Overview

Books of Business and territory alignment changes happen all the time, and we have an article here to help account admins to prepare for this eventuality.  Another eventuality, of course, is Contact transitions.  This article will help you consider your options and ensure your records are maintained exactly as you'd like them!

My contact no longer works at X Account.  What do I do?

Depending on role permissions, you may be able to edit a record that you own.  As a best practice, we recommend two steps:

1. Remove the Account association
2. Remove yourself as the owner

If you find that your edit options are limited, please follow up with your Admin or Manager so that they can make these changes on your behalf.

A note about deleting records

It's very tempting to delete a record that's no longer immediately valuable to yourself or your rep, but if we pause for a moment you'll see why it's not a process we generally recommend.  Consider the following before you delete records from your application:

• Deleting a record, as you would imagine, clears it from the system entirely.  This means that, where there was previously context and history now there is a "hole" in the data.  When holes are punched into the data, we can no longer effectively tell the story of your work over time.  Even though that contact is not currently active, you still want those historic activities in your system so that you get credit for your body of work!
• Instead, removing ownership and association allows the record to live in the All Contacts view without having to carry the record as part of your active book of business.
• "Orphaned" Contacts can be reassigned to new Accounts in the future - it happens frequently that a Contact leaves one office but stays within the business, and so may turn up in someone else's Account soon!  This is an incredible boon for your team, as all of the context and history is now available for your Owner to use.

If, after due consideration, it is necessary to delete a record please note: any referral or activity history attached to an Account or Contact must be removed before that record can be deleted.

Manager Toolkit

If you'd like to expand your workflow beyond removing ownership and association, here are a few more options for customization:

• Use the Find Unassociated Contacts or Find Unowned Contacts feature to maintain visibility on these records over time.
• If you find that you have a larger cohort of unassociated contacts that you'd like to maintain, you can create Account buckets to house these contacts temporarily.  Our Parent Accounts and Cold Call Documentation articles provide great examples of Account bucket options. 
• If your company has a House Account user, assign unowned Accounts or Contacts to that user.  House Accounts can be leveraged for visibility through the AE Detail reports!
• If desired, you can also create custom objects to capture details on Contact status like Archived User or Do Not Call.

Learn More

• Associating Contacts to Accounts
• Role Management
• Merging Best Practices
• Managing your Team with Spark Reports