How to Clean Your CRM Data Before Migration to Salesforce

As you prepare for your Salesforce data migration, it is important that you provide your Salesforce implementation (SI) partner with usable, clean data so that they can import your data into your new Salesforce platform. Below you will find some tips, best practices, and resources to help your team clean and prepare your data for migration.

What is “Bad Data”? 

Bad data is data that is disorganized, incomplete, or duplicative to the point that is unusable. Bad data is often the result of on inconsistent data entry practices, typos, empty fields, old records, or duplicate records. Because bad data is bound to happen to some extent within any organization, it’s important to do a little “spring cleaning” with your data every once and a while. Even if you are not planning on conducting a data migration anytime soon–maybe you are already using Salesforce or happy with a different CRM–getting your team in the habit of regularly checking and cleaning data is a great routine to establish. Moreso, teaching and implementing strategies to proactively prevent the input or collection of bad data will save you time and headache down the line. 

Common Signs of Bad Data

When it comes unruly, messy CRM data, some dead giveaways are typos or spelling errors; capitalization or formatting errors; empty/blank fields (especially for essential fields); and of course duplicated or outdated data that just bogs down your system and users.

Migration Templates

Your Salesforce implementation (SI) consultant should provide you with a customized data import template to use for data migration. Here you can preview a generic template that our team at Nimbus Tech uses for our client data migrations. For best pracitce, all of your data records should be added to and included in a single document (i.e. the data migration template that we linked above). Most SI partners will urge you to not send multiple documents with data records.

The data import template will help your team organize data and offers reminders (via the color key below) about formatting for various field types.

Additionally, we know that some of your data may use a picklist field type (where there is a pre-defined list of options to pick from). Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack and Nonprofit Cloud both come with a variety of default out-of-the-box picklist values. You may have different or additional values if your picklists have been customized. For any column fields that require a picklist value, best practice is to reference the charts below for valid options. 

Here are some additional resources to help you in your data migration preparation: 

• Salesforce’s Best Practices When You Migrate Data
• Salesforce Help: Import Data

Handling Sensitive Data

Many of our clients have sensitive data that needs to be safely and securely migrated into Salesforce. Whether your data includes constituent personal information like social security numbers or HIPAA/PHI information, we advise you to never email sensitive or confidential information through an unsecured email. When you're ready to send your data to your SI partner for import, make sure they have established a secure way to share your data with them. 

If your organization handles HIPAA/PHI information, we also recommend that you let your SI partner know ahead of time. It's important to know when and how to mark data records in Salesforce as sensitve/confidential in order to meet compliance rules. Additionally, be advised that you the client are in charge of understanding your own HIPAA compliance in sharing data with an SI partner for the purpose of migration.

Download Your Data Cleaning Checklist

Remember, that your SI partner can only work with the data provided, so for the smoothest data migration process, it’s important to take your time and carefully clean and prepare your data. If you found this information helpful so far, we invite you to download our free Checklist for Cleaning Your Data. Our team at Nimbus Tech provides data migration services–including data cleaning support and pointers–to our clientele and we’d be happy to help you with your transition to Salesforce.