Expired contacts

[SarahHerbage]

Hello,

I am wondering what the recommendation is for managing expired contacts?

So if a contact has moved onto another company how do you manage this?

I dont wish to delete the contact as A). they will have notes related to the company they worked for that could be useful in future dealings wit that company and

B). in many cased the contact gets back in touch with the new company so i would want record of relationship.

However i need a way to flag this with in the contact search and also under the comany that they are nolong active.

Also if and when they reconnect under a new company do you keep the orginal contact and add a new association or do you create a new contact and associate them to an old contact?

Thanks in advance

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @SarahHerbage,

Here’s what I’d recommend you do in that situation. In any case, I strongly recommend creating a new record for the new email address, not adding the new address to the existing record. Almost all information maintained on the old record is contextual to their old job and could be misleading in the context of the new one.

• Old contact record
  • Unsubscribe contact (so that they’re automatically removed from all emails and cannot cause a bounce) Unsubscribe an individual contact from receiving all email
  • Create and use a custom checkbox property, e.g. “Contact left company date”, place it in the left sidebar, maintain it for contacts who left the company Customize records (this helps with filtering, excluding from views, and report creation if needed)
  • Pin a note to the top of the record, and add a hyperlink (and potentially additional written context) which links to the new contact record (see below) Pin an activity on a record
  • Associate the old record to the new record: Associate records (consider applying an association label: Create and use association labels)
• New contact record
  • Similar to the old contact record, pin a note with a link to the old record

That way, you cover all of your bases.

Hope this helps!

[SarahHerbage]

Hello

Thanks for your reply. This is very helpful.

I will action what you have recomended as this is the best solution i have had so far.

However what do you do with the contacts currecnt company association? id prefer to keep the association but would love them to appear inactive or greyed out..

Is there a way in hubspot to archive a contact or make them inactive- so they are still in the system but dont come up in your main search field?

[karstenkoehler]

@SarahHerbage unfortunately no, HubSpot neither has a way of archiving records nor if keeping an association while hiding a record. You could update the properties in the association card to more easily spot if a contact is active, but the card would still show.

[SarahHerbage]

Thanks- I might put through a suggestion to see if it can become a future feature