Oracle America, INCAt Oracle, we over-indexed on trying to win CRM market share against our competition. About nine months in, it was clear we weren't in a winning position with the current structure and it fell to me to lead a hard reset of the team.
I made the calls on who stayed and who didn't, then rebuilt the org around the people we kept, which meant finding new roles for some of them rather than just preserving their old titles. Beyond the mechanics of the restructuring, I ran the conversations at every level: the broader team discussions about what was happening and why, plus the individual conversations, both with people staying and the larger group who were leaving. We repurposed 6 managers and 30 salespeople into a leaner, more focused org, while a significant portion of the team was let go.
The reps who stayed carried some real survivor's guilt, and it showed up as effort. The team outperformed the prior year by 31% with 20% fewer people. What had been an overbuilt, underperforming org turned into a smaller team that outproduced its former self.
