5 Ways to Enhance Salesforce Data Management - with Valorx Fusion

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As the world’s leading CRM platform, Salesforce is a fundamental technology for businesses today, with 150,000+ companies using it to power sales and operations.

Despite the important role Salesforce plays, Salesforce data management can be a bottleneck for a number of business processes. Without optimizing the Salesforce user experience, businesses find themselves dealing with prolonged deal cycles, poor data accuracy, and difficulties planning effectively. These challenges then perpetuate user adoption challenges, thereby creating a negative flywheel effect.

Let’s take a close look at why and how to solve these challenges.

5 Common Data Management Inefficiencies in Salesforce

The Salesforce platform is highly capable, but its user interface can be restrictive. Working with large volumes of data can be intensive and time consuming. Here are 5 of the most common challenges businesses run into:

Repetitive, Multi-Click Processes

Issue: Updating multiple records requires numerous manual inputs and clicks.
Impact: Slows productivity and increases the potential for errors.

Manual Data Editing Risks

Issue: Increased likelihood of errors during manual data editing.
Impact: Discrepancies in pricing, configurations, and customer info can delay deals and damage relationships.

Data Silos and Fragmentation

Issue: Fragmented data across objects and records.
Impact: Difficult for teams to obtain a unified view, hampering decision-making and planning.

Compliance and Security

Issue: Exporting and importing data can expose businesses to security risks.
Impact: Sensitive data on local devices increases the risk of breaches.

Poor Collaboration

Issue: Collaborating on Salesforce data is cumbersome.
Impact: Leads to version control issues and data inaccuracies.

To overcome these challenges, users need a solution that can enhance Salesforce’s native data editing capabilities and is both intuitive and user friendly.

This is where Valorx Fusion comes in.

Valorx Fusion: A Salesforce Data-Management Solution

Valorx Fusion integrates Salesforce and Excel to provide a more efficient and user-friendly way to manage your Salesforce data. This powerful integration allows you to leverage the familiar capabilities of Excel while ensuring that all data remains securely within Salesforce.

Seamless Excel-Salesforce Connection
With Valorx Fusion, you can access and edit your Salesforce data directly within Excel. This means that while you are using Excel’s intuitive interface and robust functionality to manage your data, the data itself stays securely within Salesforce. Here’s how it works:

Real-Time Data Access: Fusion allows you to pull Salesforce data into an Excel spreadsheet. You can view, edit, and manipulate this data using Excel’s powerful tools.
Intuitive Editing: Use Excel’s familiar functions like copy/paste, drag-and-drop, and bulk editing features to manage large datasets efficiently. You can perform calculations, apply formulas, and use conditional formatting just as you would with any Excel spreadsheet.
Single-Click Sync: After making the necessary updates and changes in Excel, you can sync the data with Salesforce with a single click, ensuring all updates are reflected in real-time within your Salesforce environment.
Data Integrity: Since the data remains in Salesforce, all Salesforce controls and permissions are maintained. This means that users can only access, view, or edit the data they are authorized to handle, ensuring data security and compliance.

By integrating Excel and Salesforce in this way, Fusion combines the best of both worlds: the advanced data-handling capabilities of Excel and the robust data management and security features of Salesforce. This approach eliminates the need for manual data exports and imports, reduces the risk of errors, and enhances overall productivity.

Here’s a detailed look at how Fusion makes Salesforce users significantly more efficient.

1. Simplified Mass Record Management

A study by Hubspot found that Salesforce users spend an average of 30% of their time on manual data entry alone.Valorx Fusion allows you to manage Salesforce data directly within Excel, leveraging Excel's intuitive bulk editing features. More importantly, you can use Mass Modifier - a Fusion capability that lets you select records based on specific criteria and apply universal changes instantly. For example, if you are working on a quote, you can apply a common change to a number of records of different values by setting the parameters for the records that need updating rather than going record by record. You can use it to make updates to hundreds or even thousands of records instantly.

2. Complex Data Handling Simplified

Valorx Fusion integrates seamlessly with Excel, allowing you to leverage familiar formulas to update Salesforce fields and ensure data accuracy. Need to apply mass discounts or update similar data? Leverage Excel functions like VLOOKUP and IF THEN to automate calculations in seconds. For instance, a sales team can quickly apply bulk discounts to hundreds of opportunities using Excel formulas, reducing the time typically spent on manual updates.

And, when the data you’re managing doesn’t fit neatly into tables, Fusion lets you work with complex data structures like rolling forecasts and tiered pricing schedules within a single Excel sheet.

This eliminates the need for manual calculations and repetitive tasks. By enabling powerful methods of handling data and automation, Salesforce users can reallocate their time on higher-impact activities.

3. Enhanced Forecasting

Accurate forecasts are essential for any business, affecting inventory, cash flow, sales, and revenue. However, forecasting in Salesforce can be difficult due to its restrictive usability.

Inaccurate sales predictions can cause inventory problems. Low inventory can slow deals, diminish customer trust, and lead to more expensive delivery costs, while too much inventory increases storage costs and other overhead. Some businesses may only need to plan for months at a time while others need to optimize inventory (and manufacturing) schedules years in advance. Getting forecasts wrong can be costly.

Sub-optimal cash flow from poor forecasts makes it hard to plan for and cover general corporate expenses and invest strategically as a business.

As well, growing a business, scaling teams, driving productivity - these are all reliant on understanding how a business is performing and the kind of revenue it will be driving for the next quarter, year, or few years.

Managing the data behind your forecasts needs to be streamlined, and accuracy supports business performance. Leveling up forecasting in Salesforce is a worthwhile investment. To improve forecasting in Salesforce, users need a way to integrate their data systems and manage their more effectively.

Improving your forecasting experience
Fusion can connect data from multiple Salesforce objects (and existing forecasting systems) all into a single Excel spreadsheet, so that you can manage your forecasts using live data in one centralized setting.

Salesforce users can view and manage live data using the power and versatility of Excel spreadsheets. Customizing views, telescoping (viewing a range of time frames in a single forecast), applying calculations, and more are now possible. Users no longer need to work between multiple systems, export/import data, and duplicate their efforts - all of which can result in low process adoption and poor data hygiene long term. Instead, they get all the familiar tools of Excel to build and analyze their forecasts.

4. Data Security

Traditional spreadsheet work often involves exporting and importing data, which are time-consuming processes. With Valorx Fusion, users connect their spreadsheets via Salesforce credentials, ensuring all Salesforce controls and permissions are carried over. This means they can only access, view, and edit data they are authorized to do so.

Fusion allows admins to create secure templates that limit what users can see and edit, to preserve data integrity. This empowers users to work more efficiently using Excel’s features, without the concern of overwriting valuable data or making changes in places they should not.

Fusion supports Salesforce’s security protocols, including field-level security and data encryption, ensuring that your data is protected at all times.

5. Streamlined Collaboration

Fusion simplifies Salesforce user collaboration. Multiple users can work on the same data set simultaneously within Salesforce, eliminating the need for confusing email chains or version control issues later on. Each user sees/manages only the data allowed based on their specific roles. This provides users with more autonomy without risk via Salesforce controls, but now with the added speed and power Excel’s capabilities.