At Tenacre we look at Salesforce data from the perspectives of
Data security (how safe is it)
Business Continuity (how quickly can we recover from losing a key staff member)
Usability (how easy is it for people to use data as they need it)
Data has massive value in any company, particularly a business that’s a Salesforce user. All the rich CRM data holds valuable information on your customers, prospects, pricing, and the history of your sales reps calls, meetings and notes. This is why Salesforce has provided such as a comprehensive set of security options for your CRM, to keep your data safe. But have these security settings been set up, and is your data safe?
One of the first actions that Tenacre takes when we set up a new CRM or take over the management of an existing system is to undertake a security audit. This audit takes only a couple of days, but it provides our clients with a practical understanding of how optimised the security settings are in their CRM.
The steps that we take to perform this audit can be summarised as follows.
Disable users from exporting data
Salesforce enables users to export all the records that they have access to as the default setting. This is potentially a large security flaw in how you’re managing your CRM, as your staff can export data to spreadsheets before they leave the company and move to a competing business.
At Tenacre we recommend closing this security feature, and making data exporting possible on via an approved request to the system administrator.
Review the sharing settings, role hierarchy, and profiles
These settings are the three main ways that Salesforce system administrators can specify which users are able to view or edit records in the system. In most companies these settings are used to restrict access to records, opening up access only to the users that need to see the information.
A Tenacre consultant will review your existing settings and make recommendations for how best to balance data security with data usability.
Data backup
Do you have a backup of your Salesforce data? This is an important question for obvious reasons. While we’ve never seen or heard of a case where data is lost in Salesforce because of system failure, we have had cases where companies lost access to data because they decided to discontinue their Salesforce licenses.
A standard feature of the Tenacre services to our clients is that we take a weekly full data export from the CRM and store it in an encrypted folder, accessible immediately if required.
Business continuity
As remote system administrators for our clients CRM, some of the services that we provide are adding new users to the CRM and removing access from staff members that leave the business.
When a staff member leaves the business, Tenacre will deactivate their access to the CRM, and go through a process of reassigning their ‘open’ sales opportunities and leads to another person in the sales team. As we reassign these records, all upcoming meetings will be reassigned so that there will be a clean handover.
Evaluate advanced security settings
Companies in industries such as financial or medical services may need a higher level of security than is available with the standard Salesforce CRM security options.
A Tenacre consultant will be able to discuss the benefits of using Salesforce Shield, the add-on encryption platform that balances data encryption with existing business workflows and system usability