This post is adapted from our Guide to Getting the Most From Salesforce. You can download the full 60-page eBook here.
There’s an old concept in the cooking world called “mis en place.” Born in France (like so many cooking legacies), the phrase roughly translates to “put in place.” In practice, it means much more than that. Mis en place is about faithfully maintaining and arranging your equipment and ingredients. It’s about having everything you need at your fingertips, and understanding your entire cooking process before you preheat a single pan.
You can learn a lot about a chef by her mis en place. Is her work space filled with unnecessary equipment? Are any of her ingredients starting to go bad? Is her station organized to optimize her efficiency?
Indeed, many critics will tell you that the best way to predict a restaurant’s quality is not the sophistication of its chef’s palate or the wines in its cellar ‒ but by assessing the mis en place of the cooks in its kitchen.
The same is true for a sales team. Want to predict the output of a sales team? Look at the cleanliness of its Salesforce instance. Great sales teams thrive because their reps aren’t wasting time sifting through reams of unnecessary data or working the wrong opportunities. The best sales teams invest time into organizing their data so that, when it comes time to close deals, they can do just that.
But many sales leaders feel daunted by this task. Perhaps they inherited a sloppy Salesforce instance, or have tried and failed to get their reps to care more about data cleanliness. Whatever the case, it’s far too common for sales leaders to sweep dirty data under the rug.
In this post, we show you why Salesforce data cleanliness is so important, and why it’s not as hard as you think to achieve, especially if you follow these three steps to keep your opportunities in order.