Planning vacation for your team is easy. Planning vacation for your customer process is the real work

Every year, the same story: for many entrepreneurs, summer is the financially toughest period. Customers are on vacation, decisions get postponed, and new work slides into September. Yet that’s not true for everyone. Research shows that for part of the Dutch SMB market, summer is actually the most important sales period of the year — businesses that deliberately use the quieter period to gain ground on competitors who do slow down.

The difference is preparation, not luck

What these businesses do differently is rarely a coincidence. It comes down to preparing the process, not working harder during the vacation itself. Research into good sales handover practices shows what helps: a structured handover document with customer details, open deals, past conversations, and upcoming deadlines, combined with a short handover moment between the departing colleague and their temporary replacement. What matters most is where that information lives: in a repeatable format inside the CRM or automation platform, not in a separate shared document that gets lost after a few weeks.

The familiar situation at many small businesses

At many smaller businesses, “handover” during vacation consists of a quick message in the group chat: “I’ll be out for a bit, can you keep an eye on Jansen?” Without a clear agreement on what information belongs with that, which fields have been updated, and what the exact status of a deal is, that’s not a handover — it’s a well-intentioned stopgap. The covering colleague often knows little more than the customer’s name, and has to improvise the moment a question comes in.

What it costs to leave this alone

The result is predictable: deals that “sit for a bit” during vacation until the owner is back, while a competitor who did prepare their process just keeps going. That doesn’t show up as an obvious mistake — it shows up as a summer that feels quieter than it needed to, when the slowdown wasn’t caused by less demand but by a process that leaned on one person.

How FortCRM helps with this

When we set up Pipedrive, we deliberately think through ownership per deal: who’s the primary owner, and who’s the designated backup when that person is away. Through automation, we make sure a deal taken over by the backup carries the same context the original owner had — not a separate document, but the full history right there in the CRM. That way, “I’ll be out for a bit” never has to mean a customer has nobody at all.

One concrete first step

Are you, or a colleague, heading out soon? Assign a temporary backup for every open deal in the CRM, and make sure the latest status (last contact, next action, deadline) lives in the system — not just in the owner’s head. That takes an afternoon, and it’s the difference between a summer that stalls and one that just keeps moving.

Sources

• MKB Servicedesk, “Dichtgaan of openblijven tijdens de zomervakantie?”
• Financieel Management, “Vakantie? MKB gebruikt zomer juist om te groeien”
• Pipedrive, “Handover Management Checklist”