11-11-2013 12:12 PM
I am using ACT Pro 2013, Version 184.108.40.206, I use a local database on my Windows 7 Professional computer. I am not sure there is a way to do this, but this is my wish list. Is there a way to identify contacts that have a certain number of note entry dates? In my business if I have maybe 1-3 notes in the file, and no more than this, and the contact create date is over a certain age, I can probably delete this entire contact. Question is, how do I sort to find contacts that meet this criteria? I hope it is possible and that someone has the answer?
11-12-2013 11:37 AM
I was thinking through this question and am forced to ask why you would want to delete a contact. Granted, I do not know your business or what a contact represents.
So, just from my perspective, once I came across a contact that had fewer than 3 notes and no contact over a certain age, I would just change the ID/Status to something meaningful - in my case it would be Prospect to Suspect.
It is my opinion that once a contact, always a contact. Deleting contacts removes the opportunity for reviewing any information, whether notes or history, should that contact resurface. I'm thinking of people who change jobs. What a good question to ask, are you the same Edward Snowden who used to spy on the NSA? It shows you remembered something important about them.
While there is no way to count the number of notes, you might want to consider doing a lookup on Last Reach date field for anything older than a year. From there you can step through the contacts for those with fewer than 3 notes. You can export the list, but you can't export the notes field so that you could do a count.
Thinking forward without buying any software, I might suggest that you create a new activity type and results called "Notes". Then you can do a lookup of last reached of over 1 year. That will give you a list. Export that to Excel and use a pivot table or other means to find out which ones that had 3 or fewer "Notes" in the activity history.
Other than this, you could certainly reach out to one of the learned ACT consultants who could possibly write a program to interrogate the ACT db for you.