Best practice for people who have left the company

Rick,

I'd argue that once they've moved to a new organization, their past activity history at their last organization isn't all that relevant anymore, as it's an entirely new buying cycle. You could probably rig up some fancy logic in Salesforce to reconcile the old contact record with a new account, but my instinct would be to mark the old contact with a "no longer at company" flag, and create a new lead/contact at the new account accordingly.

That said, I can understand why you'd want to know their new information so that you could begin working them as a lead at their new organization. There isn't a real silver bullet to doing this within Marketo, it really involves the contact offering up that information to you. That said, you could build a program targeting "returning customers", which basically exists to allow a customer who has moved to a new company to voluntarily share their new information and get back into your pipeline and on your sales team's radar.

It would be best to outsource the history/vitals/particulars of a contact to an external organisation (data.com/linkedin/etc.). 

Rick, at least for SFDC Contacts, their history (campaigns, opportunities, etc.) are all associated with their previous company).  If you change the email address to the new company and ostensibly the Account Name to the new Account, that data will be incorrectly associated with the newAccount and that can confuse your metrics. 

When a lead leaves their company, we change their Lead Status to "Gone" and this changes their revenue cycle model stage to "Bogus Info".  This effectively retires the Lead / Contact record, but preserves its history that is associated with the previous company.  Then when the person goes to their new company and fills out a form with their new email address and company name, we create a new Contact / Lead record associated with the new Account.  We also generate a Name Duplicate created alert, so that if we didn't know that they left their previous company, we can change the Lead Status to "Gone" on the old record.

If you have too many leads changing companies frequently and your sales team can't remember that they were at a previous company, you could add a lookup field with a link to their record at their old company.  You could also give them more points in their score, etc. reflecting their prior history.

I agree with Jeff and Elliott on the general approach to tracking people as they move to new firms. If they are at a new firm, they may have a completely different set of responsibilities and needs that their previous history will not tell you about.

For data cleanliness, you must keep the old records and not modify them other than marking the person as "Gone" (please only use  lead status, I hate it when sales puts "zzzz" or "NLWF" in the name).

The other point is that, legally, a NEW email address is treated as a separate person for spam laws. Have they filled in a form and asked for your emails from their new email address? Be careful with this.

I know this conversation is from a while ago but curious, Elliott, how do you do this? (Detect the duplicate creation... is this happening in Marketo?)

Hi Alison,

Please see the article  "Get Alerts for New Duplicate Leads"

I hope this helps,

Rachel

Thank you Rachel!