Champion Departure Early-Warning Playbook 2026

Account-level scores hide champion departure — one power user going dark barely moves a 40-seat account's average. So the trigger is user-level: a key user's engagement drops to zero and stays there for 14 days.

• Define "key user" mechanically, not by memory: top-two engagement scores on the account over the trailing quarter, or the named champion trait if you set one. Accoil scores every user on the events you already send through Segment, PostHog, Amplitude or Mixpanel.
• The 14-day zero-activity window beats title-scrape alerts because usage dies before LinkedIn updates. People stop logging in during their notice period; the profile changes a month later. This play fires in the gap.
• The trigger carries the payload the play runs on: the user's engagement score, days since last seen, the account-level score delta, and active-seat percentage — so the very first alert already says how exposed the account is.

Fourteen days of silence has three explanations: departure, parental leave, or a role change that moved them off your tool. Before anyone runs a play, enrich the quiet user with job-change data from UserGems (or Champify): did they land at a new company, did their title change in place, and has a successor been named on the account? Three fields come out — new company, role change, successor named — and they turn a hunch into a decision. Don't skip this step to move faster; a "sorry to see you go" note to someone on leave costs more trust than the two days the enrichment takes.

One rule, read off the enrichment: confirmed departure — new company or a departure signal on the profile — goes to the full multi-thread play. No confirmation means the account goes on a recheck watchlist instead of getting a misfired condolence email. Write the rule down so triage never depends on someone's judgment at 5pm on a Friday.

Post to #cs-alerts and tag the account owner. The alert carries everything the play has gathered: who went dark and when, the account score delta, seats still active, where the champion landed, and whether a successor exists. Then the two CRM moves that make the risk visible beyond the CS team, done the same day: log the departure on the account record, and flag the renewal forecast immediately. A champion exit discovered in the data but invisible to the forecast is a surprise you scheduled for yourself.

The save isn't replacing one contact with another — that's how the account got fragile in the first place. The CSM's job in the next two weeks:

• Map two new stakeholders minimum — the champion's manager and one active power user from the seats-active data. The play's exit criterion is threads ≥3: three live relationships that would each notice if you disappeared.
• Book the exec-to-exec intro. A departure is the one moment a sponsor email is expected rather than awkward: "your team is changing, here's what we're seeing, here's who to talk to on our side."
• Meet the successor as a new customer, not an heir. They didn't choose your product and they inherit none of the champion's context. Assume zero knowledge and zero loyalty.

Enroll the successor in a re-onboarding sequence — the same milestone-keyed motion you'd run for a new trial, compressed. First value in week one, the workflows their team already depends on by week three. Watch their user-level engagement score climb the way you'd watch a trial activate; a successor who hasn't touched the product 30 days after taking over is the next departure signal, just slower. Suppress the sequence the moment their score clears the account's healthy user baseline.

No confirmed departure doesn't mean no risk — it means an important user went quiet and you don't know why yet. Keep the account on a 7-day recheck: if the user resurfaces, close it out; if the silence hits 28 days, treat it as a departure regardless of what LinkedIn says. And either way, a single user's silence moving your account score this much is single-threading telling on itself — start the stakeholder mapping now, while it's cheap.

The play closes when the account has three or more active threads and the successor's engagement is above baseline — not when the intro emails are sent. Track renewal outcomes on champion-loss accounts as their own cohort; run this play for two quarters and that cohort's renewal rate becomes the clearest before-and-after your CS org can show the board.