Handle Job Changes, Departures, and Churn

Derek Chen, GTM Lab's primary contact at target Account Ferrow Industrial and mid-evaluation on a new-business Opportunity, changes jobs. His work email starts bouncing. The team's instinct is to disqualify him and, because he was the primary contact, mark Ferrow Industrial's Account inactive along with him. Both reactions destroy information the business will want back.

Separately, Kessler Metal Works, a customer eighteen months ago, has had no renewal touch, support case, or usage signal since. Its Account still reads Customer. Nobody decided to leave it that way; nothing ever triggered a review.

And Sam Okafor, disqualified eight months ago because there was no active project, has just asked for pricing.

A person leaving is not a fact about the company

Disqualifying a person because they changed jobs erases the reason to reach out when they re-engage from a new employer. Downgrading the Account because its primary contact left ignores that the Account's commercial relationship depends on its own evidence, not on one person's employment. Account staleness is a different kind of failure: not a wrong inference, but a missing detection rule.

A record that comes back is not a record that never left

Sam is the third version of the same mistake, running in the opposite direction. The instinct on a re-engagement is to clear the old disqualification so the record looks clean, and a clean record is exactly the problem: the next person to work him has no idea the qualifying conversation already happened, or what the objection was, or whether anything about it actually changed. The opposite instinct fails too. Leaving him disqualified because he was disqualified once is how a recycled record stays buried under an outcome that new evidence was supposed to reopen.

Both facts belong on the record at the same time. He was disqualified then, for a stated reason, and something has changed since. That is the same shape as the recycle-then-re-engage rule in Define What Your CRM Data Means, where a returning person keeps their first milestone date and appends new history rather than overwriting it.

Preserve history on departure, force a review on staleness

For departures: preserve the person's relationship history in full, record the new employment context without erasing the old one, and leave the previous employer's Account lifecycle unchanged unless its own evidence changes. For stale accounts: define a staleness signal (no commercial activity past a defined window while status reads active) and a review path that routes to the account owner for an explicit reactivate-or-archive decision. The employer-change fixture confirms Derek's Ferrow Industrial history stays intact while he gains new-employer context. The stale-former-customer-account fixture confirms Kessler routes to review before anything changes. For re-engagement: reopen on the new evidence and keep the prior disqualification and its reason readable, which the recycled-lead-reengaged fixture confirms for Sam.

Carry this into your business

A departure is a fact about one person. Don't let it make a decision about a company. Don't let a customer account go stale just because nothing was ever built to notice. And when someone comes back, keep the record of why they left.