Today we’re going to depart from Conga-specific tips to talk about an important issue that affects nearly every organization that uses Salesforce, whether a Conga customer or not – data quality. Specifically, I want to address picklists. Just by using picklists instead of open text fields you can drastically improve the quality of you Salesforce data. First, you’ll have standardized data that is much easier to use for reporting.* Second, giving your users a short list of available options to choose from will encourage them to actually populate the field. You can take this a step further with dependent picklists to really guide your users to provide not only the correct information but also more detailed data.
Ok everyone going to start using picklists? Great, but let’s talk about how to construct your list options. Good picklists follow one key principle; they should be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, or MECE for short. Say it with me now, mee cee.
So what does MECE mean? Let’s start with the first part, mutually exclusive. This basically boils down to only tracking one thing in each picklist. For example, you wouldn’t put a value of Asparagus in a picklist called Fruit.
A common place where this becomes an issue is in customer segmentation. You’ll see a list that looks something like this:
This list mixes two types of options; you could categorize the company based on its geography or its size. To make this mutually exclusive, you’d need a list for each data point:
The second part of MECE is collectively exhaustive. This means that your list should include all of the possible options. I recently completed an auto insurance quote, and the company did a fantastic job with this concept. They have every type of car make listed, including a few I’ve never heard of. It took me three screenshots just to capture them all.
The collectively exhaustive part of MECE is especially important to data quality, because Salesforce picklists restrict a user to just the options you specify. Failing to provide all of the possible options will result in one of three bad data scenarios:
- No data – “None of these are remotely close to what I want, so I’m not going to fill this out, and I’ll probably never open the picklist on any other record ever again.”
- Incorrect data – “Oh this is a required field? I’ll just pick the option closest to my mouse.”
- The dreaded Other option – “My actual data point isn’t here, so I’ll just use other” (NOTE: Other is a cop-out. If your list is truly collectively exhaustive then “other” shouldn’t really be an option.)
So there you have it – a simple method for improving you Salesforce data. Start using picklist where you can and follow MECE when you do.
* This does not apply to multi-select picklists. They will actually make your reporting a nightmare. Just don’t use them. Still not convinced? Cloud for Good has a brilliant summary of why multi-select picklists are evil.