I'm trying to determine the best way to use DL across "departments". We're currently using it as our primary CRM for our support and administration activities. We maintain all the information on current customers within DL.

Now, we want to start using DL for sales and marketing-related activities. Including using pipelines and opportunities etc.

My question is this: How are other people using DL across "departments" for this? For example, we're about to start a marketing campaign targetting roughly 1000 local businesses. We want to manage this using pipelines: 1) send letter, 2) follow up phone call, 3) appointment for demo etc.

On the other hand, the majority of the other people using DL for day to day activities for support our current customer base of 200 clients don't really want to see 1000+ new contacts and organizations suddenly populating the database just because we happened to send them a mailing.

We've considered setting up smart lists for departments so that they'll have lists for Current Customers and Prospects. Someone else suggested setting up an entirely separate database for use with prospects in the marketing cycle, so that the support staff would never have to see prospects. That sounds nice, except I couldn't use tools to turn opportunities into projects etc cross databases.

I'd like any thoughts on using DL in this manner.

Thanks,
Matt Zarbatany