How to Deal With Inactive Contacts in Salesforce.com

Left CompanyOut of the box, Salesforce.com does not give us a way to flag Leads or Contacts as inactive, as ones that we should not market to or call any longer. Because we look to maintain accurate Account history and Campaign reporting, when a person leaves their company we don’t recommend deleting their Contact record or changing the Account that the Contact is associated with. Instead we suggest adding a checkbox called “Left Company” to the top right corner of your Lead and Contact Layouts.

This allows you to:

  • Add a filter to all marketing list Reports to exclude Leads or Contacts that have left their companies from new marketing initiatives
  • Use filters in Lead or Contact Views to focus on people who haven’t left
  • Add the Left Company field to the Search Page Layouts for Contacts and Leads so that your Users can quickly identify who’s gone
  • Edit the Account Page Layout’s Contact Related List to be reverse sorted on the Left Company field (Ascending), so that people who have left fall to the bottom of the list (see screenshot below)

Add Left Company Field to Contact Related List

We work with a lot of companies that have had Salesforce.com for five, six, seven or more years. This leads to a sizable amount of long gone Lead and Contact crud that builds up in the database, without a great way of dealing with it. When introducing a Left Company field, be sure to train your Users, explaining the overall benefit to the company (and to themselves) in flagging those who have moved on. Marketing will no longer waste their budget, and Sales won’t waste their breath!

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February 26, 2012

David Carnes - Founder & CEO

about the author

David Carnes

David’s role as Chairman & Chief Digital Evangelist is centered around driving meaningful client engagement and business development. The key to this is serving as an advisor to OpFocus’ SaaS clients as they scale their revenue operations and embrace digital transformation.

In his early career, David worked in IT and operations for software companies, developing an interest in CRM, marketing automation, and analytics while building out systems, processes, data, and reporting for the business teams he supported. He earned a Masters in Software Engineering and credits a Harvard summer class in database management for opening his eyes to what systems could do to support operations. In founding OpFocus in 2006 David took another step toward focusing on business operations, seizing on Salesforce’s vision and never looking back.

David is a frequent speaker at Salesforce and Salesforce community events around the world, mentors through the Trailblazer Mentorship Program hosts Dashboard Dōjō, and serves as a Platform Champion and a Pi-TaP board member. Due to his involvement in the trailblazer community, David’s recently been awarded the position of Salesforce MVP!