youngsmoky

Senior Account Executive

You’re on your way out. What do you take with you?

I might only be with my current company for another couple of weeks. I'm relocating and there's no guarantee I'll get to keep my role.

What should I be saving, backing up, taking notes on, etc? Would you copy your email templates, numbers, product reviews that mention you specifically?

I don't have another role lined up and I don't intend to take any important info like client lists or anything.

🧠 Advice

🔫 Job Separation

😲 secret

39 comments

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FeelItInMyPlums

Valued Contributor

Sales Account Executive

More like what do you leave behind. A solid dump on your boss's desk is a great way to leave the office for the last time.

oldcloser

Arsonist

💀

Zesty

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

Become an office legend. I like the way you think…

FeelItInMyPlums

Valued Contributor

Sales Account Executive

But in all seriousness, take anything and everything. Contact lists, call scripts that have worked for you, anything you wouldn't want to have to recreate at your next stop. Be careful with doing a CRM pull as those can be tracked, but copy and pasting info from excels/sheets, or taking screen shots of important info is a smarter bet.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

Yep, CRM dumps can lead to actual legal consequences. But collecting info - people used to take their rolodexes with them when they moved along.
Also maintain info about your deals, your attainment, everything.
Best of luck.

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

Yeah my company loves their monitoring tools and I imagine they’d wig out if they saw me downloading a bunch of CRM stuff.

Luckily I edit my templates pretty often so if I opened them to copy them, it wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

I could mention a lawsuit brought by a major tech firm against a rep who did just that.

Let’s not talk about how it was even possible for that rep to accomplish the download in the first place.

At any rate, not worth it.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

I know someone who did an SF dump and our employer pursued legal action. One of the C-suite was a lawyer lol

I never got a full understanding of the resolution, but know it did NOT go well for the former colleague. The exec was relishing the opportunity. I think he missed that part of law.

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

I had to talk to one of our corporate lawyers once in defense of a lawsuit someone tried to bring against our company. I wasn’t in any trouble, but it still gave me the willies. Those guys are intense.

RandyLahey

Politicker

Account Executive

Making love to my wife Donna...

Gasty

Notable Contributor

War Room Community Manager

Take everything!! All accomplishments, awards, recognition, important emails, personal financial information, whatever you can grab that isn't "not allowed".

Delete all information - personal files, passwords, etc.

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

I definitely accessed my personal info like gmail and my bank accounts on my work computer before I knew better 😬 Not that they’d poke around, but it’s better to be sure they can’t.

Revenue_Rambo

Politicker

Director, Revenue Enablement

Yeah before you ship your machine back and after you get your personal stuff off perform a wipe and then factory reset.

RandyLahey

Politicker

Account Executive

This is a fantastic. Screenshot your results, quota attainment, whatever else you can use to market yourself.

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

ERP Sales

My sanity and using time to find another role

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

Downside is that for a month I’d be in a 2-person, 0 income household. Otherwise I’d spend my time getting personal shit done.

Phillip_J_Fry

Opinionated

Director of Revenue

Make a list of results you've accomplished as a rep. This is the info that recruiters are looking to discuss.
If you can reference stories of increasing revenue or margin in specific accounts and discuss how you did so, that's going to be far more valuable than anything else you'd take out of there.

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

I like that a lot. So like deals I saved, extra revenue I pushed for, or problems I solved before they ended the deal?

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

I would take:
- copy of all commission statements - any outreach templates that you like - look at your results and make sure you have all the data you need: Average deal size, total number of deals, total amount of Rev closed, connect rates, number of meetings set ect. - if you think you could sell for a competitor or in the same industry i would make a list of key contacts and contact info so you can stay in touch.
Look to see if there are deals that will have closed but you wont be paid on yet. get those specifics so you can make sure your paid correctly.

but most importantly, try to get insight on if you can keep your job so you can get a new one lined up. that seems way to risky to not have insight on.

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

This is thorough, thank you!

oldcloser

Arsonist

💀

Smoky!!! Whatever you take, just do not email anything to yourself. Drop it all into a zip file and move it to an external HD. If you do find yourself in need of CRM data don’t export it. Just print to a file.

Good luck in the chase!

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

Oldcloser you always have my back. I’m thinking of accessing my work email and CRM at home and creating pdfs of the emails and office docs of everything else would be hard for them to trace.

