Conrin Inc Salesforce EDO Data security

Salesforce Data Security Webinar

/in , , , /by

Data security.

What happens if……..

  • Your password and username are stolen and your online banking accounts are compromised?
  • Your password and username are stolen and your credit cards are maxed with fraudulent charges?
  • Your password and username are stolen and the your company’s data is held hostage, pending payment of a “ransom”

Data security needs to be part of any company’s business continuity plan.

How many of us use one or two passwords for all of our accounts?  It can be hard to remember 75, 50, even 10 passwords. But when we use the same password over and over, we leave ourselves open to hackers.

We’ve seen identity thieves take advantage of people in all kinds of ways. In the last couple years, I’ve had to deal with fraudulent international flights, credit card purchases, and tax returns. It is no wonder why so many companies are offering identity theft insurance.

EDOs need to make sure they’re protecting their data and not leaving themselves open to serious security issues.

 

A great way to learn more about this is at Salesforce’s multi-factor authentication (MFA) webinar on March 9 at 12:00 EST.  Here’s the agenda:

  • Introduction to MFA
  • Your Enablement Journey
  • Demo: Setting Up MFA
  • Demo: How to Monitor User Adoption
  • Resources
  • Q&A

To register for this event click here.

Data security is something your organization needs in order to stay safe online. It’s time to stop using Password123 for all of your accounts.

Email Marketing Apps for Economic Development Organizations

/in , , /by

So you need to get email marketing off the ground and running yesterday.  Your boss wants to leverage your investment in Salesforce to promote your EDO.  Requirements include:

 

  • Manage campaigns targeting key contacts associated with potential projects.
  • Build awareness with site selectors.
  • Provide stakeholders and investors with regular updates on your activities in areas which they might find of interest.
  • Promote your organization and its ongoing record of success to your community.

 

Salesforce logo Conrin INC CRM for economic development

Salesforce.com’s AppExchange is the best place to start.  Similar to the Apple App Store and Google Play, the AppExchange provides more than 5000 ready-to-install apps designed to integrate with Salesforce, including email marketing tools provided by MailChimp and iContact.  Both apps provide a robust feature set, including:

 

  • Real-time update of campaign member records, providing insight into email history.
  • Synchronize records with Salesforce, ensuring a single, updated contact database.
  • Cost-effective solutions that are easy to implement and use.

However, before you jump in feet first with a new email marketing app, you may want to consider utilizing features already available within Salesforce.com.  Benefits of this approach include:

  • Leverage existing Salesforce.com functionality at no additional cost.
  • Same-day rollout allows you to quickly launch your first campaign.
  • Identify detailed feature requirements prior to investing money and time in email apps that might not fully meet your needs.
  • Who knows – you might even find that existing features fully meets your needs!

Conrin Inc. is 100% dedicated and devoted to utilizing Salesforce CRM for EDOs.  Please feel free to contact us if we can be of assistance with Salesforce.com CRM, application selection, and integration. We are here to help!

 

 

To schedule a conversation/demo, please click here.

Conrin Salesforce Contact validation chart

Maintaining CRM Data Hygiene

/in , , /by

Data Hygiene

Best Practices for Economic Development Organizations

Everyone knows economic development organizations must maintain accurate company, contact, project, and BRE data. Protecting and nurturing this information is critical for the long-term health of the organization.  A well-managed CRM is the only way to capture and manage this mission-critical data.

Frequently, CRM is the first thing moved to the backburner when the unexpected occurs.  And, in most cases, that is the correct decision. Last-minute site visits or RFP requests are high visibility and time-sensitive. The challenge is to make sure CRM isn’t completely forgotten.

Where to Start

Forbes magazine’s “Best Practices For Data Hygiene” article details the process of auditing and maintaining an organization’s contact records.  Based on my background with CRMs in the economic development space, I would like to offer my best practices.  It all starts with “The Audit”.

The Audit

The audit doesn’t require an overly complex analysis of the entire data set.  A sample will provide insight into the overall data hygiene of the CRM.  A series of basic reports are a great place to start:

  • Created date: Companies created more than three years ago may need updating in areas such as new/improved products and services; primary contact information; expansion locally or abroad and new worker counts.
  • Last modified date: Contact information that hasn’t been updated in more than three years is likely to be inaccurate.  These days contacts are likely to have moved to a new role or organization or left the organization.
  • Email verification:  Invalid email accounts are a sure sign that contact has left the organization. According to CNBC, at least one in four people quit their job this year, and the share could grow before the end of 2021.
  • Conrin’s email verification service identifies contacts with invalid email addresses.  Records with bad email addresses are tagged as “Inactive” in Salesforce.com.

