It would be great to “archive” deals that have either been won or lost, so that they don’t appear on the dashboard or deals table. This way you wouldn’t lose the information from the deal and it would affect the figures on your deals dashboard.
Over time we accumulate contacts who are no longer active. Perhaps they’ve retired, changed jobs and industries, or passed away. Currently there appears to be two ways to handle these contacts in the CRM:
1. Delete them, or
2. Change their Lead Status (or a custom field) to “Unqualified” or similar.
The issue with the former is that all history with the contact is lost. Let’s say they were the designer on a job (deal). If I delete that contact then I lose the reference in the Job’s record indicating who the designer was on that project.
The issue with the latter is that I now need to create filters in various locations to filter out these “unqualified” contacts. For example, in Sales → Views, or as an “exclude” category in marketing emails.
I would like to see an Archive feature that automatically implements these filters, removing the “archived” contact from workflows, views, emails, etc…, yet retains their “associated” links to deals (jobs) and is searchable.
I agree, I encounter this a lot now. Perhaps there could be a lowered fee for “archived” contacts so that they don’t increase our count of contacts too much. But the point being that our customers/contacts rotate in and out of jobs all the time -- I want to keep my old contacts information to be able to reference their name, see what we talked about and our communication… But I don’t need to actively communicate with them or have them bog down my customer list.
Is this possible to create within Hubspot? I think it would be a very valuable addition to the CRM.
I agree. We recently started using the HubSpot CRM and found this to be an issue. We use “active” vs. “inactive” in Salesforce, because in our industry people move to different firms and we prefer to not lose the contact history over the years.
I agree it seems as though I have at least 10- 20 contacts a day that are no longer with a company.
I temporarily make a smart list that auto-generates based on a custom contact field, AM Contact Yes, No, Primary, OR NTL (no longer there)
Then when I find the new contact name… Create the new contact, make a note saying from this point on the old contact was Mr. Something and then merge the old contact with the new contact. This keeps all the old notes but then updates to the new contact going forward.
This archiving feature should be available not only for contacts, but of course also for companies. The new data protection law coming into effect 2018 in Europe (GDPR) actually asks for such a feature. Deleting is simply not an option, because you need to be able to proove some things even after the active relationship with a contact has ended.
This archiving feature should be available not only for contacts, but of course also for companies. The new data protection law coming into effect 2018 in Europe (GDPR) actually asks for such a feature. Deleting is simply not an option, because you need to be able to proove some things even after the active relationship with a contact has ended.
I agree! This archiving feature should be available not only for contacts, but of course also for companies. The new data protection law coming into effect 2018 in Europe (GDPR) actually asks for such a feature. Deleting is simply not an option, because you need to be able to proove some things even after the active relationship with a contact has ended.
This would be a great feature. When we have clients that cancel their services with us, I would like an option to simply archive them so that I don’t lose notes and emails. It would also be preferable that archived contacts are stored at a cheaper cost since we would most likely only need to utilize that info once in a blue moon.
This would be amazing on so many levels.
Has anyone hear rom Hubspot on this type of feature? We need it as we have clients leave one company and go to another company. This causesinternal confusion when looking up their name. I do not want to accidentally send an email to the old address. That could potentially start a firestorm with the old client, especially when they are sour about losing an employee.
Hello,
Any update on this? GDPR is approaching fast!!
I want to Thumbs Up this as many times as possible! I encounter this a lot in my industry where people are so mobile and frequently go from company to company. I need to be able to make the name inactive, but keep the historic information on the deals, company to show that yes, we HAVE in fact been in touch with that company, but I also don’t want to see that contact all the time under contacts and then have a newbie waste time trying to call them.
Any info from Hubspot???
10/10 do want!
Our industry has a lot of movement of staff between companies, so being able to archive a user at one company, but leave their new user record (with a new email domain) at the new company would be ideal!
Hi, the archiving option is without any doubt essential.
We created an interim process for the time being.
We ran verification reports periodically on our contacts emails and reference them with different status codes. Each code then initiates a workflow. For those who are invalid, they are added to a static list that is exported, stored and shared with all concerned parties. We delete all invalid contacts from HubSpot and keep the exported file as a reference.
Cheers,
Elias R.
Agree, that could fix another issue related to pricing.
We use marketing and sales. Marketing charges based on number of contacts, but Sales does not. For Group A contacts, we use only Sales features, yet, since we have marketing activated, those contact count towards the marketing bill. So, virtually, for those contacts, a big account (using sales + marketing), we pay more for sales only than a small account (using sales only).
With archived contacts, Hubspot could charge marketing based on the “non-archived” contacts and prevent those contacts from using marketing features.
@VagaeNatus Awesome point but I think the main problem is that they are making so much money with the way its set up I doubt they are going to change this. There is a sneaky way of keeping contacts Archived but thats kinda a process. What they should really do us unlock the contact count to unlimited, but lock down the number of emails able to send per month with the marketing product.
Yes! Please do add this feature - hugely needed
Any update on this HubSpot??
We really need this feature and it’s seriously lacking. There are contacts who have since left a company, but we don’t want to lose any information about the dealings or communication with them, as this will be really helpful to deal with the person replacing their position.
I agree that this is a needed feature. The current options are not sufficient. The ability to mark a contact as Inactive rather than opting them out or deleting the record is standard in most CRMs. We need a way to preserve the history when a contact leaves a company, with a tag that can easily be filtered out for communications. Ideally, users would also not be charged for Inactive contacts. HubSpot could prevent users from taking advantage of that by not allowing emails to be sent to inactive contacts until they were made active again.