Planning Your Data Integrations with Salesforce

Over the last decade, the transition to the cloud has become a catalyst for many security and data breaches for companies of all sizes. This risk compounds when an organization’s data becomes in transit across multiple systems that are implemented in parallel. The question remains: how do we build a safe and efficient data integration strategy that will provide us with the output and security we require?

If you follow our podcast we released an episode focused on data transformation and BI integrations. Here, we’ll highlight a few key questions to ask yourself as you begin the data transformation journey. 

Start with the end in mind

Understanding the utility of your output will help you understand what data you need to access.

• What is our revenue by industry? 

• What are our customer adoption trends by week?

• What is our average support case lifecycle time? 

Whatever the purpose, it will dictate the integration design, frequency, and systems necessary. 

Where does the data I need live?

This is the initial question we ask our clients when getting started on a project. We need to understand which systems need to be connected in order to provide the right solution. 

• Do we need to augment or enrich data within your system to provide the outputs? In other words, are we combining data from an external system with data within Salesforce to provide the full data set necessary to run the requested reports?
• Are we performing a data migration or building an integration? 
  • If the information will be constantly updated, then integration is the best path forward. Whereas, if we’re looking at static historical data, a one-time migration is the best path, and most of the time the more cost-effective option. 

Who is the audience for this report?

Now that we’ve uncovered the purpose and where your data lives we can think about the end-users who can take action on these insights. 

• Is this data needed for recruiting to notice market trends, dictating hiring needs? Ie. Looking at the open pipeline to understand what skill sets are needed to fulfill the order/client needs  
• MQL/SQL – the tale as old as time. Attributing lead conversion, pipeline generation, and all other aspects of revenue generation to the correct business unit. As a sales professional and now sales leader; it’s always the sales team’s efforts. 

All in all, these are the questions to ask yourself while preparing for an analytics journey. If your systems are not set up to provide the answers you’re looking for, buying a BI tool is the wrong next step. Set up the system to organize your data into the format necessary to provide those answers. Then, implement the BI tool with all the features needed to surface the data to your end-users. If you have more questions or are ready to implement a BI tool, reach out to us today!