I fired half my remote sales team in a month, here’s what I learned

I was on Zoom, at 10:00pm GST in Dubai staring at this remote sales rep who was hired and wondering, "Who hired this person?  They can't sell what we do AT ALL!"   It was a frustrating moment because my sales script was good and tight.  My CRM setup on Pipedrive was clear, simple and effective (or so I thought). And yet, I was trying to train this remote sales rep I had never met before and was dumbfounded WHY this person was working in my company.   One issues was the tonality was awful.  This person didn't have much on-camera charm and presence and I was not gravitated toward listening to what they were saying about something so fun and enjoyable: healthy cooking classes for kids. I had to figure out what to do with my company…which had already been through a wild month.  We had fired the sales manager and I was the interim manager, ready to clean things up.   Quick Intro: I scaled my service business from $1.3M to $10.2M in 19 months, and it takes me half a day per week to manage.  That company teaches healthy cooking classes to schools around the US and instructs 12,000 students a week.  Now, I help service founders hire and onboard remote sales reps to generate $20k+ per month without them sorting resumes or building SOPs.  I have a limited time offer where I will work for free UNTIL my clients generate at least $20k in revenue for just 5 clients.  Book a call at www.winwinwitheric.com In the past month, we fired half of the sale team.  All of it was 100% justified and now we have a smaller group of A-players that are carrying the company in signed clients every month.  Plus, I genuinely like each and every one of them.   Here's what I learned so YOU don't have to make the same mistakes. Lesson 1:  Tracking isn't enough, you gotta dig deeper My first indicator that things were off was the attitude with the sales team.  There were changes to the industry to account for such as, in Education, the grants the schools I work with receive constantly change. On the surface I could see that calls were made, FTAs (First Time Appointments) were happening and proposals were going out the door.   But something seemed off.  It was a gut feeling.   Cash-collected seemed lower than it should be. We looked at some of the contracts and they were big. But then I saw a hole.  It had said we had millions in signed clients for 2026, but I realized this included contracts that were partially serviced in 2026 AND 2025.  For example, a school had a Fall 2025 session and a Winter 2026 session.  Instead of dividing up the contract into the two seasons, we just looked at one big "lump" amount. This revealed that 2026 was significantly lower than expected, and the final difference was…30% off!   "Wow, we had a lot of work to do," I thought Lesson 2:  Problems come from the top down:  the sales manager was faking the pipeline. The process began with into the hole of sales and separating everything by session.  Then we went further and looked at  all of the sales rep and their activities.   Here's what we found:

• People were "double counting" calls, meaning they'd make a call to a prospect at 11:10am and then make another call to the same contact at 11:15am because they got a new extension or phone number to contact.  In my world, that's ONE outbound contact to that lead, not two, even if it's two dials.
• People were calling after hours, because the manager told them too, which generates no traction because no one is around!
• Reps would reach out to a lead multiple times and then "throw a meeting on their calendar" meaning they would send a calendar invite to someone who NEVER wanted a meeting, in hopes they would just "meet because the calendar said so."  Obviously, this is terrible advice and doesn't work at all.  This would be counted as an "FTA" incorrectly.
• People would book FTAs and if the prospect didn't show, they'd count it as an FTA.  I thought to myself, "If I went on a date, and the date never showed up…does that count as an FTA?"  Obviously not.
• People would attend an FTA to observe a more seasoned sales rep…and both people would log it as an FTA.  Thus double counting.
• A setter would book an FTA and count it, then a sales rep would attend it and count it as an FTA.  Thus, one FTA was tracked as "two." 

This is all horrifying, and the sales manager was let go immediately.  More things popped up, the more we dug. But with the sale clean, I could step in as the interim sales manager and get the team on track (which I'm still doing).   It's part of business and a big lesson learned.  Lesson 3: Signed clients is the MOST important metric While we were cleaning out the system, the one metric that couldn't be faked was real signed clients.  As noted from the issues above, you can count more calls then what happened.  You could "log" an FTA as needed.  You can meet any prospect and spit out a large proposal for $100,000 and log it as a big new proposal (even though you know it won't close).   (Btw, the old sales manager would encourage to pitch big giant proposals to new prospects, even though our instructions in the SOP specifically say not to.  We like to start with something small, and go bigger on the second contract) With a lot of calls, lots of FTAs and a TON of new proposals…what was wrong? Well, the signed clients were QUITE low compared to everything else. You can't fake a signed and official government contract, because those things are battle tested and easily traceable to see if they're a fraud. That metric was the one that opened my eyes the most, as I track signed clients every day, week and month.   Lesson 4:  Small high-quality team > Big average team. Within a day, we had two low-performing sales reps out the door.  One was taking off work randomly during the day (and we saw that) and the other was just not closing like we needed (but was a nice person).   As I started leading sales meetings, I saw the sales rep I talked about in the beginning of this article and asked "who hired this guy?" The answer: the old sales manager, and no one else had done any interviews or reference checks. Soon that rep was, politely, let go. We had two appointment setters that we decided to part with as well, mostly because I'd rather just pay the difference and have a full-cycle closer who can set AND lead the meeting.  With our sales, it's better to have people who can confidently talk about the service because it's a long sales cycle.   I noticed once I got rid of all of the B and C players…I had more time for the A players.  And it's a much, much better experience with that type of energy in the room.  Lesson 5:  Roleplay is a great way to expose the truth In this article I went over how roleplay is a key part to train a sales team. I find it hard to "carve out" time for training.  It feels half-hazard, so I added two 90-minute "sales roleplay" sessions each week. During these, I'd spend about 15-20 minutes with each sales rep watching them making live calls.  I'd bring them into separate break rooms, with 2-3 people in each room, and watch them call. I noticed one rep was just not using the script well, and it seemed odd because we had done so much training. Later, I found out this person had "faked calls" on our CRM, and everything now made sense. It's hard to be good at calling…and to get better…when you're not making calls! Lesson 6: The longer you wait, the more it costs My only wish is that I could have fired the sales manager, and low-performers, sooner. Smaller red flags had popped up throughout the year, but we had ignored them. This was in part because we had been signing a lot of clients. But that dipped, a bit, and we looked at the numbers and they "seemed" good. The lesson is to follow your gut, and act fast. I don't see "business" as this self-serving mechanism to help the world.   It's a place where there is a real exchange within the company where good people are paid well, and if someone isn't good to work with …well they shouldn't be in the company. This isn't charity. This is a contractual relationship where two people come together: I'm the owner and want good people who are a pleasure to work with to produce good results, and in exchange there is a salary, bonuses and a productive and upbeat work environment. Now, we trim quickly.   If we have a bit of a nudge that something off, chances are it is and it's better to part ways now then later. Plus it opens up more energy to FOCUS on the good people who are actually worth your time and attention. If you're a service business who wants to bring in a remote sales rep that generates $20k+ per month (guaranteed or we work for free), without hiring or onboarding (we do all of that), book a call with me at www.winwinwitheric.com