CRM Strategy: Responding to a Departing Sales Rep

Deactivating a departing user in Pipedrive

Naturally, it’s important that access to your CRM is blocked as soon as needed. This happens by deactivating the user. In Pipedrive, you don’t ever really delete users; you only deactivate them. The benefit of this is that all information created by the user stays put even though their access has been blocked. Information on deactivating users can be found in Pipedrive’s Knowledge Base.

Remember that you can also reactivate any user at any time.

Re-assigning items to other users

Most likely, the departing sales rep is also leaving open sales cases, activities and other planned tasks behind—those you can transfer to other users either before or after deactivating the user.

All items can be transferred in bulk, so there is no need to click them one by one to change ownership. Just open the deals, organisations, activities, etc., in a list view, select all or several and change the owner from the bulk editing window that opens on the right-hand side. Very handy. There are also instructions for this on the Pipedrive Knowledge Base (we highly recommend getting to know the Knowledge Base for other Pipedrive questions, too!).

Before transferring everything to another user, take your reporting into account. For example, we recommend that you first evaluate if you should transfer past, closed deals or done activities to other users at all. Changing the ownership of deals and activities might skew your reporting, so be mindful.

Preserve the departing sales rep’s emails!

If the user has had their email synchronised with Pipedrive (which we recommend for anyone working with customers), ensure their emails stay in Pipedrive. This is easiest done so that the user is deactivated before any other action is taken regarding the email inbox. After the emails have been synced to Pipedrive once, they will stay there unless someone specifically deletes them either in Pipedrive or in the email inbox.

There are situations where the user, on their last day, deletes all emails in their inbox. If the Pipedrive email sync is still on, this also means that all emails disappear from Pipedrive. Also, sometimes the IT department closes or even empties the email inbox quickly after the user has left the company, resulting in emails disappearing again if the user is active and sync is on.

So, we recommend that the first step is always to deactivate the user.

Licence and seat management

Deactivating a user will always release one seat for you to use. So, after deactivating one, you can immediately add another user without affecting your billing. If you do not wish to replace the deactivated user with another and want to reduce your billing by one seat, do let us know separately by emailing, e.g. our support address. This way, we can disable the seat altogether.

The admin checklist for departing sales rep

When a user leaves your organisation, do as follows:

1. Deactivate the user in Pipedrive.
2. Using the bulk editing function, change the ownership of upcoming activities and open deals/leads to other users.
3. Finally, close off the email inbox.

If you’re unfamiliar with user management or bulk editing, we recommend our admin training. After the training, you will be on a new level in using your Pipedrive – with fewer grey hairs and more efficient workdays.