Our VP of Sales was employee number two twelve years ago and lives our core values completely, but as we expand into mid-market enterprise accounts, he clearly lacks the capacity to build a formal sales engine or coach reps. How do we make this GWC call without tearing our culture apart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is the classic Right Person, Wrong Seat scenario. Your sales leader has full marks on the People Analyzer for core values. He is family. He helped build the company. But GWC requires all three components: Gets It, Wants It, and has the Capacity to do It. Capacity is not just about intelligence or hours worked. It encompasses experience, emotional bandwidth, mental acumen, and the capability to execute at your company's next stage.

When a company scales from two million to twenty million dollars, the seats evolve dramatically. The sales seat that worked when hustle and personal rolodexes drove revenue is not the seat that manages enterprise pipelines, compensation tiers, and CRM discipline.

Address this directly and compassionately. Sit down with him outside the regular Level 10 Meeting. Use the Accountability Chart to show him how the five roles of the VP of Sales seat have changed. Ask him for his honest self-assessment before offering yours. Often, a struggling legacy leader already knows they are over their skis and feels daily exhaustion trying to pretend otherwise.

Explore whether there is a true seat on the Accountability Chart where he can thrive. He might be an exceptional individual enterprise producer, key account director, or strategic alliance manager. If a true seat exists where he is an absolute yes on core values and GWC, move him there.

If no such seat exists, or if his ego cannot tolerate stepping out of leadership, you must help him transition out of the business cleanly. Keeping someone in a leadership seat they cannot handle out of sentimentality is unfair to the rest of the company and unfair to them.