How These Companies Conquered Salesforce Growing Pains with Own

• Salesforce orgs inevitably experience growing pains while dealing with an influx of data and increasingly complex customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
• Own backup and recovery and archive tools provide Salesforce teams with everything they need to overcome the most common data growth challenges for smooth, successful project implementation.
• Salesforce veterans across three industries provide insight into how Own helps them reduce risk and create data lifecycle processes to optimize Salesforce.

Business growth is usually a good thing. But sometimes data grows quicker than you can figure out how to deal with it. The challenges of data growth are a common pain point among industries that use Salesforce to manage large amounts of data. Organizations need to be able to safely determine which data is deletable while maintaining quick access to what they choose to store within their data limits. Enter Own, the SaaS data protection leader that helps Salesforce customers protect and activate their data. Three Salesforce trailblazers recently joined a webinar to share insights on how Own enables them to optimize Salesforce within their organizations, including:

• Lori Sanders, Senior Director of Enterprise Apps, Vertafore
• Jesse Hendricks, Senior Salesforce Administrator, DAT Freight & Analytics (DAT)
• Aven Santo Domingo, Engineering Manager of Consumer Engagement, Kimberly-Clark

Their stories from across three different industries—consumer goods, transportation, and insurtech—reveal how Own helps Salesforce customers overcome growing pains and scale while maintaining performance and minimizing risk.

Salesforce snapshot: Data management three ways

Vertafore uses Salesforce across its numerous business units, including:

• Sales Cloud
• Service Cloud
• CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) Salesforce
• Experience Cloud

“We’re also integrated tightly with our ERP [enterprise resource planning] and other systems, which contributes to our [data] growth the most,” Lori explains. “We get a lot of data from external systems that take up a lot of space.”

‍DAT adds marketing and billing to the mix—where CPQ and billing are the biggest contributors to ongoing data issues, Jesse explains. 

‍Meanwhile, Kimberly-Clark relies on Sales and Service Clouds in addition to Marketing and Commerce Clouds to manage both B2B and B2C products. When customers contact the company to inquire about its brands and products, all the data flows through and is stored in Service Cloud. 

‍Growing pains: Ensuring a strong data lifecycle strategy

When working with large amounts of data, Salesforce customers usually have some degree of data lifecycle management strategy. The problem is, those strategies are often implicit rather than consciously thought-out and actively discussed. New orgs typically start with small datasets, and cobbled-together strategies can work fine when data is still fresh and in development. But as the volume of data balloons over time, inherent complexities require a more intentional approach.

‍A high-level view of the data lifecycle looks like this: creation at birth, maturity with change and enrichment, and obsolescence with retirement. Along the way, ongoing data growth naturally creates three pain points:

1. Migration from legacy Salesforce environments: As Vertafore migrated, it didn’t need as many users, but this also meant fewer users had access to data they might have needed. The company was managing no less data—including historical data with high numbers of attachments—but at the same time had to stay within its consumption limits. 
2. Creeping new org data requirements: The same flexibility and customizability that makes Salesforce a great CRM platform can also be a double-edged sword, introducing complexity during org migrations. At DAT, “we were prevented from updating and installing new managed packages, assisting stakeholders, and serving our customers as admins,” Jesse explains.
3. Retaining easy access: Kimberly-Clark needed to store easily accessible data as it rolled out its first Service Cloud instance in Latin America. That meant growing numbers of files including data-heavy images and videos—exponentially increasing with expanded communication channels, brand acquisitions, and rising consumer numbers. “We had to figure out a solution pretty quickly,” Aven says.

Challenges: Backup and recovery for safety, compliance, and development

‍Orgs experiencing legacy migrations need a backup and recovery solution as a safety net. Implementing Own improves:

1. Data management: Deciding what data to delete and when can be a tough call. You never know what you might need in the future. Introducing an archiving solution made Vertafore’s data much more manageable. Kimberly-Clark, on the other hand, started with Own backup and recovery from the get-go—before problems arose.
2. Compliance: Industrial giant Roper’s acquisition of Vertafore meant new compliance requirements as a public company—especially important given the increased complexities of Vertafore’s org migration. “Our parent company expects a business continuity plan,” Lori says, “So a restore solution was a great option.” Meanwhile, “Kimberly-Clark has a thorough vendor management process and requires partners to endure a lengthy checklist of items to even be approved,” Aven highlights. “On top of that, it stores a lot of sensitive consumer data, and our teams invest heavily to ensure this data is not compromised.”
3. Sandbox testing: Vertafore found value in backup and restore for sandbox testing environments, reverting to pre-testing states when issues occurred. 

Solution: Evaluating the backup and recovery strategy to protect data

When companies manage data effectively—including proper archive and deletion—they can expect improvements in:

• Performance, which improves when there’s less data to deal with.
• Legal risk exposure, based around the discoverability of data.
• Cybersecurity, by archiving or deleting private data.
• Storage costs, mitigated by a proactive, cost-effective solution.

Kimberly-Clark assessed its functional requirements for backup and recovery to ensure Own met these before going live. DAT’s two biggest objectives in efficiently protecting data were:

• Ease of use: Teams should be able to manage data without extensive knowledge of it, with automations handled directly by the system. “Own covers all that,” Jesse says, helping to build stakeholder trust in its viability as a solution. 
• Reliability: “Knowing our data is there and is accessible to us whenever we’re going to need it was super important,” Jesse highlights—especially critical during compliance checks.

When analyzing different solutions, Vertafore looked for one that “worked well with Salesforce and was easy to implement and manage after that,” Lori says. The company also sought a good partner who would be ready and available to assist in the event of a crisis.

Backup and recovery are essential to protect all data and preserve business continuity in the face of data loss. In implementing Own, Vertafore, DAT, and Kimberly-Clark all overcame their data growth challenges and their Salesforce org growing pains.

Results: Best practices for successful Salesforce org growth

Once DAT got a handle on high data storage, it looked at what else it could archive and reorganize. “It really helped us to take a holistic look at all of our data,” Jesse says. For organizations with ballooning data, “start early and have a plan for it,” Jesse recommends. Before taking action on old data, ask questions such as:

• What are we trying to do with our data? 
• What story do we want to tell? 
• How can we use that story? 

“Invest some time into Own Backup and Recovery so that you have peace of mind,” Aven echoes. “Don’t wait until disaster strikes or you get a large unexpected invoice.” Build and identify the maturity curve before data balloons out of control. “And partner with a company like Own.” 

Lori suggests not only starting with the biggest Salesforce objects but also looking at unnecessary data that takes up lots of space—like managed packages that show up at the bottom of the list in the Salesforce data storage interface. “All of those things accumulate over time,” Lori says. “Removing them helped us clean up our org.”

Hearing from different perspectives highlights common challenges for Salesforce orgs. Whatever the industry, getting ahead of data skew and anticipating data overages ensures your organization can hope for the best while being prepared for the worst. ‍

This story is based on a webinar moderated by Own Technical Account Manager and Salesforce Application Architect Sierra Valenzuela-Phillips. Request a live demo with experts to find out how Own can scale your Salesforce org while maintaining performance and minimizing risk.