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This highly depends on the philosophy of the CRM. But in most of the companies i worked for this is actually a desired thing. But this is for companies who track persons/individuals.
The thing is: it sometimes is hard to track and keep the record up to date, even if you have a data broker involved.
So either the company lost track of this individual or doesn’t care about individuals and only keeps track of the „responsible person“.
In your companies where this was considered desirable, what was the reason?
Your second line is why I think it's a needed feature - as a salesperson if I open an account and look for the best contacts, I'm going to find of all the people listed a ton of them aren't there anymore.
Once I've done the work of looking up their linkedin or whatever, it would be great if there was a one click button to store that knowledge for future sales reps (and my future self).
Instead I have the option to 1) delete the contact - not desirable because would be good to know what previous conversations we had with them or 2) modify the contact record in some way to store that information.
Which I do now, but it's cumbersome (I replace the title with an "x" and put their old title and email in the description field, so hopefully they're not getting a bunch of hard bounces if added to marketing emails) and the changes I make are ad hoc, other people may not know that my notations mean the contact isn't there anymore, and it doesn't make skimming a list of people easier in terms of directing attention.
Oh, and some tips regarding getting this functionality. It might be already implemented but you don’t know about that or don’t have the rights. Open s ticket and ask support.
But i guess nobody actually thought about it. Ask your peers if they find it useful as well. The more the merrier. (First question the GM or ceo asks me: is is relevant?). If so, get your regional manager involved. Maybe you have „power user“ for the crm, get them involved, too.
Then contact your crm manager and discuss this idea. It might even be a nice project that looks good on your resume or development plan.
I am probably the person who decides the strategy and gives the order to implement it.
So, why would i want it? For many reasons, but one is activity history. I have this person in my CRM for a reason. And the person probably has been visited already. So i can lookup previous calls (maybe even from a different sales representative).
Another thing - if your contact changes, you presume the next role will be either something similar or a bit up. Time to visit an old friend, i guess, and tie your bond again.
Expense and sample tracking was another reason, as my market is strictly regulated and a person cannot recieve more than a certain amount per year.
Ah, I think we're talking past each other.
I don't mean that the contact should be deleted, I think it should still be in the database. For the reason you said, so you can see the history of activity. But I'm saying there should be a way to mark they're not at that organization anymore. A one click button that flags them as past employee rather than active - and then those contacts are still in the database but displayed differently to make it easier for the sale team to direct their attention.
If the data on the contact, email address, phone, cell phone, is all tied to their former company, and they are no longer with that company, the data is useless and they should be deleted.
Unless you want a record of previous communication, and which email or phone number it went to.
Again, not super useful information if they aren't at that company anymore.
"But I was talking to Dave and..."
"Dave aint here man..."
Marked as moved and displayed on the „old“ account as inactive/moved as well as active on the „new“ account. I think i know pretty well what case you are talking about.
This is one thing which is a bit complicated. Because what you want to avoid are duplicates as good as you can. The person still exists, but is on another account. So what you want is a contact history.
Account = company/building Contact = person you can talk to Call = the activity you do with a contact
If you already have calls documented on this account it is easy. The calls are stille there, but the contact is gone (moved). Call history is implemented by standard. Contact history is a different thing, though. This probably needs to be customised.
I built a couple of bespoke CRMs in the early 00's and built this option in by using a separate table for companies and individuals, then associating them, which made add/remove with a button trivial.
I look at current SaaS CRM's and shake my head; we’ve gone backwards.
Motherfuckers act like they forgot about has_many_through
I mean, yeah, like, it's a relationship, innit?
I've used some CRMs with features like this, but at least in one of them it only existed because I had to create it when we had a contact jump from one important client company to another and it confused everyone.
What values do you have under Lead Status?
In the two organizations I've been at we didn't use the lead object at all, it was all contacts. At the one place we did have a custom checkbox field for "no longer at the company" but that didn't change how the contacts were displayed at all.
Ahh.. kk.. so there is a less often used field for contact stage as well. Iirc Left Company is a default but I may have inherited that from stages syncing after deploying Outreach
If you're talking about users, Salesforce you toggle active/inactive. You actually can't delete them, unfortunately. If you're talking about Contacts, there are probably a number of standard, out of the box fields you could use, but a good setup will have a picklist or a checkbox or whatever you want. You can also delete contacts, but it's a good policy to keep data around for a while and then archive it instead of just deleting stuff straight up.
Am Salesforce admin. Happy to answer any Salesforce related questions.
Yes, I think all the contacts should be retained, because those interactions are useful information. And at the one company we did have a custom checkbox field for "not at the company anymore", but I would really like that information to change the way the records are displayed. Like if I'm looking at an account page, and I'm looking at the list of contacts, the ones who are still there should be listed first, and the people who are gone should be grayed out or something. Having to open each record one at a time is cumbersome, and the page load times are so bad.
So in Salesforce that IS possible. An admin, using Lightning App, could for example create a filter on some fields so that they're shown or hidden depending on the value of other fields. It would only be possible using the Lightning App builder since that gives you the most tools--standard page layouts don't let you filter viewability of values like that. Alternatively, though, you COULD make an "inactive contact" page layout & corresponding record type and just change the record type either manually or using a Flow (or workflow) whenever the contact is marked 'inactive'.
EDIT: Your admin can also modify what fields are shown on a Related List. So you can be on Account, looking at related Contacts, and have the Inactive field prominently displayed on that related list, and sortable. Again, this is assuming you operate out of Lightning, not Classic.
Very helpful to know, thank you. Of course now I'm somewhere that uses zoho which is inferior for a variety of reasons.
I do think it's strange that there's no native/default accommodation. Every organization has to handle contacts who aren't with an account anymore.
If they don't work for that company anymore, they should be removed as contact.
And yet you might want a record of communications. Hence the post.
Because there's a lot of competition, these companies have to focus on eye-catching features that make bosses drool.
As an employee, your needs matter little.
Do you suspect there's a larger reason than they just haven't built in that functionality and don't consider it a priority? What kind of answers are you expecting to get from this community? What reasons have the companies that lacked this feature given you when you asked about it?
To answer your question about answers from this community - I posted in the sales community, which has 20 subscribers, and crossposted to asklemmy. I don't expect most people subscribed to the larger community care or know of CRMs. But I figured it's content, and I want to support lemmy. (and at least it contributes to lemmy appearing in search results)
As for reasons - I can't think of any good ones besides they're printing money and so new features aren't a priority. I suppose also that a lot of sales people aren't the "update records" type of personality so they don't care one way or another. But I'm a process driven person and I care about working efficiently, so it kind of drives me nuts.