DungeonsNDemos

Big Shot

Rolling 20's all day

Ooooh I need this thread today. Thinking things through my friends.
I'd write down on my own what useful tactics and processes I have. Stuff like executive alignment emails, frameworks, general processes that do not constitute as company information.

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

Right I’m not trying to steal any illicit company info or anything. But yeah, I wrote almost all our process docs so I should probably save those.

Not that it helped or anything. I wrote all these docs, shared them with the team, and was told to stop wasting time on them because “you’re not paid to think.” PHEW!

medhardwaredr

Politicker

Director of Sales NA

Take pics don’t download anything fyi

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

braintank

Politicker

Enterprise Account Executive

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

Good thinking. And always good to see you in my post comments, helping out!

Pachacuti

Politicker

They call me Daddy, Sales Daddy

Your contacts and emails if you can. Nothing else is worth anything.

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

That’s a good call. I’m not like about to start a competing company or anything - just have a list of people I did business with and people who liked me enough to refer me.

thisdoesntexist

Executive

Sales Consultant

In addition to all the good advice here, I would be thinking about it in terms of securing and clearing your own personal data on any computers belonging to the company and clearing old messages, emails, etc. of any form of personal nature. Passwords, etc. Browser history and screenshots, photos, anything like that. I hate to think of my employer being able to access that after I leave. So a good preemptive house cleaning is as important as taking anything with you. That said, I usually have a routine backup someplace of work files and stuff, just in case. If they ask you to delete it, then do. But many won’t make a point of it.

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

Great call. And not something a lot of people think about.

We recently got an app that acts as a keycard to get into the office. It asked if it could know your location when using the app or all the time. I picked when using the app. It asked me several times if I was sure I wouldn’t let it see my location all the time.

My coworker and I started telling everyone to be aware this app was trying that shit. It’s not like we’re planning to call in sick and go to Six Flags but I don’t need my keycard snitching on me!

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

Lots of good advice here, I'll double down on no exports and wiping anything personal.

Whenever I start a job, I usually create a work-specific gmail drive that I use for my own work. So I create templates, do my messaging etc. in there. Never had an issue. I'll usually copy a few files over there too, but usually do it throughout my tenure so nothing is flagged.

Disclaimer - these haven't been large orgs, under 200 ppl

youngsmoky

Celebrated Contributor

Senior Account Executive

That’s smart. I have access to my OneDrive at home so it wouldn’t be unusual for me to upload docs there and save them on my PC. But there is definitely a risk that they pull the rug from underneath me and I lose access to it before I transferred everything.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

That’s definitely a risk. I read a solid tip a few weeks ago, pretty sure it was from Dan Goodman.

If you’re WFH, but if you get called into ‘one of those’ meetings, put your work laptop on airplane and join on your personal machine. Companies will often brick a laptop remotely during the call and you’ll lose everything. If you’re on airplane mode, that won’t happen until you connect to wifi. You’ll then be free to back up your shit

Revenue_Rambo

Politicker

Director, Revenue Enablement

2 things to consider.

1) Most companies prevent you from connecting to a USB or external drive. Create a folder in your GDrive or Share point. Create a new gmail account (not for email but to give you access to a full 17GB holding space)

Give that new email access to the share drive folder. Copy files to your new GDrive. From there (on a personal computer) you can move files to external drive and recycle that 17GB.

2. There is a platform called Connect the Dots (ctd.ai) that can basically become a database of all contacts from previous employers. Sign up/in with your new dummy gmail. Connect it to your current work email and import all contacts.

Retired Sales Professional

Take all you can legally take and move on.

lowhangersalesbanger

Executive

Account Executive

I copy everything I ah e ever touched and get it on my personal google drive. Especially if it’s collateral I wrote.

Also when I quit McDonald’s I took a piece of the shake machine with me. They had to buy a whole new machine.

kzmt

Contributor

Founder

You probably already did that, but I would look through all my past customer meetings, and connect with them on LinkedIn before leaving this job. This is useful because some profiles require their work email address, and you can connect with them easily while you are there.

It would also be good to send them any casual message on LinkedIn and start some informal thread. This way, you can continue chatting with them in future, if needed.

Finally, and this may be my “Captain Obvious” point 😉, but also connect with potential employers/their leadership people on LinkedIn.

Once you are out, LI can be an immensely useful way to reach back informally and without ruffling much feathers. HTH @youngsmoky