When A Contact is No Longer with a Company

[Arun_Opto22]

Hubspot Community,

I'm looking for ideas or best practice...or what you do: if you find out your contact is no longer working for the company (and you don't know where they went). Right now all we do is add a note to the old record like "No Longer There"...and then PIN that note.

Deleting doesn't seem good to me because you loose all the original timeline history, which can be valuable if they pop up again in the future at a another company (in which case we merge the Contact records).

Thoughts, ideas?

Thanks,

Arun

[webdew · Accepted solution]

Hi @Arun_Opto22 ,

What you are doing is absolutely right! Putting a note and pinning it seems perfect
Of course deleting a contact is not the right thing to do. As you said you loose all the original timeline history, which can be valuable if they pop up again in the future at another company

In order to keep a track of those contacts what you can do is either create a custom property to give them a label or you can also create a static list directly for these types of contacts.

Hope this helps!
If we were able to answer your query, kindly help the community by marking it as a solution.
Thanks and Regard.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @Arun_Opto22,

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.)

As you already mentioned, o 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.

Hope this helps!

[prasta]

My marketing team has indicated they would like to keep the 'no longer there' contact associated with the primary company they were previously with. To me, this is the incorrect path, and just leads to inactionable cruft building up in the company record. My preference would be to mark them as 'no longer there' and remove the company association, this would get them out of view of my CSMs, but also preserve the historical record. The only thing we agree at the moment is opting their email out. LOL. 

I've asked them to help me understand how leaving them associated with the company is useful to them, and what actions they will take by having this information, and will report back when I hear something, but wondering...

Aside from marking them no longer there, do you remove their company association, or leave it in place? 

[CButtery · Accepted solution]

I create a company record called 'Unassociated Contacts' I then associate the contact to this company record until I can find where they have gone. I set them as inactive until they are associated with  a new company when they then become active again. This way any worklows or lists etc can be managed against the active contacts. Hope that helps - if anyone thinks that I am missing a trick here any feedback gratefully received. 🙂 

[DianaGomez]

Hi @CButtery, I hope you are doing well!

Thanks for sharing 🙂

Best,

Diana

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @Arun_Opto22,

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.)

As you already mentioned, o 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.

Hope this helps!

[Arun_Opto22]

Great. Thanks Karsten.

[webdew · Accepted solution]

Hi @Arun_Opto22 ,

What you are doing is absolutely right! Putting a note and pinning it seems perfect
Of course deleting a contact is not the right thing to do. As you said you loose all the original timeline history, which can be valuable if they pop up again in the future at another company

In order to keep a track of those contacts what you can do is either create a custom property to give them a label or you can also create a static list directly for these types of contacts.

Hope this helps!
If we were able to answer your query, kindly help the community by marking it as a solution.
Thanks and Regard.

[Arun_Opto22]

Thank You. Nice suggestion about the custom property to filter on or create a list for. Appreciate it.