When all else fails – look for the obvious

Our sales team had an issue today.

Earlier in the day they had been able to mail merge a list of leads and email it, but suddenly that stopped working.

I tried it from my machine – not working.

I checked the leads and some didn’t have email addresses, so I tried to merge on ones WITH email addresses – Still no joy.

Maybe there is a problem with the template – So we re-created it. Nothing.

Apply all the updates – Not that either.

Slept on it.

Thought this morning that maybe there was something wrong with the leads (That we were trying to merge from), so I created a dummy lead – IT WORKED!!

What was different about all the other leads? They were ALL set to ‘Do Not Email’!! – The sales team had set a good amount of these leads to ‘Do Not Email’ for some reason, and forgot to mention it.

To be fair – I should have checked that first, because the bottom line was, it had worked, nothing changed in terms of the CRM system,and now it wasn’t working. What I should have checked 1st was the parts that could have changed, which were the leads.

Lesson #1 – Always check the obvious.
Lesson #2  - Check Lesson #1 again.