28 Apr Clean Up Your Data During the COVID-19 Slowdown

Needless to say, but every business in the US is being impacted by COVID-19, some experiencing an insane pickup in business, but most experiencing a slowdown to some degree. Those experiencing a slowdown can easily get demoralized. If this is you, here’s something you can do that will keep your team busy and also pay off nicely when we get on the other side of this – clean up your data.

That’s right, clean up your data. I talk to small business operators daily about their software and I almost always hear “our data is a mess” or “we have a lot of gaps in our data”. The story is usually the same in that nobody ever has time to stop and fix their bad data. It becomes like a chronic medical condition in that people just learn to live with it. Unfortunately, in our current environment, many people will now have some extra time. The fact is that when it comes to a data cleanup project, it’s always a tedious, manual, time-consuming process so yeah, what growing business has time for that?

So, if you find yourself with a short-term business slowdown, get after it. Export records into Excel and get busy merging duplicates, fixing errors, filling in gaps where data is missing. If you’re a Salesforce user, visit the AppExchange and look at some of the data quality tools available to help you. There are plenty of benefits:

It’s good for you and your team to have something constructive to work on during a downturn in business.

I have found that in projects like this in the past, I often learned things or gained new insights when I dug into a mess of data to clean it up. You probably will too.

Clean data is an asset. Once you have your data in good shape you’ll be set to leverage it when we get through the current crisis.

In the modern economy, he who has the best data often wins. So don’t miss this opportunity to turn a negative into a long term positive for your firm.