How to Fire Your Top Salesperson Who Makes Millions for Your Company

It’s easy to believe you’re leading a high-performing team when the numbers look good. When your top salesperson is bringing in millions, crushing quotas, and racking up public praise, it’s tempting to think everything’s fine. That kind of performance creates a comforting illusion—until the cracks start to show.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice those cracks aren’t just surface-level. They’re signs of something deeper: operational strain, morale decay, quiet frustration. Often, those cracks are caused by the one person everyone’s too afraid to confront—your top rep.

They’re not following the process. They’re overpromising to clients. They’re steamrolling the operations team, leaving accounting to clean up chaos, and refusing to be coached. Because they produce results, they’re untouchable. They win the awards. They get the recognition. Little by little, your credibility as a leader begins to rot.

That’s the leadership tax—and it’s brutal. It’s the emotional and operational cost you pay for protecting performance over principles. You feel it when your best people start disengaging. When meetings are tense, but no one tells you why. When your company’s values are posted on the wall, but ignored in practice, You feel it in the turnover, the burnout, and the rising resentment of the people who actually keep the machine running.

What most leaders miss is that performance can easily become a shield. You start excusing behavior that’s poisoning your culture simply because the numbers are good. But when you protect someone who violates your standards, you’re not just tolerating bad behavior—you’re building a business around it.

The rot doesn’t show up as a scandal at first. It starts with the small things. A broken promise here. A blown-off process there. Support staff cleaning up messes while your top rep moves on to the next client. Eventually, your team stops speaking up. Your best people get tired. They stop trusting that you’ll do the right thing because, in their eyes, you already haven’t.

This is when your values go from being a compass to a decoration.

I had a friend call me about this very situation. His VP of Sales had closed over $3 million in business that year, as he does year over year. On paper, this guy was gold, but behind the scenes, he was sleeping with his assistant—both of them were married. It was a direct violation of their company’s core value: integrity.

My friend was frozen. “I can’t fire him,” he told me. “We’ll lose $3 million in sales, and I can't do that, but I can't let this go without some form of action either.” I asked, “Ok, if you can't take a $3 million loss, can you absorb a $1 million hit and still survive?” He paused. “Yeah,” he said. “I could survive that.”

That was the moment everything changed for him, and I heard the energy rise in his voice immediately. He realized the decision wasn’t about whether to fire $3 million. It was about whether he had the courage to protect the company’s integrity, even if it cost him short-term revenue.

He let the VP go. The company not only recovered, but they grew beyond where they were before. The team stepped up. Trust returned. The culture healed. The leadership message became unmistakably clear: this company has standards.

Here’s the real cost of keeping someone whose behavior doesn’t align with your values: You lose the people who do. You lose the silent loyalty of those who follow process, respect others, and protect your brand when no one’s watching. You lose the very thing you built your company on—integrity, trust, accountability.

What most leaders fail to realize is that when one person is allowed to operate above the standard, the rot spreads. Systems bend to accommodate them. Managers look the other way. Accountability becomes selective. Suddenly, you’re not leading anymore. You’re managing around dysfunction.

If this feels uncomfortably familiar, you’re not alone. Most leaders won’t admit it, but deep down, they know when something’s off. They just opt not to deal with the fallout.

They say, “Let’s wait until after Q4.” They say, “He’s just intense. That’s how salespeople are.” They say, “We’ll clean it up later.”

Unfortunately, “later” is where culture goes to die.

Because the longer you protect someone who undermines your standards, the more you teach everyone else that standards don’t matter. That performance buys immunity. That leadership will always flinch when money’s involved.

So let me ask you: what’s it really costing you to keep them?

You might think you can’t afford to lose them, but have you calculated the hidden costs—the lost trust, the silent disengagement, the stress fractures forming across your team?

Because if your company can’t survive without one person, it’s not a team. It’s a hostage situation.

You haven’t built strength. You’ve built dependency. And now the question isn’t, “Can you afford to fire them?” It’s, “Can you afford not to?”

I explore all of this in my newest video, and I don’t hold back. If you’re a leader who feels the tension, who’s been carrying this weight, who’s silently struggling with whether to make the call, this is for you.

🎥 Watch it now: https://www.youtube.com/@brendaneckvatal Title: How to Fire Your Top Salesperson Who Makes Millions for Your Company

If you want to see how this plays out in real leadership moments, the video is worth watching.

But insight alone won’t carry you through the conversation that follows.

When you’re dealing with a high performer who operates above the standard, the real risk isn’t the decision itself. It’s what you say, how you say it, and whether you hold the line when the pressure hits.

If you want support in those moments, the Toxic People Toolkit app gives you on-demand guidance and language you can access in real time. It’s designed for leaders navigating difficult people without blowing up their culture or second-guessing themselves afterward.

You don’t need to wait until it’s unbearable.
You need the right words before it gets there.

Access the Toxic People Toolkit app at www.askbrendahow.com