cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12565350
RE: sales CRMs like salesforce or zoho
Don’t expect much of an audience for this on Lemmy, but:
Maybe it’s just the places I’ve worked, but seems like I’m constantly wading through contacts who are gone - I don’t want to delete them because the history could be helpful, but seems like there should be a quick, native way to mark them. Maybe once marked those names are grayed out or something.
My one company had a custom field that you could check, but then there was no special handling of those contacts in terms of how they’re displayed - just you could use it to exclude results in reports.
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.
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.