Cookbook
Retire a dead account without losing its history
A customer that has gone away should stop cluttering your lists without taking three years of history with it.
The situation
An account is finished. Acquired, wound up, churned. It is in every list you look at, in every count you take, and deleting it would throw away the only record of a relationship you spent two years building.
What must be true when you are done
- It is out of your working lists and your counts.
- Its history is intact and readable when somebody asks.
- Why it went is written down while somebody still remembers.
- You can bring it back if it comes back.
Write down why first
Do this before archiving, not after, because after is when it does not happen. The reason an account ended is the single most useful thing about it a year later, and it lives in somebody's head for about a week.
You
Kestrel Shipping got acquired by a competitor, no renewal. Note that on the account, then retire it.
Agent
What archiving does
It leaves your ordinary lists and your counts. It does not leave the workspace.
You
Show me the companies. Then show me Kestrel anyway.
Agent
Everything attached to it is still there and still linked. Ask what happened with Kestrel in eighteen months and you get the answer, including the note you wrote in the minute you still knew it.
This is why the product has no delete for a record. Deleting is available for a whole workspace, on purpose and with a waiting period, and for one person's data when they ask for it. For an account that merely ended, deletion destroys the thing you would want.
Bring it back
Acquisitions unwind and churned customers return. Restoring is one instruction and the record comes back whole rather than as a fresh one with the same name.
You
Kestrel are buying again under the new owner. Bring them back.
Agent
The deals, the contacts and the history are the ones they always had, so the relationship reads continuously rather than starting again at zero.
Verify it
- Take a count. Your pipeline and your company count should both have dropped by the account you retired. If they did not, you archived something else.
- Ask for the archived record by name. It should come back, marked as archived, with its interactions.
Run it again
Quarterly, as a pass rather than one at a time. Ask your agent for accounts with no open deal and no contact in a year, read the list, and retire the ones that are genuinely over. The list is usually longer than you expect.