New: Lead settings – own leads, soft delete and anonymization

✨ We're excited to announce a new settings page that lets you, as an administrator, define centrally how your company handles leads: Settings → Leads. You'll find three topics there: whether your company creates leads of its own, how deleted leads are treated (soft delete), and how you anonymize leads – by hand or automatically after a retention period.

Until now, a deleted lead was gone immediately and irreversibly, and personal data stayed in closed or stale leads until someone deleted them. From now on you decide both yourself – to match your processes and your data protection requirements.

What's new?

The page Settings → Leads is available to administrators and has two tabs.

Tab “Own leads”

Here you define whether your company creates and manages leads itself. With the switch off, the lead-creation areas – New lead, Lead import, Lead inbox and Transferred leads – are hidden from all coworkers. This is meant for companies that only accept leads as sales partners and don't need the lead-creation menu items. Leads arriving via interfaces (API, Zapier) are not affected by this setting. For all existing companies the switch is on – so nothing changes in your navigation. Pure sales partners that don't create leads of their own can switch it off and tidy up their navigation.

Tab “Deletion behaviour”: soft delete

With soft delete, a deleted lead is no longer removed at once but scheduled for deletion. It disappears from lists, search, map and reports for all coworkers and sales partners – but is kept in the background until it is deleted for good.

• Retention period – either a period of 1 to 90 days, after which scheduled leads are deleted for good automatically, or no expiry: scheduled leads then stay until an administrator deletes them for good or restores them.
• List “Scheduled for deletion” – shows all scheduled leads with the time of deletion, the deleting coworker and the remaining time. Per lead you can restore it (it reappears everywhere as before) or delete it for good now, for instance for a GDPR erasure request. “Delete all” deletes the list's whole current selection – search and filters included – for good.
• List “Deleted” – logs leads deleted for good by their ID and timestamps, without personal data. You can see whether a lead was deleted immediately, after the retention period or by an administrator.
• Connected systems receive the “LeadDeleted” event only on final deletion, not when a lead is scheduled.

With soft delete off, everything stays as it was: a deleted lead is deleted immediately and irreversibly.

Tab “Deletion behaviour”: anonymization

Anonymization makes a lead privacy-safe without deleting it: the fields you marked are replaced by the placeholder “Anonymized”; activities, notes and files are removed. The lead stays in all lists, in search and in reports with its sales history – so your figures remain complete – but can no longer be edited. It carries the chip “Anonymized” everywhere, and its journal contains an entry with the time of anonymization.

You decide which fields are anonymized:

• In the form editor, mark per field with the option “Anonymize field” which data of your lead form is to be masked – typically salutation, first and last name, email, phone and address.
  
• In your sales pipelines, mark outcome fields that may contain personal data the same way.
• The settings page shows all marked fields at a glance and warns you when contact fields are not marked yet. Anonymization cannot be switched on without at least one marked field.

How to anonymize a lead: With the function switched on, coworkers with edit rights find the new action “Anonymize” in the action menu of the lead page, and in the lead lists it is available as a bulk action for several leads at once. A confirmation dialog explains what happens. The action cannot be undone.

What stays protected: A lead that is currently being distributed, has an open offer, or is still actively worked by a sales partner or coworker cannot be anonymized. The application names the reason in that case, so nobody's work is taken away under their hands. An anonymized lead can later be deleted like any other.

Keeping track: The list “Anonymized” on the settings page shows all anonymized leads of your company with time and originator. The lead lists also offer the filter “Anonymized” to show or hide anonymized leads.

Integrations: After an anonymization, connected systems receive the updated, masked values through the usual events for changed lead data, so copies in your systems can be cleaned up as well.

Automatic anonymization

So that personal data doesn't linger unnoticed, leadtributor can anonymize leads of certain categories automatically after a retention period. You switch on each category individually and give it its own period in days:

• Stale leads – leads that were never processed: no commission, no running distribution. The period counts from the last change to the lead, its notes, tasks or appointments.
• Withdrawn leads – leads whose commissions were all withdrawn or cancelled, without an outcome. The period counts from the end of the last processing.
• Lost and won leads – leads with an outcome. Here too the period counts from the end of the last processing, so a second sales partner who works the lead later is not interrupted.

Next to each switched-on category you immediately see how many leads the next run would anonymize – the number follows your input, even before you save. A click on the number opens the list of exactly those leads, so you can check in advance what would be affected. The run takes place every night; leads in a running distribution or with an active commission wait until processing has ended. When a category is first switched on, the whole overdue backlog is anonymized in the first run. Automatically anonymized leads appear in the list “Anonymized” with the originator “Automatic (period)”.

Who may do what?

• The page Settings → Leads and the three lists are seen and used by administrators only.
• The action “Anonymize” follows the same rule as deleting: it is available to the owner of a lead with edit rights. In the new (coming soon) permissions management it can be granted as its own right, “Anonymize leads”.
• Sales partners see anonymized leads with the chip “Anonymized” and the masked values; they don't see the settings page.

Data protection

Soft delete and anonymization are two tools for your GDPR deletion concepts that can be combined: soft delete protects against accidental deletion and gives you a recovery period; anonymization removes personal data from leads you want to keep for your analyses. Before switching on, check that all fields with personal data are marked – the settings page points out unmarked contact fields. With no-expiry retention of scheduled leads, keep in mind that their data remains stored until final deletion.

What do you need to do?

Nothing, if you don't want to change anything: soft delete and anonymization are off initially, deleting works as before, and “Own leads” is on for all existing companies. If you want to use the new options, we recommend this order:

1. In the form editor and your sales pipelines, mark the fields with personal data with “Anonymize field”.
2. Open Settings → Leads → Deletion behaviour, switch on Anonymization and check the field overview.
3. Decide whether you want to use soft delete with or without a retention period.
4. If needed, switch on automatic anonymization per category – and have a look at the preview first to see how many leads the first run would affect.