cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12565350
RE: sales CRMs like salesforce or zoho
Don’t expect much of an audience for this on Lemmy, but:
Maybe it’s just the places I’ve worked, but seems like I’m constantly wading through contacts who are gone - I don’t want to delete them because the history could be helpful, but seems like there should be a quick, native way to mark them. Maybe once marked those names are grayed out or something.
My one company had a custom field that you could check, but then there was no special handling of those contacts in terms of how they’re displayed - just you could use it to exclude results in reports.
Do you suspect there’s a larger reason than they just haven’t built in that functionality and don’t consider it a priority? What kind of answers are you expecting to get from this community? What reasons have the companies that lacked this feature given you when you asked about it?
To answer your question about answers from this community - I posted in the sales community, which has 20 subscribers, and crossposted to asklemmy. I don’t expect most people subscribed to the larger community care or know of CRMs. But I figured it’s content, and I want to support lemmy. (and at least it contributes to lemmy appearing in search results)
As for reasons - I can’t think of any good ones besides they’re printing money and so new features aren’t a priority. I suppose also that a lot of sales people aren’t the “update records” type of personality so they don’t care one way or another. But I’m a process driven person and I care about working efficiently, so it kind of drives me nuts.
Breaking windows isn’t beneficial because it keeps the glass manufacturers and installers busy. Rules and purpose descriptions are decided on or dictated to be used to shape the culture of a given community; if we want to just have any-old-content-at-all there would be no reason to have categories like “Movies” and “Pictures” and we could just post and link anything everywhere. Since Ask Lemmy states its purpose is “A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions” I propose a more appropriate version of your question would be more like:
“Why don’t companies prioritize tools that increase the efficiency of their workers?”
or
“Why are companies complacent about correcting workplace impediments?”
etc.Those questions could encompass many industries and can describe digital and physical tools. A pointed “Why doesn’t x software work like y” is closer to seeking support than crowdsourcing opinions.
I’d argue it is open ended - not yes/no, no specific correct answer. Just you’re not interested in the subject, which is fine.
I don’t mean that the contact should be deleted, I think it should still be in the database. For the reason you said, so you can see the history of activity. But I’m saying there should be a way to mark they’re not at that organization anymore. A one click button that flags them as past employee rather than active - and then those contacts are still in the database but displayed differently to make it easier for the sale team to direct their attention.
The database does not include that boolean field that can be queried and acted upon. The front end viewer class doesn’t have methods to change the presentation of results. It would require someone to implement those features and that would either cost money or development time.
What’s a philosophical equivalent of the above response to your open ended, no specific answer, question?
Nah I like the specific question better. Not that I have an answer, sorry, but I was happy reading it.
I get that I’m either the guidance counselor in Clerks searching for the perfect carton or Harry from In Bruges [NSFW], but I still believe that rules and principles are important and there’s no reason to have them if they aren’t enforced.
This highly depends on the philosophy of the CRM. But in most of the companies i worked for this is actually a desired thing. But this is for companies who track persons/individuals.
The thing is: it sometimes is hard to track and keep the record up to date, even if you have a data broker involved.
So either the company lost track of this individual or doesn’t care about individuals and only keeps track of the „responsible person“.
I built a couple of bespoke CRMs in the early 00’s and built this option in by using a separate table for companies and individuals, then associating them, which made add/remove with a button trivial.
I look at current SaaS CRM’s and shake my head; we’ve gone backwards.
Motherfuckers act like they forgot about has_many_through
In your companies where this was considered desirable, what was the reason?
Your second line is why I think it’s a needed feature - as a salesperson if I open an account and look for the best contacts, I’m going to find of all the people listed a ton of them aren’t there anymore.
Once I’ve done the work of looking up their linkedin or whatever, it would be great if there was a one click button to store that knowledge for future sales reps (and my future self).
Instead I have the option to 1) delete the contact - not desirable because would be good to know what previous conversations we had with them or 2) modify the contact record in some way to store that information.
