The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) focuses on seven major principles, including fairness and transparency, purpose limitation, data minimisation, accuracy, data deletion, security, and accountability and ensuring that sales force automation complies to them is a necessity.
As a consumer or even an enterprise, the last thing you’d want is for your personal data to be breached or misused. That’s one of the reasons why GDPR compliance for sales is a crucial factor in determining the brand’s authenticity and ethical abidance.
From understanding the challenges aligning SFA with GDPR and how to resolve them, this 1Channel guide will take a closer look into all of them.
What is GDPR, and Why Does It Matter?
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a comprehensive data protection law enacted by the European Union in May 2018.
Think of it as the class monitor but in the business world. The main objective of GDPR is to look over how different businesses are collecting, storing and using the consumer’s personal data. In short, their existence allows you, as a consumer, to have more control over your data.
As previously mentioned, some of the pillars of GDPR include:
- Lawfulness, Fairness, and Transparency
- Data Minimisation
- Accuracy
- Storage Limitation
- Integrity and Confidentiality
Enterprises that fail to abide by these often face penalties, which can go up to €20 million or 4% of annual global turnover, whichever is higher.
So, if your business uses sales force automation software, ensuring compliance with GDPR is vital, especially where consumer data is involved.
4 Challenges of Aligning SFA with GDPR
What kind of challenges do you think would arise when you are integrating GDPR compliance into SFA systems?
You’d be surprised to know that a report from Statista depicts that around 91% of the U.S business are legally required to comply with GDPR guidelines. These numbers often indicate the importance of GDPR and why non-compliance often costs millions.
Following are a few challenges aligning SFA with GDPR:
1. Data Collection and Consent Management
The base of GDPR is built on the foundation of how businesses are collecting and using the consumer data. GDPR mandates explicit consent for collecting personal data. Since sales force marketing automation often collects data from various sources, ensuring consent across all these sources becomes impossible to cross-verify.
2. Data Subject Rights
GDPR grants individuals rights such as access, rectification, and erasure of their data. It is thus mandatory for the SFA tools to locate all the data in the system associated with the specific individual and be ready to delete every single data upon request. For businesses with multiple integrated systems that involve CRM, SFA and other automation tools, unifying all this data becomes a challenge.
3. Data Security and Breach Management
Roughly 79% of businesses collected sales data from their customers, which usually contains personal and sensitive information. That said, it is also the ethical duty of the businesses to ensure that the collected data is secured safety and without the risks of being hacked into. GDPR compliance in sales outlines the need for businesses to have robust security measures to prevent data breaches, which can be a fairly expensive affair for several businesses.
4. Cross-Border Data Transfers
SFA tools often involve cloud storage, with servers located worldwide. GDPR imposes strict rules on transferring data outside the European Economic Area (EEA). So, ensuring that the data transfer complies with GDPR standards is a must, which is often a roadblock many businesses work through.
4 Ways to Ensure GDPR Compliance in Your SFA System
When implementing sales force and marketing automation, businesses also need to adopt a proactive approach to ensure that the SFA tool in question is in compliance with the GDPR standards.
Following are a few ways to get the done:
1. Conduct a Data Audit
Since GDPR circles around the importance of data laws and protection, it is mandatory for businesses to start from scratch, aka the Data. The ideal data audit process involves 3 major steps:
- What data is being collected through your SFA system.
- The purpose of data collection.
- Where and how the data is stored.
This allows the businesses to find loopholes in the collection and storage of data and make necessary adjustments along the way to ensure that the consumer’s data is never compromised.
2. Choose GDPR-Compliant SFA Tools
As a business, trust is a priority. If you want consumers to put their trust into your business, enough to share personal information like name, address, email, contact details or bank details (for transactions), you need to choose SFA tools that are GDPR-compliant.
Look for features such as:
- Built-in consent management.
- GDPR-ready data processing agreements (DPAs).
- Transparent privacy policies.
These will ensure that the data collection done from the consumers is safe, ethical and the stored data isn’t being tampered with.
3. Implement Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC)
As the famous saying goes, “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” This applies to enterprises and the data that’s being collected and stored by them. Providing leeway access to multiple people is bound to not only maximise chances of errors but also increase the potential risks of data breach.
So, to ensure optimal GDPR compliance for sales, it is vital to limit access to sensitive data within the sales team. With minimal people with access, it becomes easier to pinpoint who is to blame in case of a future discrepancy. Also, assigning permission to authorised personnel in the sales team also ensure that not many can view of modify the information in question.
4. Train Your Sales Team
More than the technology of the sales force automation tools, GDPR compliance is also about training. Instilling proper ethics and training in the sales team allows them to understand the importance of consumer data and implement the best practices for handling personal data.
Instead of leaving an open gap in communication, which leaves more room for error, training the sales team about GDPR compliance and the right use of SFA systems take away from these complexities.
1Channel’s Approach to GDPR and SFA
Highlighting the importance of GDPR compliance for sales doesn’t limit its role in the EU only. In fact, the need for businesses to be responsible with the consumer data is a universal need.
Implementing reliable sales force automation tools like 1Channel thus becomes a necessity. As a highly customisable software, 1Channel SFA tailors its features to your business’ ethics and values. Every data that’s collected, processed and stored in the software is in compliance to the guidelines chalked out by the business and their need to foster trust in the market.
With our SFA tool at 1Channel, your business gets access to a powerful tool for growth, innovation, and trust-building among your target audience. So, why delay further?
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