The rep offboarding checklist: keep the book when the rep leaves

When a rep resigns, the handover meeting covers the active deals: the six or eight opportunities everyone can name. Then everyone goes back to work, and the rest of the book (hundreds of contacts, the "call me in Q3" promises, the proposals awaiting a nudge) transfers to nobody. It doesn't get lost dramatically. It gets archived by neglect, one deactivated login at a time.

Turnover is normal. Losing the book is a choice, made by not making one. This checklist is the alternative; it takes a few hours in the week notice lands and a half-day audit a month later. If your portal has already absorbed a few departures without it, the last section covers the archaeology.

The week notice lands

• Export the full owned book, not just open deals: every contact, company, deal, and task the rep owns, with last-activity dates. This is the map of what's about to go quiet, and it's also your baseline for the 30-day audit.
• Capture the verbal book while the rep is still friendly: which buyers said "next quarter," which proposals are awaiting a decision, which relationships are warm but unlogged. Thirty minutes of structured questions, written into the records themselves, not into a doc that dies in a drive. Useful prompts: which five deals would you work first if you stayed? Who owes you a reply? Who did you promise something to?
• Log the promises: any commitment made to a buyer (a callback date, a revised quote, an intro) becomes a dated task on the record, now, while someone can still remember it. A buyer who was promised a revised quote and hears nothing draws conclusions about the whole company, not the departed rep.
• Keep the login active until reassignment is done. Deactivating on the last day orphans everything at once and turns reassignment into archaeology. Read access for the manager is enough; sending rights can end immediately.

Reassignment rules

• Reassign by record, not in bulk. A bulk transfer moves ownership without moving responsibility. The receiving rep inherits four hundred names and reads none of them. Route active deals to named reps, aging-but-alive records to whoever owns nurture, and genuinely dead records to an honest closed state.
• Match load to capacity. The instinct is to give the book to the best rep, who is also the busiest rep, which converts a stranded book into a technically-owned-but-untouched one. Splitting by segment across two or three people beats one heroic inheritance.
• Every reassigned open deal gets a re-introduction task with a date. The new rep's first touch acknowledges the change ("I'm picking this up from Sam, and I've read the whole thread") rather than pretending continuity. Buyers forgive a handover; they don't forgive being forgotten, and they notice being restarted from zero.
• Renewals get checked by name. Ownerless renewals inside 90 days are the most expensive records in any departure: revenue already won, quietly up for grabs.
• Write down who received what. The one-page reassignment map is what makes the 30-day audit possible.

Thirty days later, audit

• Filter for records still owned by the deactivated user. The correct count is zero; the actual count is the leak.
• Check activity on reassigned records: how many got a first touch from their new owner? Reassignment without contact is the same abandonment with a newer name on it. This is the single most common failure: the paperwork completes, the follow-through doesn't.
• Ask the new owners which inherited records surprised them. The answers surface the verbal book that never got captured, while some of it can still be recovered.
• Compare pipeline totals against the week-one export. Deals that quietly vanished or got closed-lost in bulk during the transition deserve a second look; transition weeks are where inconvenient records go to disappear.

If departures already happened

Most portals carry layers from departures nobody ran a checklist for. The recovery sequence: filter for records owned by any deactivated user (that's bucket four of the four places revenue leaks), then triage by the same rules above, newest departures first because their buyers still remember the company. Expect the pile to be worth working: departure-stranded records include mid-stage deals that were alive the day the rep left. A record-level audit prices this pile record by record if you'd rather not excavate by hand.

The standing fix

If departures are frequent, the checklist wants to become policy: books are reviewed quarterly while reps are still here, next steps live on records instead of in heads, and no departure ends with a bulk transfer. A book that's legible while the rep is present is a book that survives the rep leaving. Legibility has a side benefit unrelated to turnover: it's the same hygiene that makes the weekly pipeline review tell the truth.

Every departure since your portal went live left a layer of orphaned records behind. The checklist stops the next layer; a record-by-record audit is how you find out what the previous ones are still worth.