Data Cleansing

Your CRM data has been entered by many people over the years, so don’t be surprised if there is a lot to do.   Don’t, however, bite off more than you can chew.  Data hygiene is a continuous process.  Look for low-hanging fruit and move on from there.  The best place to start is with your contact records.

Contact information is typically the largest “bucket” of dirty data within a CRM (see above). Review the reports created during the audit:

  • Start with the highest priority records by criteria
    • Companies and contacts associated with projects
    • BRE-related contacts
    • Investor contacts
    • Contacts related to companies within key industry sectors
  • Take advantage ofConrin Salesforce Data Hygiene Charts Conrin’s new contact validation service.  Contact email addresses are validated using an automated process.  The service provides both a dashboard and status report email status for all contacts managed within the CRM database.

 

Upon client approval, Conrin electronically tags records as “Inactive” within the contact record in Salesforce.com.  This process provides the ability to filter inactive contacts while retaining communication records, notes, and files for future reference to leverage email validation to quickly identify and update invalid contacts.

 

Data Quality Guardrails

Now that you have made the first step into the world of data hygiene to implement guardrails to ensure ongoing data hygiene.

  • Implement the change to leverage the Salesforce.com dupe blocking feature. It helps prevent duplicate entry in real-time (and it’s free!).
  • Analyze field utilization.  Simple is good.  If a field isn’t needed, remove it.
  • Search for multiple fields with the same purpose. Example:
    • County picklist – Morgan County
    • County text – Morgan Cty; Morgan; Morgan County
    • Disable and remove the text field (this can be done electronically)
  • Remove unused tabs and page components to simplify navigation and data entry.
  • Training – Do not underestimate the importance of training team members on the importance of quality data entry compliance.
  • Ongoing review – Running reports every six months is a great place to start.  You will be able to spot areas that need to be addressed before you fall back into the data hygiene nightmare!

Repeat.  Data hygiene is an ongoing process!

 

Conrin Data Hygiene Contact ValidationFree Data Hygiene Audit

Conrin is offering a complimentary audit that includes the following:

  • Field and page layout analysis and recommendations to improve accurate data entry.
  • Summary contact verification based on email deliverability report.
  • A formal report outlining findings and recommendations for moving forward.
  • A follow-up call to review findings and recommendations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contact Conrin Inc. for a complimentary Data Hygiene audit.

616-340-4519

[email protected]

Conrin-Economic-Development-Data-Security

“Work From Home”

/in , /by

Data Security for Economic Development Organizations

By now, it’s obvious:  Work from home (WFH) is here to stay.  The number of WFH employees has been trending upward for years.  New COVID-19 regulations have accelerated the migration to this new business model.  Now more than ever, data security needs to be a top priority for all organizations.  EDOs, are no exception.  EDOs depend on irreplaceable data: Company records; activity history, and project information.  Loss of this data can be catastrophic, and result in loss of capital investment, jobs created, and jobs retained.

At the end of the day, security is the responsibility of IT.  That said, there are steps that can mitigate potential threats.  Here are five, easy to implement, security precautions I recommend to all of my Salesforce for economic development clients.

Password Policies

No one wants to change their passwords.  It’s not uncommon for individuals to use the same password for every application they use for years!  EDOs using Salesforce are no exception.  The solution to this one is easy.  Configure Salesforce.com to require more frequent password updates (quarterly), while increasing the required number and type of characters.

Also, be sure to deactivate users who no longer need access to Salesforce.com.  I have seen many examples of EDOs with active accounts for users who left the company two to three years ago.  Your organization, and the previous employee, will be better off for it.

 

Conrin-CRM-Economic-Development-IT-Security

Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) has been around in the banking and healthcare industries for some time.  We are recommending that all of our economic development clients implement MFA.  It is easily enabled in Salesforce.com.  All that is required of Salesforce users is to enter a short code, sent by text or email when they log in.

 

 

User Privileges

One of the most often missed security risk is incorrectly configured user privileges.  Economic developers have sensitive data that must remain confidential.  Salesforce.com allows you to set your own security protocols at the user level.  Controls include:

  • Ensure only appropriate users have “view all data” permission
  • Eliminate users’ ability to delete or export records
  • Restrict access to confidential project and investor data-specific data

These profile privileges can be quickly customized for any EDO using Salesforce.

Backup Your Data!

Incremental backups are a life raft for all economic development organizations and a must have “insurance policy”.  Salesforce backup procedures provide the following benefits:

  • Restore data that had been inadvertently deleted or overwritten
  • Mitigate the risk of ransomware. Including as much data as reasonable within Salesforce.com provides double redundancy.  The file is available on-demand on Salesforce.com.  It is also available in another secure location.

Data backups are absolutely necessary for all EDOs.  It is inexpensive insurance for data loss and security risks.

