Imagine that one of your best sales reps tells you she’s leaving the company
What do you do next?
If you don’t have an immediate answer to that question, your sales team management process needs some work.
Effective sales offboarding benefits the rep who’s leaving, you as a sales manager, your sales team, and your customers.
In short, customer experience may suffer if you don’t have an offboarding process.
Want more advice on hiring, managing, and offboarding sales reps? Download a free copy of The Sales Hiring Playbook!
Let’s take a look at how you should be offboarding your sales reps. There are two situations to talk about.
We’ll start with the easier one:
When Things are Going Well with Your Rep
Let’s assume that you have a good relationship with your rep. They’re leaving for another opportunity, being transferred, getting promoted, or leaving for another reason.
The important thing here is that they’re not being fired. This is a planned exit.
If you have a good relationship with your reps, offboarding situations shouldn’t surprise you. You should know that your rep is leaving in advance.
Pro tip: Did you get blindsided by a rep leaving? Use the opportunity to learn from the situation. Why weren’t they comfortable enough to give you some warning?
In this case, there are three questions to ask yourself.
1. How Can You Help Your Rep?
Sales team management starts with taking care of your reps. And that doesn’t end when they leave the company.
Taking care of your rep even though they’re leaving is when you show the importance of your values.
So make sure that you do right by your rep. How can you improve their transition? How can you help them succeed in their next job?
Remember that just because someone leaves your company doesn’t mean you’ll never work with them again. They may come back looking for another job. Or ask you for a reference for a future position.
You might partner with their new organization. Your former rep might even start their company and look for investors or partners. For us at Close, many of our earliest customers were employees of the sales consulting company we ran before releasing our software.
They took on sales leadership roles at other companies and then introduced our CRM in those organizations—so sometimes ex-employees can become future customers! These are opportunities—you won’t get them if you treat your rep poorly.
So ask yourself right away: how can I help my rep succeed?
2. How Can Your Rep Help Your Team?
Think about your sales team next. Your team must be ready to take over the work after the rep leaves. And to serve those customers well.
Work with the rep who’s leaving to ensure that this process goes smoothly. Ensure the rep knows that performing admirably in this transition phase will benefit your continuing professional relationship.
Once your team knows that the rep is leaving—and you’ve done what you can to address any of their specific worries—it’s time to build a transition plan. You’ll start with two specific tasks:
Pipeline audit: Go through each rep’s accounts and find out where they are in the sales pipeline. Here are some questions to consider:
- What’s happened in this relationship?
- What are the next steps?
- How should the new rep get started?
Ask lots of questions, and take lots of notes. The new rep should be in this meeting, too. Record everything.
(You can find more tips in our article on how to conduct a pipeline review.)
CRM audit: Review the reps' accounts in your sales CRM and ensure they’re updated. The information from the pipeline audit will be very helpful in this phase.
But other things might come up, too. Updated contact information, job titles, and communication preferences can slip through the cracks when a rep gets busy.
Again, ask lots of questions and make sure to take notes. Record any notes useful for the incoming rep in the CRM itself.
If you use a CRM that automatically tracks customer touchpoints and account changes (like Close), you’ll save a lot of hours in this part of the process.
Post-mortem: Give your rep a couple of weeks to adjust to their new job and establish some distance from your company.
Then, schedule a coffee, virtual coffee, lunch, or another short meeting where they can speak candidly about their experience.
You’ll get valuable insights that you wouldn’t get from a current employee.
Here are a few things to talk about:
- Your management practices
- How the sales team could be better
- How the company could be better
- Processes that need improvement
- Onboarding or offboarding advice
- What you could have done to make the relationship even better
It’s easy to overlook this step. Many sales team managers would rather not have this conversation, especially if the rep is critical of your team and company.
But it’s worth doing. This is where you get valuable insight that helps you improve your sales team and your company.
