# A rep just quit: how to reassign their Pipedrive deals without wrecking the forecast https://salesbond.app/blog/rep-leaves-reassign-pipedrive-deals/ Published: 2026-10-02 · Updated: 2026-10-26 When a sales rep leaves, don’t hand the whole book to one person. Before the last day, the rep writes one next step on every open deal. The manager then freezes the book, sorts it by stage, changes the owner through a filter and bulk edit in Pipedrive, deactivates the user on the last day, and reviews the close date of every inherited deal after the new owner’s first conversation with the buyer. The forecast is rebuilt deal by deal, not carried over as a number. If the rep is only out for a few weeks, you don’t need any of this: [cover their deals with followers instead](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-followers-rep-out-of-office/) and leave the owner field alone. ## The Friday resignation Say it arrives on a Friday, around four. Two weeks’ notice, forty open deals, and a manager who has never looked inside most of them, because the rep was hitting target. The forecast you sent up last week has their number in it. It was a good number. Now it’s the least reliable number you own. The instinct is to reassign everything to your best rep on Monday morning and sort out the fallout later. We think that’s backwards. The owner field is one click; the buyer’s trust doesn’t live in that field. So the two weeks go on collecting what only the departing rep knows, and the click happens near the end. ## Before the last day: one next step per open deal The departing rep knows things that exist nowhere in the CRM. Ask them to open every open deal and make sure three things are true. There is a next activity scheduled, with a date. The activity note says what the buyer is expecting from us and who on their side is waiting for it. And the expected close date reflects what the buyer actually said, not what the quarter needed. At about two minutes a deal, forty deals is an hour and a half, so one morning. If the rep honestly doesn’t know what happens next, the note says “no agreed next step” and the deal is already flagged for sorting. One pinned summary note per deal helps too, and here is how to write [notes that survive a handoff](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-notes-mentions-pinned-handoff/). Do this in Pipedrive, not in a handover document. A document gets read once; an activity on the deal is what the new owner sees on day one. Then ask, kindly: which deals do you think are dead? People on their way out have no reason to defend a pipeline so it’s the most honest read on the book you’ll ever get. Write the answers into the deal notes. ## Freeze the book and sort it by stage Once the next steps are in, nobody touches the owner field until the book is sorted. ORM-Tech puts it as “freeze the book and triage the open opportunities before reassigning a single account” ( [ORM-Tech: how to reassign accounts when a rep leaves](https://orm-tech.com/blog/how-to-reassign-accounts-when-a-rep-leaves)). Reassign first and the deals land on whoever objected least on Monday. The sorting never happens. We sort by stage, into three piles. Late-stage deals, where a proposal is out and a decision is due this quarter, go to the manager or the strongest closer: they carry forecast money and have the least time to recover a relationship. Mid-stage deals (demo or discovery done, no proposal yet) go to a peer rep who already sells into that segment or region. If your [territory plan](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-territory-planning-small-team/) says who covers what, this is where it earns its keep. Early-stage and quiet deals, where the last activity is old or the rep said “probably dead”, go to a shared queue or to the manager for a one-line review. Most will be closed lost. A rep who inherits thirty cold deals on top of thier own book will work none of them, so the cold ones don’t go to a rep at all. ![Sorting rule for an inherited book: late, mid and early-stage deals with a destination for each, all marked at risk](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/rep-leaves-reassign-pipedrive-deals-2.png) In a team of five with no spare person, which is most teams we talk to the manager takes the late-stage pile personally for one month. Not because managers should carry deals, but because the alternative is a rep carrying a book and a quarter (or double, if it all lands on one person) and dropping their own deals to save someone else’s. A month later, whatever is still open moves to a rep, with the buyer already told. Whichever pile a deal lands in, it should not become one of the [records left with no owner](https://salesbond.app/blog/salesforce-queues-unowned-records-audit/). ## Reassigning deals in Pipedrive: filter by owner, bulk edit, deactivate on the last day The owner change takes minutes in the list view. Pipedrive’s instructions ( [Pipedrive: how can I reassign items owned by one user to another user](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/how-can-i-reassign-items-owned-by-one-user-to-another-user)) come down to this: 1. Open the deals list view, click Filter, choose Owners and pick the departing rep. 2. Tick the checkbox in the top left to select every deal in the list. 3. In the bulk edit panel, pick Owner, choose “Edit current value”, select the new owner and click Edit. 4. Repeat in Contacts, People and in Contacts, Organizations. Reassigning a deal doesn’t change the owner of the people or organizations linked to it, so a rep can end up owning the deal while the departed user still owns the buyer’s company. 5. Check Activities too. Activities stay with the user after deactivation, so a scheduled call still assigned to the departed rep reminds nobody. Move the open ones. If the rep was commission-only, [the day the arrangement ends](https://salesbond.app/blog/commission-only-reps-pipedrive-access/) has a short list of its own. Because you sorted first, step 3 runs three times: Pipedrive filters can combine owner and stage, so it’s three saved filters and three bulk edits, not forty separate edits. Leave won and lost deals and completed activities where they are. They’re the departed rep’s history, and moving them skews per-rep reports. Before the first of the three runs, [check the automations box](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-bulk-edit-safety/): a bulk edit runs your automations unless you untick it. If the new owners come from a segment sheet rather than one name, [re-import with the System ID](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-update-records-spreadsheet-system-id/) and skip the filter-by-filter edits. The same owner filter is how you check [owner