 

Economic Development data security is so important, Conrin offers a complimentary security audit.  For more information, contact Todd at 616-897-4325 or via email at [email protected].

The #1 Way to Measure ROI on Salesforce: Campaigns

/in , , , /by

Salesforce has an often overlooked feature, Campaigns, that you might not be currently utilizing.  It comes standard with most Salesforce.com Editions and is a powerful tool that will allow you to measure ROI on various marketing activities including trade missions, email campaigns, and seminars.

Salesforce.com describes a Campaign as “an outbound marketing project that you want to plan, manage, and track within Salesforce. It can be a direct mail program, seminar, print advertisement, email, or other type of marketing initiative. You can organize campaigns into hierarchies for easy analysis of related marketing tactics.”Measure ROI on Salesforce with Campaigns

Campaigns allows you visualize your marketing efforts and their ROI on Salesforce. You can create valuable reports that track and measure your campaigns, and their success or failures. Campaigns allows you to define a “success” that you establish at the beginning of the campaign will gauge the level of success for the audience targeted, responses, and impact on Projects as well as jobs created, projects closed, and overall response rate.

Once a campaign has started, you then track responses, through lists loads, web-to-lead forms, or syncing it with a marketing automation tool. This will allow you to report on the Campaign success and impact to opportunities.

Campaigns in Salesforce allows you to select specific groups that you want to contact based on certain criteria. Your Campaign history then shows up in the Contact and Lead record, giving you a quick idea of what people are responding to. The best part of Campaigns? It tells you the ROI on trade missions and all campaigns, as it is related to Projects.

If you are a Conrin client, you most likely already have Campaigns. It is included with the Enterprise Edition and Professional edition of Salesforce. Our goal is to have you use Salesforce to the best of its ability, so why not take full advantage of something you are already investing in?

Contact us for a free demo! It’s simple enough to set up yourself, but we are always here to help.

Improve CRM with Salesforce

/in , /by

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the practice, strategy and technology that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer life-cycle. The goal of a successful CRM is to improve business relationships with customers, assist in customer retention and drive sales growth. CRM is not just a sales and marketing tool, but instead is one of the biggest ways to improve productivity – from HR to customer services.

Salesforce Implementation of CRM

Salesforce is the world’s #1 CRM app. The offer features such as Sales Cloud, SalesforceIQ, Service, Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Wave Analytics and more that improve your daily tasks all the way down to your organization’s bottom line.

Average improvements among Salesforce customers reflect favorable returns: a 36 percent increase in sales productivity, a 25 percent increase in sales pipeline, a 26 percent increase in sales win rate, a 30 percent increase in revenue, and a 45 percent increase in forecast accuracy.

Many think that CRM is just a software, however it is much more than that. It is a comprehensive approach to a lasting relationship with your customers. The most important factor of successful customer relationship management practice is human connection. Once an organization has their “people,” it then creates their process and puts their technology in place. This technology continually evolves around the needs of the people and process.

Conrin Salesforce Implementation

At Conrin, we focus solely on implementing Salesforce for economic development organizations across the nation. We follow a strategic three step approach that allows us to perform one-user implementations to complex, state-wide projects. Our first step is process discovery, then system configuration completed by step three, where we finalize deliverables. Salesforce Implementation is different for each client, but this process is flexible for each client.

If your CRM software does not take a holistic approach, or your organization does not use one at all – contact us.

Ask Us Anything – Salesforce CRM Services

/in , /by

It is no secret that we love Salesforce. We love the benefits that it brings to our customers, the ease of use, the organization, and the list goes on. Salesforce is in the business of making others successful, and that is what we strive to see. However, sometimes Salesforce brings up questions.

That is why Conrin is here for you.

Salesforce is a vital tool in the marketing process; you can identify marketing opportunities, devise strategies, oversee implementation, evaluate results, and focus on what really matters – your customer. Do you feel as though you are missing out on growth opportunities in Salesforce?

There are times Salesforce will make an announcement, and you aren’t sure if that affects you or what it even means.

Perhaps you gave Field Trip a try and can’t figure it out, or feel like you aren’t seeing the benefits.

Maybe you decided to poke around AppExhange and came across an app that looks like it could be useful for your organization, but are not sure how to implement it or if it will really be useful for you.

Whatever your question at hand may be, we are here to assist you with the implementation of Salesforce, as well as making sure you are getting the most out of all the great features Salesforce has to offer.Salesforce CRM Services

Ask us your CRM Services Questions

We want your Salesforce experience to help your organization excel and achieve success efficiently. So we want to know, what can we help you with? Do you want to know about helpful apps in AppExchange? Or maybe you want to hear about a client’s story of what worked for them.

Let us know in the comments or let us know on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Learn more about how CRM services can benefit your economic development organization.