Selecting a group of contacts for a targetted mailing / campaign

It would probably easier to create a role or a UDF for 'Recieves Information' and then assign it to the contacts at each company you want to contact.

Then you can search on the companies, select them all, retrieve contacts, invert selection, make selected list current. Then narrow the contacts list by 'recieves information' to be left with only the people you want to e-mail.

I've considered that, but the person whom we would like to target isn't always the same for each campaign.

We have roles such as 'Purchaser', 'Manager', 'EndUser' and 'Executive'. Different campaigns will be targetted to different roles, and not all companies have each role (and some have multiples of the same role)

But, I want my campaign to reach every company, so if I'm targetting 'EndUsers' but there aren't any at a particular company, I need to include *someone* from the target company, even if they're a 'Manager'.

Am I asking too much? Maybe I'll just have to implement a policy that every single company needs to have at least one contact that is classified for each of the target groups that I will need.

(I appreciate your suggestion, although I may not sound like it. If you have more I will appreciate them also!)

Hi again.

I can appreciate your quandry.

Unfortunately you're running up against a limitation of the product here. Maximizer is at heart a database program, you have to have data already inputted into the system before you can start to use it.

In this case you are correct, a Primary Contact type role is what you require. We use that policy here at CABC, each company record must have one contact nominated to recieve information.

Well, since I replied, I realized that there are ways that we can make that method work, but they require a little discipline on the part of the users (and me)

I'll see if I can't make it work.

THanks!

Okay, so I've considered this approach, and I think I'm missing something obvious.

I have contacts that are classified as "Primary Mailing Contact" in all companies.

Now if I want to create a campaign that targets all my the primary contacts from all the companies in one specific area (or any other database field, like state, market segment, or company size) then I still have to pre-select the company set, and then Search for all contacts within that set, then narrow down that contact list to only include my "Primary" set of contacts.

I should be able to say "Give me all Primary contacts from all my companies in Germany" and get the list, no?

Is this that obscure a request? If I had to write the query:

select * from company_table as a inner join contact_table as b on a.company = b.company where a.country='Germany' and b.primary=true

Not quite.

You'd do the search to build the list of company records that match the criteria you want include in the campaign. Then you click View>>Select All followed by Search>>Retrieve Contacts, then you click View>>Invert Selection (this moves the selection from the Company Records to the Contact Records) and finally View>>Make Selected List Current.

This gives you a list of all contacts associated with the companies your search turned up.

Once that is done you just need to narrow that list by your Primary Mailing Contact field/role.

CABC:

That's an approach that I've tried, but I guess my question was to see if there isn't a better (read: faster) way of doing it. If it is the best practice, I'll adopt it.

I just ran a test of the campaign that I want to run. Selecting the companies was easy-breezy, there are roughly 5000 in this selection. However, the "Search>> Retrieve Contacts" step took 52 minutes to return 10000 contacts. (exclamation point)

I'm running on a fairly hefty SQL-Server without much network traffic. I doubt that this installation of Max is too far away from the norm.

Does this surprise you? It seems extreme to me, but I have only this as my experience. As a former IT and DB admin, I know that data calls of this nature can be almost instantaneous. In fact, a call to another application's database (on the same server, from the same client machine) can return twice the number of records in under 3 seconds.

Doesn't that performance differential seem odd?