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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

The conversations I've heard on this topic seem to agree that they pull the lever quickly on sales people because they don't want the guy copying all of his contacts and trying to poach customers/sabotage the company.

But I can't see how that would work because only the really bad salespeople don't already know to have their own contact list. Once you've seen it happen to someone else or heck watched certain movies, you should know better.

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This happens all the time. In a past company I worked at, I had test email accounts in the CRM, and those fake-contact email accounts would receive blast messages from reps who were now working at competing companies.

I always reported it, but damn, at least have the foresight to scrub your list of stolen accounts for contacts that have the last name "TEST". Pretty obvious where you got the list from if you don't.

I worked at a firm in the UK where this happened. Due to the UK having fairly strong data protection laws, the salesman ended up being arrested and charged.

Hmmm... yet somehow a sales person/consultant of any worth is hired on the strength of their book...

> strength of their book

Exactly, their book, the contacts they personally have. Not an arbitrary dump of a previous employer’s contact database, but the folks they had relationships with.

Also if your company's only assets are some sales leads, you're already not doing great.

If you don't have them, you're almost certainly not doing great

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