Keywords: salesforce.com, search, find, filter, contact filtering, lead filtering, exception search
Would you like to know the people in your salesforce.com database who haven’t been contacted in a while? Particularly the ones who have given you repeat business? Sales managers know that it’s a lot easier to keep existing customers than to acquire new ones, so it’s critical to maintain and nurture customer relationships. One way to ensure this is to periodically find such “neglected” contacts, make sure to call or reach out to them and keep them aware of your product or service.
From the technical perspective, finding such contact records amounts to retrieving those records for which there are no related tasks or events in the recent past, where “recent” might mean “the last two months” or “the last year” depending on your business. Unfortunately, with the search tools available within salesforce.com, it is not very easy to find such contact records. One of our clients asked us precisely this question: Can we use Apsona for Salesforce to find these contact records?
Fortunately, the answer is yes, we can. Apsona includes the ability to filter your data records in many ways. In particular, you can create a filter (i.e., a set of search criteria) on an object, and then apply that filter to restrict the data on a related object. In this example, we can:
Finding neglected contacts (3 min 50 sec)
- create a filter on the Task object, one that retrieves recent tasks that have been completed; and
- apply the negation of that filter on the Contact object, i.e., asking for Contacts that have no such related tasks.
View the video on the right to get a more detailed perspective on how this is done.
With Apsona, you can use this technique with any object that has associated tasks or events. For instance, you might want to find Opportunities, Leads or Accounts that have had no recent activities. You can also use this technique to find Contacts or Leads that have not been part of any of your campaigns, or those that have been excluded from specific campaigns that you choose.
We think Apsona’s search and filtering is one if its most powerful features. And we’d love to get your feedback on it. Please try it out—visit our AppExchange listing, install it and use our free 30-day trial. Please let us know what you think.