mapping after a migration](https://salesbond.app/blog/migrate-to-pipedrive-data-audit/), where deals without a matched user land on whoever ran the import. When to deactivate is our call, not Pipedrive’s rule. Pipedrive lets you reassign a user’s data before or after deactivation: deals, contacts and activities “remain owned by these users” and can be found under “Deactivated users” in the filter dropdown ( [Pipedrive: viewing and reassigning the data of a deactivated user](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/viewing-and-reassigning-the-data-of-a-deactivated-user)). We deactivate on the last working day anyway, because until then the rep can still answer questions. And one thing does get lost: Pipedrive deletes the user’s emails that aren’t linked to a deal, lead, person or organization once the user has been deactivated for more than 30 days ( [Pipedrive: what happens when a user gets deactivated](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/what-happens-when-a-user-gets-deactivated)). So before the last day, the rep links every buyer email that matters to its deal. The simplest habit is to [link the thread and set it to Shared](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-email-visibility-shared-private/) while the rep is still there, so the new owner can read it. Automations the rep owned are the other thing that does not move on its own: Pipedrive switches them off when the owner is deactivated, so check which ones the rep owned before the last day, as in [the automation owner audit](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-automations-owner-audit/). Apps the rep installed go the same way, so [check what they connected](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-deactivated-user-apps-uninstalled/) before the last day. If the rep kept contacts on their phone, this is the week you find out; [who owns CRM data in a small team](https://salesbond.app/blog/crm-data-ownership-small-sales-team/) is worth settling before the next hire. ## Tell the buyer yourself The owner field changed. The buyer doesn’t know, and the the worst way for them to find out is an email from a stranger that opens with “I’ve taken over your account.” For the late-stage pile the manager calls. Not the new owner, the manager. Short message: your contact has moved on, here’s who picks this up, and I’d rather you heard it from me than from an out-of-office reply. Then the question that decides everything else. Where do you think this stands? Buyers answer that honestly far more often than reps expect, because they have no stake in your pipeline report. “We were waiting on a revised quote” is a deal. “Honestly, we’d moved on, your rep stopped replying in August” is not, and it’s been sitting in your forecast for two months. For mid-stage deals, the new owner introduces themselves by referring to the last activity note (the departing rep’s morning pays off here) and proposes a specific next step with a date. And if the departing rep was the only person on your side the buyer ever spoke to, the deal was [single-threaded](https://salesbond.app/blog/single-threaded-deals/) long before anyone resigned. Get a second buyer-side contact while you’re at it. The mirror case, [when the contact on the buyer side leaves](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-switch-deal-contact-participants/) instead of your rep, has its own checklist. ## Rebuild the forecast from inherited deals, one at a time ORM-Tech’s rule is the one we’d adopt word for word: “treat every deal in the departed book as at risk until the new owner has spoken with the buyer directly” ( [ORM-Tech](https://orm-tech.com/blog/how-to-reassign-accounts-when-a-rep-leaves)). The stage and close date were set by someone no longer accountable for them. In Pipedrive, make it visible with a label. Add an “Inherited” label to every reassigned deal, then build one saved filter: label is Inherited, next activity in the past or empty. That filter is the manager’s Monday list for the next month. A deal leaves the list when the new owner logs a completed activity with the buyer and either updates the close date or closes the deal. The value sitting in that filter is the departed book’s share of [revenue at risk in your pipeline](https://salesbond.app/blog/revenue-at-risk-sales-pipeline/), the figure to show when someone asks why the number dropped. After each first conversation the new owner does one of three things. Keeps the close date, because the buyer confirmed it. Moves it to the date the buyer named, with their reason in the note. Or closes the deal lost. Deals that haven’t had the conversation stay out of commit, whatever stage they’re in. Two weeks after the last day, the book’s number is the sum of deals that passed the conversation. It will be smaller, and it’s the first forecast for that book someone still on the team can defend. If a close date then [keeps moving](https://salesbond.app/blog/pushed-close-dates-pipedrive/) under the new owner, the usual rules apply. We build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses. Deal Health checks every open deal against more than 20 rules and shows what lowered its score, so a forgotten inherited deal doesn’t have to wait for someone to open the filter. [Check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/) if you’d rather not maintain the filter by hand. The call to the buyer is still yours. The handover checklist, in the order it runs: - Departing rep: next activity, note and honest close date on every open deal; “probably dead” deals marked in the notes; buyer emails linked to deals. - Manager: book frozen, deals sorted into late, mid and early piles with a named destination for each. - Pipedrive: owner plus stage filters, three bulk edits for open deals, then people, organizations and open activities. - “Inherited” label on every reassigned deal, and a saved filter for inherited deals with no future activity. - User deactivated on the last working day. - Manager calls every late-stage buyer; new owners write to mid-stage buyers with a specific next step. - Forecast rebuilt from deals that passed the first conversation, the rest out of commit. - One month on: the manager’s temporary deals handed to a rep. For the new hire who eventually takes over the book, see [onboarding a sales rep in 30, 60 and 90 days](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-rep-onboarding-30-60-90/). Handing a new hire their first deals is a different sort: [what to give and what to keep](https://salesbond.app/blog/what-deals-to-give-new-sales-rep/). Clients already in delivery are a different handover: [closed-won handoff in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/closed-won-handoff-pipedrive/).