Don't expect much of an audience for this on Lemmy, but:
Maybe it's just the places I've worked, but seems like I'm constantly wading through contacts who are gone - I don't want to delete them because the history could be helpful, but seems like there should be a quick, native way to mark them. Maybe once marked those names are grayed out or something.
My one company had a custom field that you could check, but then there was no special handling of those contacts in terms of how they're displayed - just you could use it to exclude results in reports.
Do you suspect there's a larger reason than they just haven't built in that functionality and don't consider it a priority? What kind of answers are you expecting to get from this community? What reasons have the companies that lacked this feature given you when you asked about it?
To answer your question about answers from this community - I posted in the sales community, which has 20 subscribers, and crossposted to asklemmy. I don't expect most people subscribed to the larger community care or know of CRMs. But I figured it's content, and I want to support lemmy. (and at least it contributes to lemmy appearing in search results)
As for reasons - I can't think of any good ones besides they're printing money and so new features aren't a priority. I suppose also that a lot of sales people aren't the "update records" type of personality so they don't care one way or another. But I'm a process driven person and I care about working efficiently, so it kind of drives me nuts.
Breaking windows isn't beneficial because it keeps the glass manufacturers and installers busy. Rules and purpose descriptions are decided on or dictated to be used to shape the culture of a given community; if we want to just have any-old-content-at-all there would be no reason to have categories like "Movies" and "Pictures" and we could just post and link anything everywhere. Since Ask Lemmy states its purpose is "A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions" I propose a more appropriate version of your question would be more like:
"Why don't companies prioritize tools that increase the efficiency of their workers?"
or
"Why are companies complacent about correcting workplace impediments?"
etc.
Those questions could encompass many industries and can describe digital and physical tools. A pointed "Why doesn't x software work like y" is closer to seeking support than crowdsourcing opinions.
I don’t mean that the contact should be deleted, I think it should still be in the database. For the reason you said, so you can see the history of activity. But I’m saying there should be a way to mark they’re not at that organization anymore. A one click button that flags them as past employee rather than active - and then those contacts are still in the database but displayed differently to make it easier for the sale team to direct their attention.
The database does not include that boolean field that can be queried and acted upon. The front end viewer class doesn't have methods to change the presentation of results. It would require someone to implement those features and that would either cost money or development time.
What's a philosophical equivalent of the above response to your open ended, no specific answer, question?
I get that I'm either the guidance counselor in Clerks searching for the perfect carton or Harry from In Bruges [NSFW], but I still believe that rules and principles are important and there's no reason to have them if they aren't enforced.
According to the rules you’ve mentioned so far, this post adheres to the rules.
So no, you don’t get to invoke rules as a general concept to kill this post. We also think rules are valuable. That’s not a dividing line here.
You just seem to think questions of user experience aren’t open ended or thought-provoking. Perhaps they aren’t to you. But as you can see by the thought-involving, open-ended discussion happening above, they are to other people.