The Foundation of a High-Performing CRM: Why Great Data Governance Starts with People, Not a Platform
As a sales or marketing leader, you rely on your CRM to make strategic decisions and drive growth. But what happens when you can't trust the data it holds? For many leaders, their Salesforce instance is a source of frustration, filled with inconsistent data and unreliable reports. You know that to hit your aggressive goals, you need a single source of truth. The question is, where do you start the cleanup?
It’s tempting to dive straight into the technical weeds, but the most effective starting point isn’t a field audit. It's a conversation.
All meaningful data governance starts with stakeholder interviews. The goal is to uncover what’s truly important to the business before you touch a single setting. However, you can't just ask, "What data do you want to govern?" That's a limiting question, and the initial answers are often contradicted once you dig deeper into the business's strategic objectives.
Let's be honest: the term "data governance" can make people cringe. It feels heavy, bureaucratic, and like a roadblock to getting work done. Our approach is different. We frame it as building a reliable foundation for growth—the first, most critical step in transforming your CRM from a cluttered database into a strategic engine.
Setting the Stage for Success: Our Approach
When we partner with a new client, we begin by setting clear expectations. This isn't about creating rigid rules; it's about defining the key data points that measure and support the health of your organization. Here’s how we initiate the process:
Information Gathering: We start with a series of confidential, one-on-one discovery sessions with key leaders across the business. We typically budget 45 minutes for each conversation. Our mission is to uncover the data points most valuable to each person’s role and to the overall health of the business.
Concurrent Technical Audit: While these conversations are happening, our team conducts a parallel audit of your CRM, mapping its current fields, automations, and processes. This gives us a complete picture of both what the business needs and what the system currently does.
Actionable Recommendations: The initial output is a clear set of recommendations. We identify the most critical data points and propose specific, high-impact modifications to your CRM. This plan is presented to the stakeholder group for review and final approval.
Implementation & Change Management: Once the plan is finalized, we determine the best way to implement the changes within the CRM. Crucially, we also draft a comprehensive change management strategy to ensure user adoption and a smooth rollout.
This initial project is an investment. But once this foundation is built, maintaining it becomes a simple and efficient health check—a process you can run annually or biannually to keep your data pristine and aligned with your goals.
Sample Questions to Uncover What Matters
The key is to ask questions that connect high-level business objectives to ground-level data needs. The questions we ask are tailored to each stakeholder, but here are some examples from our playbook.
For the CEO/COO:
What are the top 3-5 metrics you use to determine the health of the organization?
How do you track progress toward our strategic objectives? What information is essential for that?
What are your most important leading indicators for future success?
What are the most critical “need-to-know” facts about our top clients?
For the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO):
How do you define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? What are the key firmographic and demographic attributes?
What constitutes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) in our organization?
How do you measure campaign influence and marketing’s contribution to revenue?
For the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) or VP of Sales:
What are the key leading and lagging indicators for your revenue targets?
How do you define a qualified opportunity?
What are the distinct stages of your opportunity lifecycle, and what are the exit criteria for each?
How is your sales team structured? (e.g., by territory, vertical, company size)
What activities and data points do you review to manage your team’s performance?
Who supports the deal cycle (e.g., Sales Engineers, SMEs), and when are they typically brought in?
For the Head of Customer Success:
At what point are you brought into the sales cycle?
What information does your team need to successfully onboard a new client?
How is a new client officially handed over from Sales to your team?
How do you measure the success and health of a customer engagement?
For the Head of Finance:
What information is essential for you to successfully invoice a customer?
How do you know precisely when a customer should be invoiced?
What is the current process for gathering that billing information?
Your First Step
While this list isn’t exhaustive, it illustrates a critical point: effective data governance is a business conversation first and a technical exercise second.
A final piece of advice: we highly recommend conducting these interviews one-on-one. This fosters candor and provides unfiltered feedback. Once you have that initial input, you can bring the leaders together for a group discussion to align on the path forward.
Building this foundation is the first step toward unlocking the true potential of your CRM. It’s how you turn a simple database into a strategic asset that fuels predictable growth.
