"I inherited a 40-person sales team. Here's what I cut first."

A new VP of Sales on the hardest 90 days of her career.

Taking over a sales organization is hard. Taking over one that's been managed poorly is harder.

When Rachel Kim joined as VP of Sales, she inherited a 40-person team with high turnover, complex compensation structures, and unclear accountability.

Her first 90 days involved difficult decisions about who to keep, what to change, and how to communicate the vision.

"The first thing I cut was the complexity," she says. "We had compensation plans that nobody understood, forecasting processes that took a week, and too many layers."

She reduced the sales org to 28 people, simplified the comp plan, and introduced a weekly forecast update instead of monthly.

The result: lower payroll, higher clarity, and—surprisingly—better results.

"People don't leave because they're asked to do more," Rachel reflects. "They leave because they don't understand the game."