current i talked about subscribing to linkedin maybe you say look i'm not gonna pay a subscription in my opinion those services are not accurate we just have people account managers that are constantly checking on our customers and making sure that all of our data is accurate that's a one that's you get one point for that like if you have a process to do it even if it's manual you don't have to pay linkedin or dun and bradstreet or whatever you don't have to the hoovers or there's many companies out you don't have to pay them in order to do it but do you have a process in place do you have a mechanism in place in order to keep this data accurate remember there's hundreds of changes that happen every 30 minutes when you count for addresses and phone numbers and ceos and all of that so do you have a mechanism in place if the answer is yes then you get a point number eight is do other products that bring information into crm adhere to your data plan so for example if you have a subscription to linkedin or done in bradstreet or whatever are they bringing data that matches your plan the way they have their job titles and the standard that you have put in place for your users to follow will the data that is augmenting your crm data follow that plan because if it doesn't that's a problem if you come up with a plan and you're enforcing it you're training your user you're telling me you're better not into it right if you're following a plan and then you go into dynamics or into crm and you see a button that says we notice your data is out of sync click this button to synchronize and all of a sudden you click on that linkedin pushes all of the updates which are awesome by the way but they don't follow your plan they don't follow the you know the standard that you came up with that's a problem now you have to understand that and either adjust your standards or figure out the configuration of your service so then when the data comes in it comes properly or if you have an integration with erp and that integration is creating you know contact records and customer records or whatever it is are those records created based on our standards and are they following our data you know management plan those have to be in sync so users are not the only ones following this plan your integrations also have to follow it so if the answer is yes do other products that bring information into crm follow the plan then you get a point okay so number nine is the only one that no means a point and the question is simple can your users delete data in crm and i'm not talking about the system admins because system admins can delete data i know the answer for that i'm talking about regular users non-system admins from the ceo to the secretary it doesn't matter whatever user is in your crm can they simply delete data because if the answer is yes you get zero points if the answer is no then you get one point we want them to deactivate in crm we don't want them to delete so that's why that question is in place and then lastly question number 10 is your data really secure all right and this is a little bit complicated question because what happens is in a lot of cases what i see is there's a lot of fields and things like that behind the scenes that are being hidden by customizations and stuff like that but the data is not being protected by permissions it's not being protected by security rules or hierarchical security or field level security is not being protected by any of those things so what happens is if you just have this smoke and mirrors this curtain essentially protecting you from you know data that shouldn't be accessed then people can circumvent your restrictions and get to it so is your data really secure i mean can i go with level up go into gut mode and mess with your data surface all the fields and see what's behind the scenes can i use advanced fine to find data that you're filtering out for me right and i'm not supposed to access the data i mean i get it that in some cases you're doing it for convenience like you're showing people that work in the state of texas let's just say the data from texas and you don't really care if they get to the data from new york because it doesn't matter they won't be able to do anything anyway i get it if it's a convenience thing if they can circumvent the restrictions and look at new york data and it doesn't affect you but if it does affect you if it's they're really not supposed to access the data then just simply smoking mirror solutions won't work you have to really secure it with security with permissions with authorization essentially so the question is is your data really secure if it needs to be secure is it really secure if the answer is yes you get a point on that now if you work for a company where everybody has access to everything and you don't really care this actually makes it makes it easier and better for your users then you don't have to answer this one you get a point like is your data really secure i guess so because they have access to it and you know i only have the users that i trust and that's it so you get one point so how does this fare out so you've been counting these points okay across the way you answer yes and so maybe no on some so here's how i want you to grade it if you got 10 points meaning you answer yes to all of these or no to number nine and then yes to all of the other ones then you get an a perfect data readiness score from you know the crm mvp podcast from gus gonzalez however you want to think about that if you get if you get nine or ten is an a let's just say if you get seven or eight you get a b okay if you get five or six is a c if you get three or four i guess you get a d and anything below three so if you get 20 or two or one points or zero it's a fail right so it's f um so depending on where you score there a b d whatever a b c d e or f um you know for fail whatever you score if you didn't score a perfect 10 then there is that's good news that means that there's a lot of you know space or margin for you to improve there's obviously a lot of leeway for you to get better and make things you know more accurate get closer to that number 10 and again these are just 10 things that i put together there's more to think about in terms of permission and authentication and whatnot that's why i didn't want to make it a top 10 because it's really a top 100 there's a lot to worry about when it comes to data and security and all of that but this is a good start for data readiness i hope you enjoyed the episode i wanted to cover something a little bit more technical a little bit more architecture uh in this case i'm trying to put together an episode with uh on a collaboration with another solution architect that i've mentioned a few times in the show uh so we can tackle pretty much like do a deep dive on on some functionality in dynamics so if you want to know a lot about one specific topic and that topic happens to be what we decide to cover on the show you're probably to enjoy that a lot uh but for now i just want to talk about data once again if you're not subscribed to the youtube channel go crmmbp media.com takes you straight to the youtube channel it's free there's no sponsors there's no advertisement or anything it's just us tips sharing tips sharing best practices and i say us because i'm not the only one hosting tips there there's a bunch of other mvps that have hosted um you know two minute tuesdays and other videos there so i encourage you to go and subscribe and watch every week at least one you know episode will go live and something to learn i cover tools it's not always about microsoft i cover xrm toolbox stuff i cover you know solutions out there best practices etc so definitely check that out but for now if you have any questions or comments you know you can always reach us at info crmnbpodcast.com you can leave comments on all of our episodes on the website crmnbpodcast.com every episode gets kind of like their own page where you can leave comments and then other mvps will come in and comment on that as well and obviously if you have any suggestions feel free to reach out to us info at crmmbpodcast.com but for now once again i hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll see you in two weeks