Which I do now, but it’s cumbersome (I replace the title with an “x” and put their old title and email in the description field, so hopefully they’re not getting a bunch of hard bounces if added to marketing emails) and the changes I make are ad hoc, other people may not know that my notations mean the contact isn’t there anymore, and it doesn’t make skimming a list of people easier in terms of directing attention.
Oh, and some tips regarding getting this functionality. It might be already implemented but you don’t know about that or don’t have the rights. Open s ticket and ask support.
But i guess nobody actually thought about it. Ask your peers if they find it useful as well. The more the merrier. (First question the GM or ceo asks me: is is relevant?). If so, get your regional manager involved. Maybe you have „power user“ for the crm, get them involved, too.
Then contact your crm manager and discuss this idea. It might even be a nice project that looks good on your resume or development plan.
I am probably the person who decides the strategy and gives the order to implement it.
So, why would i want it? For many reasons, but one is activity history. I have this person in my CRM for a reason. And the person probably has been visited already. So i can lookup previous calls (maybe even from a different sales representative).
Another thing - if your contact changes, you presume the next role will be either something similar or a bit up. Time to visit an old friend, i guess, and tie your bond again.
Expense and sample tracking was another reason, as my market is strictly regulated and a person cannot recieve more than a certain amount per year.
Ah, I think we’re talking past each other.
I don’t mean that the contact should be deleted, I think it should still be in the database. For the reason you said, so you can see the history of activity. But I’m saying there should be a way to mark they’re not at that organization anymore. A one click button that flags them as past employee rather than active - and then those contacts are still in the database but displayed differently to make it easier for the sale team to direct their attention.
If the data on the contact, email address, phone, cell phone, is all tied to their former company, and they are no longer with that company, the data is useless and they should be deleted.
Unless you want a record of previous communication, and which email or phone number it went to.
I’ve used some CRMs with features like this, but at least in one of them it only existed because I had to create it when we had a contact jump from one important client company to another and it confused everyone.
If they don’t work for that company anymore, they should be removed as contact.
And yet you might want a record of communications. Hence the post.
If you’re talking about users, Salesforce you toggle active/inactive. You actually can’t delete them, unfortunately. If you’re talking about Contacts, there are probably a number of standard, out of the box fields you could use, but a good setup will have a picklist or a checkbox or whatever you want. You can also delete contacts, but it’s a good policy to keep data around for a while and then archive it instead of just deleting stuff straight up.
Am Salesforce admin. Happy to answer any Salesforce related questions.
Yes, I think all the contacts should be retained, because those interactions are useful information. And at the one company we did have a custom checkbox field for “not at the company anymore”, but I would really like that information to change the way the records are displayed. Like if I’m looking at an account page, and I’m looking at the list of contacts, the ones who are still there should be listed first, and the people who are gone should be grayed out or something. Having to open each record one at a time is cumbersome, and the page load times are so bad.
So in Salesforce that IS possible. An admin, using Lightning App, could for example create a filter on some fields so that they’re shown or hidden depending on the value of other fields. It would only be possible using the Lightning App builder since that gives you the most tools–standard page layouts don’t let you filter viewability of values like that. Alternatively, though, you COULD make an “inactive contact” page layout & corresponding record type and just change the record type either manually or using a Flow (or workflow) whenever the contact is marked ‘inactive’.
EDIT: Your admin can also modify what fields are shown on a Related List. So you can be on Account, looking at related Contacts, and have the Inactive field prominently displayed on that related list, and sortable. Again, this is assuming you operate out of Lightning, not Classic.
What values do you have under Lead Status?
In the two organizations I’ve been at we didn’t use the lead object at all, it was all contacts. At the one place we did have a custom checkbox field for “no longer at the company” but that didn’t change how the contacts were displayed at all.
Ahh… kk… so there is a less often used field for contact stage as well. Iirc Left Company is a default but I may have inherited that from stages syncing after deploying Outreach
