What to do when a contact leaves a company?

[maxclark]

Hey 👋

What do you do when a contact leaves a company?

• I don't want to remove the association with the company so we can keep the history, etc...
• I also don't want to change their name, or email address (makes searching not ideal
• It would be nice to have a visual indicator that they've left, don't email, etc...

What's the correct way of dealing with this in HubSpot?

Thanks!

[KLawrence9]

We also want to keep the contact so we can have a clear history of what that person's role was in specific projects. We leave in HubSpot, unsubscribe them from all marketing emails, and we set contact status as inactive - do not delete. I am wondering why we would need to disassociate from the company? 

[GOtabor]

you do not have to remove the contact details because they might be helpful in the future should there be any eventuality that will warrant getting their contact details to reach or locate them. Hence, they have collaborated with the company and know everything about the establishment, it is prudent to have every ex-employee of an organisation contained in a separate file. who knows, things might occur that will make you look for the details someday. I hope this help.

[pgarcia2]

Would remove the contact name. But not the company's information.

[pgarcia2]

I do not want to remove the contact information. So That busines will continue

[CWheywell]

I usually changed to unassigned but add into the lifecycle and indicate ex-employee 

[MZimo]

This is a huge issue for us, because it's one of the important relationships we track in the CRM. Ironically, HubSpot vanilla is rather weak when it comes to documenting different types of relationships/associations. What we ended up doing is creating a custom object called "relationship" to associate the contact with the former company. For former employees, we have a relationship type called "Former employee" that we associate the contact and company with. That way the contact record will be associated with the current company, but we keep the historical relationship. We also use the relationship object to track investor relationships, mentor/mentee, family, company spinouts, board membership, etc.  Hopefully, this will just be a temporary solution, and HubSpot will allow us to create association labels between two records of the same object (i.e., contact-to-contact, company-to-company) and then sort by association labels.

[Jnix284]

@maxclark we have a lead status for "left company" and our contact views all filter this out as a default filter so we don't have to worry about finding the wrong one. 

Hope this helps get you a little closer to the solution that will work best for you!

[Olivia_Bagnall]

@maxclark Great question Max! 

Disassociating a contact from a Company record does NOT remove the contact's historic data from the company record.  Also a contact's email address often changes once they leave a company. 

In this case, I would personally disassociate the contact from the company and opt the contact out of all email communication (that is if the email doesn't start bouncing anyway) 

I actually don't see the reasoniing why you would leave an ex-employee associated to a company given the info above. In the name of a clean CRM I would remove the association and opt them out. 

You can opt them out by clicking on 'Actions' next to their name on their contact record and then on 'opt out of all email'. 

I hope this helps! Let me know what you think 

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @maxclark,

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!

[maxclark]

Is there a way to suppress/differentiate the results on a search? For example, if I had

Karsten Köhler @ Salesforce (old/inactive)

Karsten Köhler @ HubSpot (new/active)

If I search for Karsten by default I wouldn't want to see the Salesforce result (or at least know it was not the right record)

Or do you deal with this just by having the top note being that the record has been replaced with a new one?

[karstenkoehler]

Correct, @maxclark. Unless you delete the contact, they will show up in search.

Best regards!