Discover how “vampire sales orgs” quietly drain your business, wreck margins, and stall growth, and the garlic-like discipline that keeps them out. Learn the hard-won tactics to protect your sales culture before it’s too late.
Table of Contents
Introduction
In September 2024, we did 7.8 cr revenue for the month after adjusting refunds. We had a team of 60 effective callers at this time and hired about 100 more over August and September. We also hired 6 experienced sales directors from other companies. The goal was to increase our revenue to 15 crore/month by scaling up our sales team.
Even if 15 didn’t happen, 10 cr/month seemed like a done deal in a matter of months.
Actual result? Our sales went downhill. It was stuck around 6 cr per month or 7 cr at best no matter what we tried. Per caller productivity dipped to 2.5 lakh/caller at one point from above 10 lakh/month.
How did this happen? How can a high performing sales org become a zombie in a matter of months?
I have a proper understanding of this now after seeing the whole thing play out and then resolving it myself one step at a time.
Good news is that the holes are plugged, solution found and we are surging again. So no need to worry.
But the problem? It’s universal.
Very few sales organizations manage to scale. What happened to us is a textbook example of leadership failure and cultural collapse in sales teams.
We created something we now call a vampire sales org. And it took only one mistake for it to happen.
Let’s take a step back.
Imagine that you build a new product. You run ads. You do organic content. You start to get a steady stream of leads.
Your landing page will convert some of those leads.
You email the others, message them, run them through a funnel. You get them to follow you on social media so that you can keep them interested.
Eventually some more would buy as they build trust, desire and their needs evolve.
Your funnel is profitable. So you spend more.
If you have high ticket products (high ARPU), you call those leads and realise that you can sell much more if you consistently call those leads and help them make a buying decision.
You can make only so many calls. Should you create a sales team now?
The answer is yes only if you can increase the conversion percentage. If marketing converts 2% and your sales team can increase conversion to 10%, it is a no brainer.
So you go ahead and hire some sales people. Their job is to move the people sitting on the fence to making a buying decision. Their job is to convert the sceptics into believers.
This works.
But then you hire an experienced sales guy. You are hoping he knows things you don’t.
And sure he does.
He has been taught that the fastest way to hit his target is to focus on the 2% leads who are already ready to buy. He ignores and refuses to nurture the other 98%, from which you would have got and expected 5x more conversion.
He only demands more leads. Leads are not that great, he says, that’s why our sales figures are going downwards. Just give me better leads and see what magic we do.
He complains about marketing non-stop. You start thinking there must be some truth to it.
Your existing sales people who worked hard to convert leads now have also learned that more experienced sales people do not try to convert less than already ready to buy leads, so they just find the most willing ones.
Suddenly per caller revenue takes a hit while some people seem to be doing well (by cornering and sifting through leads really fast).
Now you have a sales team that is a parasite. Now it is the proverbial monkey on your back. It is not adding anything to the conversion but increasing the cost of sales. If you listen to them, you will go ahead and ratchet up your marketing spend so you can have more leads. Your margins will go for a toss as your CAC goes up month on month and touches the stratosphere.
And yet your sales org will demand even more leads.
Many profitable companies have died this way. Think of all the startups whose CAC (cost of acquiring customers) never came under control no matter at what scale. They had this monkey on their back.
You can call it the vampire sales org. After sucking your business dry and running it into the ground, this sales organization will find another host. They will refer and hire each other in another place with an ascending brand or fresh funding.
How do you save yourself?
By measuring effort. And insisting on effort rather than results. Results will follow efforts.
If as a founder or key leader, you have run your initial sales organization, which you probably did right at the beginning if you have seen success, you will already have an idea about what effort is needed to succeed in your sales organization.
You need to understand that bringing an outside sales leader, no matter how qualified, does not mean they know more about how your org should operate. They don’t even have your best interest on their mind. They barely understand what works and what doesn’t. Do not surrender to those people.
And the garlic for the vampire sales organizations is effort. If you measure effort they will stay far away from you.
What happened to us? How could I allow this to happen?
I always made sure that we measure effort. This is a hard won lesson that I was well aware of. So I did everything to measure effort in our sales org. Unfortunately, someone very senior in the system decided that if someone achieves their number, it is a good idea to let them off the hook on effort. He was tricked by the vampires and he fell for it. I had no idea this was allowed. HR turned a blind eye despite writing that “effort is paramount” in the culture document themselves.
The rest of the people had no idea.
This is how ships sink, fortresses fall and profitable companies go to unprofitable hell. This is how vampires enter your fortress, someone invites them inside.
This one single chink in our defence meant our sales org got overrun by zombies and vampires. In a matter of months!
No maths was adding up.
I finally had to enter the front line myself personally to study what happened to be able to understand this critical weakness in our system and fix it.
Currently, if someone produces results in the system without effort, it is to be assumed that they are doing some kind of scam. You may not know what the exact nature of it is, but do you need to wait till figuring out and collecting evidence? No, not really.
Without exception, this has proven to be right so far. Every day we discover new scams in the system perpetrated by low effort people who miraculously created great results despite their low effort.
If you are not producing results but putting in effort, that is one thing. We have no doubt that we will eventually turn your results around as long as you do not stop your efforts.
If you are not putting in effort, you must go. If you are not consistently upgrading your sales skills step by step, you must go.
This is universally true, but even more so for sales. If you don’t follow this golden rule, you will be killed by vampire sales orgs. Your
I know, easy to say, hard to do.
How do you make sure effort metrics are actually met when there are 10,000 ways to fake them?
Here is how we solved it:
- Track time spent on phone, keep recordings of each call
- Track time spent on laptop with a time and activity tracking software
- Transcribe every call and quality audit them with an AI agent (this has become a game changer as effort cannot be faked after this)
But remember, no system is full proof unless people refuse to create loopholes and watch out for discipline.
Watch out for vampire sales teams, many of them are out of job and looking for the next unsuspecting host. There is an army of sales leaders out there who swear by lead harvesting as the gold standard for running a sales team. May they join our competitors and not us.
How to identify vampire sales orgs:
- Hates effort tracking, wants you to focus only on results
- CAC skyrocketing
- Regular complaints of low quality leads
- A few people exceeding targets without effort, others wanting to emulate them
- Sales leaders relaxing effort metrics instead of trying to instill discipline
- Sales culture rewards results over discipline, leading to increased misselling
- They hire their ex colleagues en masse, and they change jobs every two years because they need new hosts after killing the last
What does a good sales team look like?
- Efforts are measured and results match up with efforts
- There is constant push to improve quality of the calls, there are effective systems to audit and improve individual performance
- If someone puts in effort with consistency, the system helps them to become great. People who put in effort are not allowed to fail by the system. People who put in effort to improve their craft make great money, and their failure is seen as a failure of leadership.
- Hiring happens slowly, at a pace that can be handled by the system without undue pressure, there is no random firing of people who are putting in effort consistently
- There is a well defined process to train newcomers and people are not blaming each other for training failure
- Vampires and zombies leave very quickly saying culture is toxic. People who work hard take pride in the sales culture.
- Leaders work as hard as front line workers, not sitting around bossing people but actually producing results themselves. They are judged by how many high performers they create (not hire) and incentivized to create more high performers. Moving people from low performance to high performing is seen as a high point of leadership.
- There is transparency, no misselling required, and culture is one of honesty and integrity.
- Problems are surfaced quickly to be resolved not swept under the rug, no need for “bro code” of mutual silence about shortcomings and failures
Allow notifications
