Our market has shifted, and we need to completely eliminate our field sales department and transition to an inside sales model, which makes our current Field Sales Director seat obsolete. How do we structurally execute this deletion on our Accountability Chart without letting our personal loyalty to the director cloud our business decision?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Restructuring your Accountability Chart requires you to be completely unsentimental. You must build the structure of the business for the next twelve months first, with zero names attached. Only when you have designed the perfect, most efficient chart do you begin placing people into the seats.

If your field sales department is no longer viable, that seat must be removed from the chart. Keeping an obsolete seat just to protect a loyal employee's feelings is a form of business suicide. It drains your resources, confuses your team, and signals that personal comfort is more important than strategic reality.

Once the Field Sales Director seat is gone, you have a person without a seat. You must run a GWC™ check on this individual against your open, future state seats. Do they have the core values and the conative drive to run the new Inside Sales seat, or perhaps an Account Management seat?

If they do not GWC™ any of the active seats on your new chart, you must let them go. This is a difficult conversation, but you must be direct. Thank them for their loyalty and service, explain that the market has forced a structural shift, and provide a fair severance package. Keeping them in a manufactured, low impact seat will only frustrate them and poison your culture. To prepare for a clean exit, your chart must reflect strategic efficiency, not historical sentimentality.