We at SalesIntel are committed to helping you strengthen, sustain, and ensure accuracy in your contact data. We are also committed to privacy and protecting your data, and meeting ever-changing compliance regulations. With the roll-out of SalesIntel’s international data and the upcoming California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) causing many of our clients to re-examine their internal compliance operations, we thought that the time was right to provide a quick refresher on the precursing major data protection regulation – the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that was enacted in 2018.
As we at SalesIntel begin to offer global data for our clients, our unwavering commitment to data privacy continues to cover global regulations like GDPR and APEC’s Cross-Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) System – we’ll be addressing the latter in a future post.
SalesIntel is fully compliant with GDPR, are you? If not, it isn’t too late and if you need assistance with understanding how our data can be used in light of GDPR regulations, or if you’d care to talk about how SalesIntel can help you get your data compliant, we are available.
We were thrilled to see that we already met many of the requirements in the GDPR framework for businesses, including the most painful of these requirements: tracking data sources.
It may sound simple, but many of the organizations with which we interact have not identified the sources of their contacts or their leads. You met somebody at a trade show, connected with them on LinkedIn and got their email address by fabricating a “first-dot-last at” email. Yes, jane.doe@janedoecompany.com delivered successfully and you entered the information in your CRM as a lead. Did you identify a source of that information, and if so, what was that source? This is one of the most basic requirements of GDPR, and if Jane works for an American multinational at an office in Munich, not identifying the source of her information in your system is a violation.
Fear not, Sales and Marketing Warriors! You can always go back and flag a source to get compliant, but the problem compounds itself when you have dozens or hundreds of reps adding data to your CRM, and compounds itself even further when that data piles up over the course of months, years, or even decades. This is one way SalesIntel was compliant with GDPR before it was required – we have tracked every single source from our inception up to today.
Several other requirements, including creating a data protection plan and conducting periodic risk assessments were also already standard operating procedures for SalesIntel and all of the data we manage.
So what did we have to do to get compliant?
- We appointed a data privacy officer, who along with our senior executive leadership owns compliance end-to-end at our company.
- We consulted with expert counsel, making sure that the steps we put together to get compliant didn’t miss anything.
- We analyzed all of our data to get a clear picture of what information, exactly, is protected by GDPR and made sure we didn’t use that data in any way that violates the regulation.
- We assessed our data security processes and made a few upgrades.
- We performed an end-to-end audit of which employees have access to our data and updated our data access rights to make sure our researchers and sales and marketing staff could not risk an accidental violation. If there is no reason for one of our staff to have access to Jane Doe’s email address, this upgrade prohibited that staff member from being able to access it.
As we all know, GDPR is so 2018, and now we’re looking at the dawn of a new decade and the rising of advanced data protection regulations on American shores, in the form of CCPA. The good news is that if you are already GDPR compliant, there is not a whole lot you have to do to iterate that compliance to get right with CCPA. We’ll address that in a future post, and in the meantime, your friends at SalesIntel are available to discuss these measures and how we can assist your organization in meeting them.
Send a note to support@salesintel2.flywheelstaging.com, or interact with any of the Support portals on our website if you’d like to discuss. Here’s to a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2020, and thanks as always for your ongoing use of SalesIntel!
