The setup
A regional VP of Sales was frustrated watching leads go cold whenever a rep was simply out of office for a day or two. His fix: an automation that reassigned any lead untouched for 24 hours to the next available rep in a round-robin queue, so nothing sat idle waiting for someone to come back online. He designed it himself, pushed it through with real enthusiasm, and presented it at a company all-hands as a case study in operational excellence. It applied to everyone, with no exclusion list, because — his words, on record in the meeting notes — "if it's good enough for the reps, it's good enough for me."
The rule checked raw inactivity on a lead. It did not check whether the assigned rep had an out-of-office status set, was on approved leave, or was, for instance, getting married.
The collapse
He went on his own three-week honeymoon shortly after the rollout, and set his calendar and email out-of-office as any reasonable person would. What he didn't do was exclude himself from the reassignment rule, or hand off his book of business first — the rule he'd built didn't ask about vacation status, only about the clock. Every lead and open deal in his personal book, built over nine years and including the firm's three largest active renewals, auto-reassigned to whichever direct report happened to be online during each rolling 24-hour window.
Several of those direct reports, working entirely inside the rules of the system their VP had designed, closed some of those deals during his absence. Under the compensation policy — also his design — commission credit went to whoever was assigned when a deal closed. He came back from his honeymoon to a noticeably smaller book of business and a company-wide congratulations email celebrating deals he had never heard of moving.
The autopsy
Root causes on record
- The rule measured inactivity, not availability. A rep being unreachable for a good reason looked identical to a rep simply neglecting a lead.
- No exclusion list, by design, on principle. The rule's author treated universality as a feature rather than a risk he hadn't personally modeled.
- No integration with approved leave or out-of-office status. The one signal that would have prevented this — "this person is on approved leave" — already existed elsewhere in HR systems and was never connected.
- Compensation policy rewarded whoever held the assignment at close, not who sourced or built the relationship. That made the reassignment rule's blind spot financially consequential rather than just annoying.
Recommendation pending
Editor's note: this slot will point to a change-management resource for rolling out company-wide automation rules with a pilot group and an exception process — including, apparently, an exception process for the person who wrote the rule.
What the post-mortem actually changed
The reassignment rule now checks approved-leave status before touching an assignment, and every company-wide automation requires a named exclusion review before launch — including, explicitly, for whoever authored it. He kept the credit-on-close compensation policy. He says that part was fine. His direct reports, several of whom are now meaningfully ahead of quota for the year, have not been asked to give anything back.