Method Community

I'm still in my trial period and trying to figure out the best way to handle multiple, large lists of cold/barely warm lists.

A few times a year I receive lists of anywhere from 100 to a few thousand names that usually includes a name but then only some of the following info: company, address, phone, email address. Although the names come from a variety of sources, it's likely that there will be overlap and the same names will show up on multiple lists.

I'd like to keep track of each activity/campaign that "touches" each contact. So, if I send an email blast or send a mailer, I'd like to save that as part of the customer/contact record.

I'd also use the information to use criteria such as city and state to find contacts/customers/leads to build a mailing/emailing list.

Then, assuming I receive a response, I'd be able to associate new opportunities to the existing contact and track it back to the lead source.

So, since the number of these types of cold/barely warm leads could get overwhelming, I wonder if I should even be importing these lists into Method? Or, should I keep the majority of this info outside of Method until they develop into a warmer lead? 

Other than the sheer number of leads that may end up in the database, my other concern is trying to avoid duplicates as much as possible. It looks like the "Name" field is unique. For all of these cold leads where having the same contact on multiple lists is likely, I'm wondering if I should a contact's email address (assuming I have it) to populate the "Name" field so that it won't get entered a second time... or something...

Anyway, I'd appreciate any recommendations as to best practices in this scenario.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Jennifer,

This really depends on how you wish to approach this.  If you were to import each lead, several thousand a year, and few of which become actual leads then you may have thousands of dead leads in Method.  You can certainly do this, then possibly design a screen to 'purge' the list once in awhile.

The bigger concern to me would be the duplicates.  You can use the name field as your key field, but using the email address could become tricky.  The 'Name' field is a field theat is connected to Quickbooks, and therefore will sync over as the customer name when the Lead becomes a Customer.  If you don't want the email address as the customer name, then you'll have to update these later. If you don't have the email, then you'll need to have this field populated with some unique value to import.  Is there anything else that might uniquely identify the contact that you can use as the 'key' field?

- Adam