Ridecell rebuilds its database to 100% usable records in under eight months using Validity DemandTools

Ridecell, Inc. is leading the way in the digital transformation of fleet businesses and operations. The company powers some of the most successful fleet businesses in cities across Europe and North America.

For a short time, Ridecell decided to use platforms other than Salesforce as key sales and marketing database drivers. This was due to the company changing its product focus, employees working remotely due to COVID-19, and Ridecell’s desire to give them flexibility when choosing tools to meet their individual needs.

At the end of 2021, the decision was made to bring back Salesforce as Ridecell’s main CRM and the hub for its sales and marketing tech stack.

This placed a new focus on ensuring leads and opportunities were tracked more effectively and updated as needed. However, bringing back a database that had outdated information and duplicates was an issue that needed to be addressed.

At this time, Salesforce restored Ridecell’s database to its 2019 state—meaning Ridecell employees were using records that hadn’t been touched for over a year and a half. Further complicating matters, shifts in Ridecell’s business model during the pandemic made most of this data unusable.

At this pivotal moment, Ridecell hired Angela Henkel. As Ridecell’s incoming Director of Marketing Operations, Henkel faced the herculean task of cleaning Ridecell’s database and equipping its employees with reliable data.

During the Ridecell interview process, Henkel made one key request: “I told Ridecell I had to have DemandTools to do my job,” she recalls. “I needed DemandTools to re-establish Salesforce. Without it, I couldn’t keep records clean, standardize fields, or automate key processes.”

At her previous company, Henkel had used DemandTools successfully for over ten years. “There, the strength of our database is what kept us going during COVID-19. The world shut down, but we didn’t skip a beat because we had this powerful database—and I was using DemandTools to build it,” she recalled.

“I was running 40 different automations, either by the minute, hour, the day, or the month, and our de-duplication rate was only .002 percent.”

Once on board at Ridecell, Henkel began by establishing a baseline for the state of the company’s data.

Using the DemandTools Assess module, Henkel determined that less than eight percent of Ridecell’s records were usable.

Henkel wasn’t surprised. She had already encountered recurring issues with duplicate records, and the email addresses the company relied on to reach prospects were sometimes missing or invalid.

Next, she mapped out a phased database rebuild. Working with a team of admins, she split the project into four main categories: functionality, integrations, training, and user feedback. Along the way, she redid standard objects, re-established custom fields and objects, and redesigned Ridecell’s assignment rules to ensure that leads were routed to the right sales representatives.

The DemandTools platform included tools that empowered Henkel to re-establish and maintain all aspects of the database in bulk, with repeatable processes, instead of record by record or need by need. She used DemandTools features like Schedule, DupeBlocker, and multi-object Import to automatically dedupe, standardize, and route data.

Henkel put inactive leads into a holding queue until they could be reassigned appropriately. She also reassigned accounts to active reps by geographic location. “It ended up being about a five-minute cleanup,” she said. “But if I didn’t have DemandTools, I’d still be doing it.”

Throughout the process, soliciting end-user feedback was critical. “If you don’t take user feedback into consideration along the way, you’re not doing your job,” said Henkel.

“What DemandTools can do versus what other platforms on the market can do is night and day. The quality of the management is just different.”

Angela Henkel, Director of Marketing Operations, Ridecell