Solving for Assistant Emails

[Anonymous]

I posed this questions last year, but thought I'd bring it up again for additional feedback:

In our industry, financial services, the assistants of our clients are often times the more active users of our website.  They are also consistently being asked to be added to our distribution lists for Marketing & Sales emails.

At first, we were adding these assistants to our CRM, Salesforce, as Contacts so that they could be included; but with so much turnover, we fear it could junk up our database.

My questions related to assistants are: (1) How have other organizations solved for assistants as it pertains to Lead Scoring and Web Activity, and (2) How have they solved for adding/not adding assistants into their databases/distribution lists?

[Anonymous]

Andrew,

If the assistants are considered a decision maker in your sales processes, I'd argue you absolutely should include them in your database. As far as keeping the data up to date and avoiding junk from popping up, you might want to consider doing quarterly or annual data cleanup campaigns where you're offering some sort of incentive to encourage your contacts to self-update their information & add any new contacts. 

We've also employed a checkbox on all our contacts for marking contacts no longer at the company. This pulls them out of email campaigns similarly to how the marketing suspension/opt out lists work. You can't totally automate this cleanup though, a lot of the responsibility falls to your sales & AM teams.