Salesforce Optimization for SaaS Scalability & Data Integrity
The Challenge
A historically grown, multi-tenant Salesforce environment hindered a fast-scaling SaaS company. Inconsistent data, poor usability across Sales, Marketing, and Success, and lack of process discipline led to unreliable forecasting, wasted sales effort, and difficulty tracking marketing ROI.
Approach & Execution
Project Overview
As Manager of Business Analytics at Prescreen.io (acquired by XING), I spearheaded the transformation of their core Salesforce CRM. The existing setup, serving over 300,000 daily users via the main product, suffered from legacy issues impacting sales efficiency and data reliability critical for scaling.
Work Done
- Process Mapping & Redesign: Analyzed the end-to-end customer lifecycle (Marketing, Product, Pre-Sales, Sales, Success, Support) and redesigned core sales processes within Salesforce, focusing on clarity and accountability.
- Data Governance & Cleansing: Defined data standards and led the cleansing of thousands of records (Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities), establishing a foundation for trustworthy reporting.
- Churn & Performance Analysis: Utilized SQL and R to analyze historical data, identifying key predictors of customer churn and significant variations in sales team performance metrics.
- Attribution Modeling: Configured Salesforce campaigns and lead processes to accurately track multiple touchpoints, enabling robust marketing attribution.
- KPI Development: Built self-service dashboards providing real-time visibility into pipeline health, conversion rates, and rep performance.
- Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Acted as the central point for data process definition and alignment across revenue-generating departments.
Deliverables
- Revamped Salesforce configuration with clear stages and automated workflows.
- Cleaned and reliable sales dataset.
- Predictive churn indicators report.
- Marketing attribution model implementation.
- Suite of self-service KPI dashboards.
Solution Overview
Led a cross-functional initiative to restructure sales processes within Salesforce, defining clear stage criteria and automating tasks with Flows. Executed a data cleansing project, merging duplicates and standardizing key fields. Implemented multi-touch attribution logic for lead handling. Developed custom reports and dashboards for self-service KPIs, identifying key churn predictors via data analysis (R/SQL).
Key Results & Impact
- Reduced time to generate accurate pipeline reports by 75%.
- Improved forecast accuracy by an estimated 30% due to cleaner data and defined stages.
- Increased sales team adoption and satisfaction through improved UI and workflows.
- Enabled Marketing to demonstrate ROI by attributing >80% of new ARR to specific campaigns.
- Identified 3 key leading indicators of churn, informing proactive retention strategies.