Best Practice for removing a contact record who is no longer with their company but has activity history I don't want to delete??? [ Edited ]

[C3]

I'm wondering what others are doing when a contact is no longer with a company. In some cases there are email communications that may be important down the road.   I have the Salesforce Professional Edition. Do I create a separate db within Salesforce so I can view old history??  Any suggestions?

Message Edited by C3 on 02-14-2008 04:18 PM

[JulieG]

For our organization, I created a custom field - check box, titled, "no longer with company" - if the contact leaves the company, they can simply mark the checkbox - we don't delete contacts either, want to keep the history.  We found that this is a good way to manage our contacts.

Julie

[timmadigan]

We have the status field picklist track whether the contact is active on the account, inactive but still with the company or is no longer with the company.  This allows us to keep all the historical records / e-mails while allowing us to sort them off or down  the related list page.

[Dako]

Hi Julie

We have done the same thing within our organization. However we do have an issue when synchronizing Salesforce.com with outlook where we would like to avoid getting the contacts "No longer with company" synchronized to outlook. Is this something that you have solved or do you have the same issue?

/martin 

[JulieG]

Hi Martin,

Well, we have Lotus Notes (Yeah I know.....too bad for us....) and we have had a lot of issues with sync'ing, so our users only synch their calendars.....not contacts.

Julie

[Dako]

Hi Julie Okay, thank you for getting back to me. Best regards martin

[Consultor]

I have created a new Account called EX-CONTACTS-UNKNOWNED COMPANY and when we know a Contact does not work any more in a Company, we change the Account for that Contact and relate it to the EX-CONTACTS-UNKNOWNED COMPANY Account.

All e-mails and Activities are kept.

I hope this helps.

[JCoppedge]

I ran into this issue as well.  At my past organization we just put FORMER (or FRM) in front of the person's title and left the contact on the account.  I think creating a field to indicate is a much cleaner solution.

As far as contact sync is concerned, the account owner will sync all contacts on the account- so I don't see a solution to that problem.

[ftchang]

We are having the same issue, but here's a twist-- what if that person leaves, and goes to another company you track.  Do you:

A. Change their organization

(but then all the communication and any connections to that person now connect to that other company) 

B. Mark "no longer at company" as mentioned above, and create new entry for that person in new company

(but then there are now 2 entries for that person) 

C.   ok, I'm trying to think of a good third option.  That's why I'm on this board.  any thoughts?  

- Fred 

[JCoppedge]

The best alternative I can think of would be to create another object such as contact roles.  You could then use this to definte many different roles that the contact has had with different accounts.  To do this create a many-to-many relationship between contact and account (contact -- contact role -- account).  Use a master-detail relationship (contact role --> contact).

When your contact changes companies, update the contact's information and move them onto the new account.  On that same contact, create a contact role with the title and info that points to the old account.  Add a check box like "currently employed" so that it is obvious they no longer work there.  You would also be able to use this for contacts that have roles on mutliple accounts (instead of duplicating the contact).

A few notes:

1. I would recommend using an auto-number for the contact role object as the name field must be first in the related list, which means the title would be listed before the contact name in related lists.

2. All activities associated with the contact will appear on the new account ONLY

There might be a way to use a roll up and 2nd formula to create a list of titles/roles for marketing purposes; haven't played with that yet.