We are looking for a best practice with how to manage old contacts. We have many channnel partners (Accountants, HR Consulants, etc.) that may leave one company and go to another. We are hesitant to merge the contacts as we will lose the historical data and associatoins about referred deals and such. However, the email address no longer exists since they are no longer at the compnay.
Is the best option to simply put them as a "non marketing contact" status and leave it be? How would we identify this as a dormant contact, but also knowing that this same human now works elsewhere? Any good ideas here?
There are different opinions on this, I shared mine here before. Personally, I'd recommend creating a new contact record as the majority of their engagement was related to their role at the previous company. (Or in other words, I wouldn't rely on segmenting or automating based on the earlier information as it might not be accurate to their new situation.)
To keep the "link" between the old and new, I'd pin a note to the top of each contact record that includes a link to the other contact record, for easy reference.
I'd also make sure that the old email address isn't being included in any marketing or sales activity anymore, either by putting it on a suppression list or opting it out of email communication – to avoid a hard bounce.
As you already mentioned, marking the contact as a non-marketing contact would be good idea.
Lastly, if you want to easily identify these types of contacts, I'd recommend creating a custom single checkbox property (e.g. Contact has left company) which is ticked for these contacts. That makes it easier to exclude them in other HubSpot tools or to report on them.
Hope this helps!
Karsten Köhler HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer
There are different opinions on this, I shared mine here before. Personally, I'd recommend creating a new contact record as the majority of their engagement was related to their role at the previous company. (Or in other words, I wouldn't rely on segmenting or automating based on the earlier information as it might not be accurate to their new situation.)
To keep the "link" between the old and new, I'd pin a note to the top of each contact record that includes a link to the other contact record, for easy reference.
I'd also make sure that the old email address isn't being included in any marketing or sales activity anymore, either by putting it on a suppression list or opting it out of email communication – to avoid a hard bounce.
As you already mentioned, marking the contact as a non-marketing contact would be good idea.
Lastly, if you want to easily identify these types of contacts, I'd recommend creating a custom single checkbox property (e.g. Contact has left company) which is ticked for these contacts. That makes it easier to exclude them in other HubSpot tools or to report on them.
Hope this helps!
Karsten Köhler HubSpot Freelancer | RevOps & CRM Consultant | Community Hall of Famer