3. How Can You and Your Rep Help Your Customers?
Changing sales reps can be a jarring experience for customers. And when customer experience is one of the most important factors in a purchase decision, it’s in your best interest to make that experience as positive as possible.
The transition from one rep to another will not always be smooth. In fact, even with great sales reps, problems might arise.
But it’s worth doing your best.
The important part is for the rep who’s leaving to contact their customers to let them know what’s going on.
The rep should let their customers know they’re leaving the company on good terms. They should also introduce the new rep who will be taking over the account (or, in the case of older accounts, the customer success manager).
Here’s the important part: your rep needs to sell their replacement. Why should the customer be excited to be working with this new rep? Are they the most senior in the department? The most experienced? The most innovative?
Maybe they’re dynamic and exciting, have a proven record of saving people money, or are just a hell of a lot of fun to work with.
Whatever the case, make sure your customers know who they’re going to talk to and why they’re awesome.
The new rep should also follow up with an email introducing themselves and offering to answer any questions.
But what if your rep has hundreds of leads and accounts?
If personal emails to every account aren’t feasible, use the 80/20 rule. Have the rep email their most important accounts to fill them in and introduce the new sales rep.
The less important accounts can receive an automated email and, if possible, a follow-up from the new rep.
Just make sure not to provide a bad customer experience. Bad handoffs make customers feel like they don’t matter. They won't be happy if they find out that their rep is no longer with the company from an autoresponder when they’re trying to buy something.
Don’t be that company.
When Things aren’t Going so Well with Your Rep
Now you know the three questions to ask when parting ways with a rep on good terms.
But what about when things aren’t going so well? What if you have to fire a rep? How do you offboard them?
This will be a test of your sales team management skills. If you’re prepared, you’ll pass.
1. Start the Process Early
Successfully offboarding this type of rep starts before you end the relationship. Let them know you’re not happy with their performance and give them a chance to improve their behavior or results.
You should also strive to complete pipeline and CRM audits before you have the dreaded meeting with your rep. This won’t always be possible, but it will make your life much easier because the entire offboarding process must be completed quickly.
While you might have several weeks to offboard a sales rep with whom you have a good relationship, you’ll probably only have a day with one with whom you don’t.
So do as much of the work above as possible beforehand.
2. Ease the Transition with Help from Management
After the rep has left, the sales team manager or even an executive needs to help with the transition.
Important accounts should receive a phone call, and everyone should get a personal email in this situation.
Let the customer know that you’ve parted ways with your sales rep and that you wish them the best (even if the split was nasty).
Tell the customer that you took an interest in their account and that you’re connecting them with their new sales rep. As in the transition above, sell the new rep’s skills and experience. Get the customer excited about working with their new rep.
You might even invite the customer to join you and the new rep on a call to discuss any questions they have about the transition.
Time to shine! Learn the ropes of sales manager training like a pro by reading my detailed article.
3. Complete a Post-mortem
You’ll also want to perform a post-mortem here. However, you probably won’t be having one with the rep, so you’ll need to meet with someone else to find out what went wrong.
Usually, that’s the hiring team, the rep’s manager, or someone who worked closely with that rep. Discuss what went wrong and why you overlooked the red flags earlier. Why wasn’t this rep weeded out in the interview or onboarding process? What could you have done differently?
Be open to suggestions here. You might not like what you hear, but you can learn from it and improve your sales hiring practices and the rest of your sales process.
Extend Your Sales Team Management to Offboarding
Sales offboarding might feel strange at first. It could be uncomfortable until you’re used to it.
But it’s a crucial part of effective sales team management, paying big dividends for your company.
Implement an offboarding process sooner rather than later, and your reps, sales team, and customers will have a better experience. It’s good for everyone.
And remember that good offboarding starts with good management long before the rep considers leaving. Open communication, clear expectations, and good habits go a long way.
Offboarding sales reps is a crucial part of running a sales team—something I cover in much more detail in The Sales Hiring Playbook. You can download your free copy today!
