If a salesman leaves, do they normally keep their contact list?

Factual Questions
1

A salesman where I work is leaving, and there’s a bit of contention over whether he gets to keep his contact list.
On the one hand, the company has paid for them, and the salesman might end up competing, or at least in a similar field, which isn’t so great.
On the other hand, the salesman probably remembers most of them anyway, and if they’re working (mostly?) on commission, then I can see the argument that the salesman should keep them.

Does salary vs. commission make a difference? Fired vs. resigned? Something else that I’m not aware of?

Mods: Go ahead and move to IMHO if you think it should be there.

2

I’m hard pressed to understand why any sales professional wouldn’t have been saving a constantly updated contact list somewhere off-site already. Every one I’ve known has always done that. To answer the OP: “Of course, unless prevented from doing so by management or lack of foresight”.

3

Well, of course they keep their contact list. Any good professional does. They can’t take company property, but I’m sure most should have home copies on their Roladex, address book or LinkedIn profile.

The only question is the terms of any non-compete agreement they may have signed with their old employer. That would theoretically limit who they can pitch work to. I say theoretically, as the reality is, once a sales person, relationship manager or business developer leaves, it’s difficult in practice to stop them from poaching your clients.

4

I don’t think there’s any employment contract in the world that can keep someone from keeping a list of people they know professionally.

What couldn’t be kept is details like orders, pricing, terms, specs, etc.

ETA: I mean under the terms of an employment contract.

And I agree with gaffa. Every salesperson I’ve ever known has the file the company owns, and they file they own.

5

I’ve always taken every business card and/or rolodex of clients I’ve collected while at a job to my next job when I’ve left. After all, the company can’t exactly say they ‘own’ the business cards, especially since in many cases, I may be leaving company B to go to company C, but the card itself came from company A and was brought to company B when I joined them.

6

Former enterprise software sales person here (now in operations, having to deal with the kind of crap I used to give the ops group :D).

I agree that any salesperson worth their salt would keep a list of the contacts they have cultivated professional relationships with.

However, if (as it seems from the tone of the OP) this is a list of contacts that the company provided to the sales rep, well, this is a bit trickier. If they went to OneSource, or Hoovers, and bought a list for a specific territory, then handed it over to the rep and said “go sell stuff”, how long until the rep truly “owns” the contact? A month? A year? Three years?

Maybe Nanoda can elaborate on the situation. Is this a company-purchased list (or even a list of existing customers)? Is the rep an inside or outside rep? Fielding inbound calls primarily, or cold-calling, or somewhere in between? What kind of product do they sell, and what “touch-level” is required to sell it (executive level/middle management/operations)? What level of effort is required by your employer to let them keep this list? Is it simply a rolodex? A CRM report? A database with confidential data that requires scrubbing?

As for differentiators (commission/salary, fired/quit) - if they are purely salaried, with no significant variable pay attached to their sales, I wouldn’t call them a sales rep. I would call them a customer service rep. If your paycheck is the same whether you sell stuff or not, you don’t own a business relationship, you’re just serving as the face (or voice) of your employer, and have no right to any customer list.

If they were fired with cause, I would send them packing with nothing more than what they came in the door with - it’s bad business to reward bad employees. If they quit, or were laid off without cause, I might let them have something, depending on the level of effort required by your employer. Unless they went to a competitor - then, I’d probably turn them down as tactfully and politely as possible.

At the end of the day, it boils down to the consequences of granting or denying the request. Are you in a small job market where word gets around of bad employers? Or are you in a super-competitive space, and need any business edge you can get?

7

Of course they can say that and they do. The cards you collect on their dime are work product.

That you haven’t run into an issue is not evidence there is not an issue to be made.

If you collected A’s card before starting at B, but you were working for Z at the time you collected it, Z has claim later under non-compete or not taking proprietary information claims as appropriate.

IANAL, but briefed on this many times as a manager and new employee.

IMHO any IME any company with material to protect makes sure new employees agree to this before starting, including NOT bringing proprietary info such as customer lists from prior employees. This reduces the exposure to the company, puts it all on the employee if all parties don’t disclose and agree to the material in advance, and keeps people honest where they might not otherwise be incented to be in practice.

