Don’t be Scared to Delete your (bad) Leads

By Lisa Heay, Senior Marketing Consultant for Heinz Marketing
It’s October – the time for pumpkin spice, corn mazes, trick or treating, and spooky stories. Speaking of spooky stories, here’s one you might have heard before.  Marketing operations approaches sales and says, “Hey – I want to clean up our database, and I plan to delete a whole bunch of leads.”  THE HORROR!
From my experience, nothing scares sales more than deleting leads.  Well, maybe it’s not hitting their quota, but deleting leads has got to be a close second.  What if we delete someone that is interested?  What if we don’t have enough leads to work?  What if we need to comb through the notes on that lead?  Or look through the activity history?  What if they are unsubscribed, we re-import them again, and email them by accident??  We’d better keep ALL the leads that have ever entered our database.  Just.