Cookbook
Hand over a book of accounts
Somebody left, or somebody joined. Moving a book of accounts is a five minute job that usually takes a fortnight, because in most CRMs it is a bulk edit nobody trusts.
The situation
A rep has left. Their accounts are still theirs in the CRM, so nothing about them shows up in anyone's list, and the first sign of trouble is a renewal nobody chased.
What must be true when you are done
- Every account that was theirs has a new owner.
- Nothing else changed on any of those records.
- The handover is in the history, so who owned what and when is answerable.
- You can see what is left unowned, rather than assuming it is nothing.
Look before you write
The list first, always. A reassignment is the one operation where the scope matters more than the change, and the scope is easy to get wrong by one filter.
You
Sam has left. Show me every account they own, and separately anything with no owner at all.
Read it before you continue. The second list is the one that surprises people: accounts nobody has ever owned tend to accumulate quietly from imports, and this is the moment they become visible.
Hand them over
You
Move all of those to Priya. Do not change anything else on them.
Agent
This goes as one batch rather than one call per account, so a book of four hundred is a handful of calls and not four hundred. Each one is reported separately, so a single account that could not move does not hide inside a total that says everything worked.
Mark it as a person's decision rather than something the agent worked out, because that is what it is. Ownership is not a fact about the account that an import should be able to revise later.
What did not change
Worth checking rather than assuming, and it is one question.
You
Show me the changes from that handover. Just the fields that actually moved.
Every entry should name one field. If a batch reports more than it should have touched, you learn it here rather than from whoever notices their notes were rewritten.
Verify it
- Ask for the departing rep's accounts again. The list should be empty.
- Ask for accounts with no owner. Zero, or a number you decided to leave.
- Read one record's history. The owner change is on it, attributed and timed, so a question about who held an account in March has an answer.
Run it again
Every joiner and every leaver, and once a quarter as a sweep for unowned accounts. The sweep is the one that pays: leavers get handled because somebody is watching, and imports quietly create ownerless records that nobody is watching at all.