What is the suggested way to set items other than leads to dead?

[jspencer]

What is the suggested way to set items other than leads to a "dead" status?

I know I could easily add a new field to accounts and contacts to duplicate the "status" field from Leads, but why isn't this already in the CRM?

Expanding on the idea, I think it would also be great to relate all entities (contacts, leads, proposals, etc) using this field, so that if it is set in say the Account, it propagates to all other related items. It would make it SOOO much easier for users to simply make this change in one place and be done with it. Having it integrated would also allow users to exclude anything marked as dead when using List views.

Oh, and please don't suggest using the 'Delete' button as that would make it impossible to search for existing items when deciding if a new prospect has already been contacted, and it would hide items from users doing reviews of their past activities.

I guess my question could be re-worded as: how do you handle the situation of say an Account that is no longer active and doesn't want to buy from you, but you still want their information easily searchable and accessable for historical purposes?

[jspencer]

FYI, I did do a search before posting this and the closest I could find was this post.

[avadtechnologies]

If it is important that people can not add / change the item you could create a new module the mirrors the accounts module (We created one for vendors) and just export / import to it and then give non-admins read only access.

I suck at programming and have no idea how...but I am pretty sure you could create a button to automate the process.

Not sure if that is what your looking for.. just an idea.

[jspencer]

Just so others looking for this option know, my solution was to just do my suggested custom "status" field and add it to the views/searched as needed to make it useful for my sales team.

I still think this should be added as a feature reques. It seems silly that only a Lead has a status out of the box as any CRM entity could go inactive eventually and would just muddy up the CRM if you couldn't easily filter out "inactive" items...

[jjwdesign]

Jay,

The way that I approached it was to create several users on which leads, contacts, accounts could be assigned to. For example: "Dead Leads and Targets" user, "Converted" User, "Marketing" user. With the combination of status and user, you can satisfy just about any situation.

Real Life Case: Management only wants minimum Leads to be shown to sales. As soon as a sales person converts a lead to contact and account, you can mark the Lead as Status "Converted" and assign it to the "Converted" user. This way the sales person no longer needs to see this object in their Leads. I went ahead and automated my process to reassign Leads based on the Status field using a nightly 'cron' job. It has made everyone happy.

Also, by assigning to different users your Leads are still there. This means that duplicate import checking will still work well. You can also reassign them again later for followup or for additional marketing campaigns.

Cheers,
Jeff Walters