Good practices for imported contacts lifecycle / lead status?

MonsieurNebo · ‎Jul 2, 2020

Hi,

My company is setting up HubSpot, and we just imported ~600 contacts in the CRM. These contacts have been gathered during the previous years by our bosses.

We agreed to use the default HS contact lifecycle stages (Subscriber, Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunity, Customer & Evangelist), and custom reduced lead status (New, In Progress, Positive Answer & Unqualified).

I updated all the imported contacts to match their new position and/or company.

Then, I started to check all of them with the guy from who the contact are coming, and we have a lot of these two use cases:

1) "We were talking with him 2-3 years ago, it didn't ended up positively (because our company was not mature enough back in the time, or because he didn't get enough budget, ...) but it could be an interesting contact. Let's keep him".

2) "We worked with him years ago, but not anymore. "

I'm really struggling to chose how we should manage these contacts...

1) I'm effraid to keep all of these "just in case" contacts, without any real purpose and strategy. What lifecycle stage should be use for these guys? Is that useful to keep them after all this time?

2) I have no idea of which lifecycle stage and lead status to pick for them. Or if we even should keep them.

I'm afraid we're keeping a lot of contacts "because it was hard to get them", but they have literraly no purpose other than "just in case". Shouldn't we keep a smaller, but qualified, base? And if we make the choice to keep an imported contact, shouldn't we reach him to check if he could become qualified now? I juste want to keep an up-to-date base, where all contact are "active" and not sleeping here for years.

Jaimee · ‎Jul 3, 2020

Hello MonsieurNebo,

Something to consider when deciding what to do with these contacts is to look at the industry regulations which apply to your business. Are you based in the EU do you need to follow GDPR regulations, are your customers based in the EU? etc.

I agree with you data should only be kept if you have concrete justifications for why you keep data for the periods you do. Does your business have a data retention program?

Even if your not based in the EU you might some of this guidance useful - https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-r...

Have you thought about creating a subscriber re-engagement campaign then removing contacts that Bounce or Don't opt-in.

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/email/how-can-i-run-a-permission-pass-campaign-in-hubspot?_ga=2.191031...

All the best,

Jaimee

View solution in original post

rikkilear · ‎Jul 3, 2020

For me it really depends what you want to do with them:

Lead - let's work them back up and requalifiy them

SQL - right time to speak to them to see if they could be a good fit again

Other - useful lifestyle stage for people who you need to keep but don't want to work with again. Like old customers

Sounds like there is no right or wrong here. Just a judgement call on what's best to do with them now given the historical context.

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