In a LinkedIn poll, we found that 90% of the respondents believe that their Salesforce Org has obsolete data.
True story: A large company refreshes their Salesforce sandbox once a year... Because they have so much data, that the refresh takes 2+ days. And another 5+ days to mask data, update remote site settings, SSO, custom labels and other configuration settings.
The friction of obsolete data is like running a marathon in dress shoes. It's painful and hampers your performance.
If data is the new oil, then old, obsolete data is the sludge that slows your business down and may be costing you money.
According to a D&B survey, up to 70% of our data may be obsolete. The "Marginal return on data" is lost over time and your data dips below the threshold to become a profit eating zombie called liability 🙁
Here is how these liabilities manifest themselves...
#1. Reduced agility, poor reporting and usage!
Obsolete data is the high cholesterol pumping through your Salesforce Org's arteries. Sooner or later, it will give your business capabilities, a stroke. Here is what it impacts...
- Reduced organizational nimbleness - Your projects take longer and cost more as they have to design business processes for all types of data exceptions.
- Poor reporting and BI performance - Classic Salesforce reports and dashboards may be slower and inaccurate because the data has lost business relevance.
- Cognitive overload leads to reduced usage - Your users have to sift through more data and it takes longer to find information, so they just crack open good old Excel.
#2. Increased data security risk, storage cost, and technical overhead
- Security risks - Obsolete data increases the surface area to protect which makes your Production Salesforce Org a bigger data breach liability. It also has a multiplier effect on your Sandboxes and increases your organization's vulnerability.
- Increased storage costs - Large Salesforce customers have 100s of Millions of old records in their objects that mean more storage cost, longer sandbox refresh, and overall poor system performance in search, user experience and business adoption.
- Skewed AI models - Training your AI/ML model to do predictive analysis on data that may not be relevant can skew its results. For example, events like Covid and pre-covid represent two different types of consumer behaviors.
#3. Increased Legal and compliance exposure
Risk of legal fines - GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and a number of privacy and industry-specific laws require data retention policies to reduce obsolete data. Regulators, CISOs, DPOs and legal counsels expect compliance to limit data spill or breach impact.
Salesforce is uniquely affected by this because if there is one enterprise application brimming with personal and customer data, it is our magical CRM.
#4. Customer trust impact on how your brand is handling our data
Lack of common sense decisions around reasonable use of customer data and data hoarding across Salesforce, Marketing Cloud and other customer-facing technologies almost always results in embarrassment and loss of brand value.
So, what next?
Address obsolete data in Salesforce with 'Data Reduction Framework'.
In this article, we covered the drawbacks of hoarding obsolete data in your Salesforce Org.
Follow our company page for notifications on our next article where we highlight the benefits of reducing data in your Salesforce instance.
Download a copy of our data reduction framework - Download Document
