## TL;DR
Champion departures leak through many small signals: a hard bounce, an out-of-office naming a successor, meetings declined, a new job at another company, login identity deprovisioned. Detection that watches only one signal misses most departures. Reconstruct what signals this departure emitted and wire the missed ones into detection.

```text
champion left the company: sponsor-change detection failed
```

## Use this when
- The champion left and the team learned weeks or months later
- Engagement from the account dropped or shifted to unknown contacts
- Detection, if any, relies on a single signal like bounces

## Not for this skill when
- The champion moved internally and remains an ally, needing a different play
- The account is small enough for manual relationship tracking

## Steps
1. Reconstruct this departure's signal trail: bounces, OOO replies, meeting declines, IdP deprovisioning, and engagement stop dates. Verify: every signal that existed is listed with its date
2. Check which of those signals any current system captures. Verify: captured versus invisible signals are separated
3. Wire the highest-value invisible signal (usually deprovisioning or bounce-plus-silence) into a sponsor-risk alert. Verify: a test departure signal raises the alert on a sample account
4. Add a quarterly contact-verification task for top accounts: confirm champion name, role, and a second thread. Verify: multi-threading is verified by a human, not assumed from data
5. When an alert fires, run the sponsor-transition play within a week: find the successor, brief them, and re-establish the business case. Verify: the play and its timing are attached to the alert itself

## Variant phrasings
### champion left undetected
A related phrasing for the same underlying problem.
### sponsor change signals missed
A related phrasing for the same underlying problem.
### key contact departure detection
A related phrasing for the same underlying problem.

Compatibility: Compatibility: CRM contact data with email engagement, calendar, and identity deprovisioning signals, current versions.

## Why it happens
No single system sees a departure whole, but the fragments are everywhere. Detection improves by joining fragments (a bounce means little, a bounce plus deprovisioning plus meeting declines means gone) rather than by buying a bigger version of one signal.

## Edge cases / pitfalls
- Out-of-office replies often name the successor and their start date. Capture OOO text as data, not just as an email event.
- Deprovisioning lags departures by weeks at some customers. Treat it as confirmation, not as the earliest warning.
- False positives (parental leave, role change) are cheap if the alert asks a human to verify rather than auto-starting a save play.

## Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_QRABWQnBkaQkQlvZMGuNug