Although they’re (hopefully) not bad enough to be featured on an episode of “Hoarders,” some sales managers nevertheless have a tough time letting go. Unnecessary clutter can create confusion and disarray, making it nigh impossible for both sales reps and their managers to get organized. Sales managers need to start identifying what they don’t need and, instead of holding on, purge them!

We are talking, of course, about fields in Salesforce.com or some other CRM.

Oftentimes, sales reps are tasked with arduously tracking down unnecessary information and entering it into Salesforce…but to what end? If a sales rep enters a bunch of information on an opportunity, but nobody ever looks at that information, much less analyzes it for actionable insight or uses it to produce Salesforce reports, is that information even valuable?

Not particularly. What this creates is:

• More unnecessary work for your already busy, stressed sales reps

• A disorganized and cluttered Salesforce process that makes it difficult to sort and analyze, while increasing the chances of data quality errors

Here are some common reasons as to why old and unused fields arise in Salesforce. When one of these scenarios happen, be proactive and go through your Salesforce process, deleting or hiding old or unused fields as necessary.

1) When you have a change in your sales process

Sales and marketing processes change. Workflows can be more more efficient, or they can become more complicated, if necessary. After some careful analysis, the sales manager might realize they are forcing their reps to suss out more information than is actually needed during their sales calls.

Take a look at this example above. According to the old process, this sales manager wanted their reps to identify not only the number of CRM seats and the number of Sales CRM seats that this opportunity has at their company, but also the total employee count of that company.

After some analysis, the sales manager realized that the total employee count did not affect the way they sold or the opportunities they sold to – the team’s win rate for all opportunities remained the same, regardless of the total employee count of that opportunity. The sales manager then determined that making their reps track down this information was an unnecessary step, and should go about deleting that field.

2) When you run tests and experiments

We wholeheartedly encourage sales managers to run tests and experiments on their sales processes, to see if they could find something that might work better. Regarding Salesforce data entry, sometimes sales managers want to try adding certain pieces of information to see if it helps. Unfortunately, experiments sometimes fail.

When this happens, instead of simply ignoring the “failed experiment” and letting it sit in Salesforce, delete the experimental field altogether! For instance, a sales manager might try having his sales reps guess at a Probability (%) to close the opportunity. This might be enacted with the intention of gauging how closely reps have their fingers on the pulse. However, after buying an analytics product like InsightSquared that provides a more accurate forecast of probability to close, this experiment might be deemed no longer necessary. At that point, the “Probability” field should be deleted.

3) When you hire a new Sales VP

Similarly to number 1, wholesale dramatic changes will sometimes happen in a sales organization, of which the most drastic might be in bringing in a new Sales VP. When this happens, the new VP should go through the sales and Salesforce data entry process and identify fields and tasks that are not necessary. The incumbent sales reps will quickly warm to this new Sales VP if he or she is making their lives easier by eliminating unnecessary procedures.