The first time I lost a top performer to burnout, I had him marked as the safest person on my team.
Call him James. He was two years into the role and already the highest biller on the team. He answered emails at eleven at night and picked up on a Sunday if a deal was live. When the rest of the team was grumbling about the new comp plan, he was the one telling them to get on with it. If you’d asked me to name the person most likely to walk, I’d have given you four names before his.
He resigned on a Tuesday with nothing to go to. He told me he hadn’t slept properly in about five months.
I’ve spent twenty-seven years in sales leadership, and I’ve now seen that burnout pattern enough times to stop calling it bad luck. The people most at risk in a sales team are very often the best ones, and the reason is uncomfortable once you see it.
The number becomes the person
Sales is one of the few jobs where your worth is published. Everyone can see the board. When you’re new, the number is just a target you’re chasing. If you hit it often enough, over years, something shifts. The number stops being what you do and starts being who you are.
That works beautifully while you’re winning. The problem is what happens in a bad quarter, which every salesperson gets eventually. An average performer has a bad quarter and thinks, that was a bad quarter. A top performer has a bad quarter and quietly wonders whether they were ever any good. One of those is a business problem. The other one follows you home.
And they don’t tell you. That’s the part managers underestimate. Someone whose identity is built on being reliable will not walk into your office and say they’re struggling, because in their own head that admission is the thing that undoes them.
The numbers bear this out. The Sales Health Alliance’s 2024 State of Mental Health in Sales report, drawn from more than 500 sellers and sales leaders, found 70% were struggling with their mental health. Their earlier research found 44% of salespeople didn’t feel able to be open and vulnerable at work. That’s close to half a sales floor with no safe way to say they’re not OK. Just let that sink in for a minute that’s a huge burnout risk for the people and the business.
Why it looks like commitment
Here’s the cruel bit. The early signs of a top performer coming apart from burnout look almost identical to effort.
Longer hours. More activity. Hoarding deals rather than sharing them. Forecasting more optimistically than the evidence supports, because admitting the pipeline is thin feels like admitting something about yourself. Holiday booked, then cancelled. Going quiet in the team channel while the CRM says they were working at midnight.
Every one of those things reads as dedication on a dashboard. Most sales management systems are built to measure output, and output is the last thing to fall over. By the time the number drops, the person dropped months ago.
At Verso we map how salespeople respond to pressure, and James fits the pattern we call the Driver: someone who meets pressure by increasing their pace, their workload and their personal involvement. On a dashboard, that looks like commitment. What it can hide is real difficulty pausing, delegating or recovering. That’s exactly why it’s the burnout pattern most managers worry about least.
What to actually do
Three things, none of which require a budget:
Change what you ask in your one-to-ones
Most sales one-to-ones are a pipeline review with a person attached. Ask something the CRM can’t answer. ‘What’s the bit of this job you’re dreading this week?’ is a better question than ‘how are you doing?’, because the second one has a socially acceptable answer and the first one doesn’t.
Make the check-in routine, not a rescue
If you only ask someone how they’re holding up when they’re missing target, you’ve taught the entire team that the question means you’re in trouble. Ask everyone, including the person at the top of the board, especially the person at the top of the board.
Watch for changes in pattern, not drops in volume
The rep who used to ask for help on deals and has stopped. The one whose emails have gone terse. The one who’s suddenly working the hours they used to mock. You’re looking for a person behaving unlike themselves, which means you have to know what they’re like in the first place.
Done well, those three habits catch most of it. The hard part is doing them consistently, for every person, in the weeks when the forecast is on fire and one-to-ones are the first thing to get cancelled. That’s the gap we started Verso to close: giving managers a regular, honest read on how their people are doing, not just what they’re producing.
The commercial argument, briefly
I could give you the cost of replacing a rep, the ramp time, the pipeline that goes cold while the seat is empty. Those numbers are real and they’re large, and if you need them to justify the conversation internally, use them.
But that isn’t why I do this. James emailed me about a year later to say he was alright. I was glad, and I was also aware that I’d been his manager for two years and had noticed nothing at all. I’d measured everything he did and nothing about how he was doing it.
We track every call, every email and every stage of every deal. Almost nobody tracks the state of mind of the person making them, and that’s the number that tells you what next quarter actually looks like.
Look out for the webinar on this topic in December!
In the meantime, why not take ISP’s Sales Capability Assessment? It gives you an evidence-based view of your sales force; enquire here.
Written by Rico Montagnino, Founder, Verso, for World Mental Health Day 2026
Rico Montagnino spent 27 years in global sales leadership before co-founding Verso, which helps sales leaders see the wellbeing signals their CRM misses. Sales leaders can take the free Sales Wellbeing Map at versonow.com