I don’t know any case law on this, but I wouldn’t put MY livelihood at risk. I’d ask the new employer’s legal team to sign off on bringing a customer list at the time I sign all the other employment agreements. It is all negotiable at that time, but not later, and later you will be sure to be hung out to dry if issues arise.

8

You would need to differentiate a salesperson maintained “contact list” from a company maintained clients list.

If it is a salesperson maintained list - absolutely, he can and should take it with him. Although if he is stupid enough to not be keeping one off site somewhere, or download it before resigning he deserves to lose it.

I have always taken namecards with me - easiest way is to jsut export my outlook contact list to excel on a regular basis. Now I have gotten smarter - PDA phone which auto syncs. There is no way the company can take that from me.

9

Sure they could if the law aligns for them. And if you can’t provide it, or the damage is done, then you can be assessed damages.

10

It’s like the first rule of hiding knives. One for them to find, and one for you to keep. How they going to know if you made a copy?

11

They can take my **personal **phone with my personal contact list contained? Wouldn’t they first have to prove that I was stealing company owned information?

And this is why I point out the need to differentiate a “contact list” from a “client list”. Mind you, do note I am in marketing / PR - so our contacts tend to be a little different, it is more in the form of contractors that have serviced us, clients that we are personal friends with and the like, rather than a listing of the top 1000 companies in a region with the person reponsible for ordering paper, so YMMV.

Do note here that my contacts are not differentiated at all, my brother in law is listed with full company information, many of my journalist contacts are listed by first name only (no publication or anything)

In any case - for the phone the point is moot, because it also syncs to my home computer. So even if they “wipe” my phone, I still have another back-up copy.

And periodically when the mood strikes me I will export to excel and then email to myself at my gmail account.

12

Here is more or less how it works. It’s easy enough for someone to make copies of their contacts. Synch to a PDA, burn to a disk, email it, load them on a thumb drive, print them out, write them on the back of napkins, whatever. There is no practical way the company can stop you.

Once you resign or are terminated, they will typically collect any company property - PDA, laptop, etc. If they are up to date on the latest data security trends, they may store an image of your hard drive before wiping and giving it to the next guy. It becomes more problematic if you use your own laptop for work like a lot of broker/dealer contractors do.

And then you will be pretty much forgotten.

Unless…all of a sudden, clients start defecting to your new company or you keep poping up at the same project proposals.

At that point, they may bring some sort of lawsuit against you. At that point, they will bring computer forensics experts in to see if you were emailing yourself client lists or storing IP on your laptop. And that evidence will be used against you.

Again, it all depends on the agreement you had. If you never signed a non-compete, why can’t you call clients you used to work with?

13

These factors can make a difference; as can such non-competition/non-solicitation clauses that appeared in the original contract. But your company really should be asking this question of its lawyer. I notice you’re in Edmonton, so you should note that there have been a few changes in Canadian employment law lately as regards this question. Your company’s lawyer would know what the current law is.

14

Out of curiousity, who is this point of contention between? Because whether or not the salesperson copies or remember them, I’m pretty sure the contact lists are the intellectual property of the company.

15

Wow; the most popular thing I’ve posted in a while! Thanks everyone. :cool:

The issue was between the salesman and management/owners; we’re a small company without a whole lot of experience yet, and without a lawyer on-staff.

To muddy things more, the salesman was on a combination of salary + commission. With the economy the way things are, new sales have been pretty poor even here, so I think we’re going to focus on existing customers for a while (hence the downsizing). :frowning:

Interesting, but I don’t know how my particular issue is wrt. bengangmo’s “contacts” vs. “clients”. Yarster and not_alice also bring up a good point regarding previous existing contacts that I’m not sure about either.

Since we’re all reasonable and flexible it’s been sorted amicably, but I think that from now on both us and the salesguy are going to keep copies, and mention something in future hiring. No wonder there are so many lawyers when little things like this can get so complicated!