When you work in sales operations, data becomes life.
Sure, nobody notices when your data is spotless, but you can bet they’ll be all over dirty data in a heartbeat. Not only does poor data quality make reporting nearly impossible (garbage in, garbage out), it erodes trust in your CRM system overall. In fact, data quality is so important, Salesforce highlights it as a top driver of user adoption.
The thing is, though, that data is always changing and being added. That means it always needs attention. Usually, that attention comes in the form of some poor soul in sales operations, sitting behind multiple monitors, developing carpal tunnel syndrome while sifting through thousands of records trying to manually keep up with the workload through an awkward combination of Salesforce reports, Excel spreadsheets, a data loader, and an abundance of caffeine.
It’s a tall order and can feel next to impossible. Plus let’s be real, few things are as mind numbing as data entry. Just thinking about it makes me want to go all Office Space on a printer. Umm….yeah…
Okay, back to reality.
We all know destroying your company’s office equipment isn’t cool, but maintaining your sanity is an absolute must. What to do?
Enter the guardian angel of sales ops: DemandTools and its trusty sidekick, JobBuilder. These two tools combined are a godsend and will keep you from losing your mind.
Promise.
Where to Start
First thing’s first: Make sure you’ve downloaded both the DemandTools and the JobBuilder applications.
Next, create one or many MassImpact scenarios in DemandTools.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- US address standardization
- US phone/fax standardization
- Populate missing fields
- Update contact ownership to match account owners (this is done through Reassign Ownership instead of MassImpact)
Note: I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface, so check out the full JobBuilder tutorial for more examples.
Once you’ve saved your cleansing scenarios, it’s time to set up the sweet, sweet automation.
Create Your JobBuilder Batch
In JobBuilder, make sure you have a new batch ready to go.
Then select ‘New Job’ to start adding your scenarios to said batch. This will make the ‘Parameter’ field selectable. Click the ellipses to load your saved scenario file into the application.
Repeat as necessary.
Pro Tip: Make sure you’ve organized your saved scenarios on your hard drive however you want them from the start. JobBuilder runs off the file path, and if it can’t find your file, all of your automated data updates will error out. Lesson learned the hard way…womp, womp.
You can add multiple jobs to this batch and/or add a remark to remind yourself what’s what. This is super helpful if you’ve combined many updates into a single batch. Plus, once you’ve set the automation up, you won’t really need to come back to it often. Better to have good descriptions in place to jog your memory when you do revisit it six months from now. Your future self will thank you.
After loading all your jobs with their respective comments, save the batch.
Schedule Your Data Run
The end is so close, you can almost taste it. Just one more step before your data cleansing and field population is ready to handle itself so you can move on to bigger and better things. You know, the ones that actually get you noticed.
Of course, you can click to execute the batch now, but the real beauty is in scheduling your data runs to happen without you even thinking about it.
Schedule your batch by clicking the ‘Edit | Create Schedule’ button.
Here, you can choose how frequently to run the update (every x minutes, daily, weekly, monthly), select the start date and time, and add a description (always leave a few breadcrumbs). There’s also a status screen to give you the details on your last and next scheduled runs.
When you’re ready, select ‘Create Schedule’ and watch the light switch from red to green.
Before: 
After:
Now you’re all set, data automation champ. Give yourself a pat on the back.
Behold the Magic
This is my favorite screen of all time:
What used to take hours — pulling reports, sorting, matching, uploading changes — now runs automatically in a matter of minutes!
The only time I think about basic data cleanup is when this magical window pops up, reminding me that our Salesforce data is being cleansed and made more complete without me even having to lift a finger.
Ahhh….time for coffee!
(cue Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangster)