I was a sales rep for a small cybersecurity startup. CEO is 26, I am 24 so just a bit older. CEO has never led sales team, had experience closing or finding more business. I was told we can't cold call and only email and LinkedIn. We get a few deals underway but the CEO wants more deals in the pipeline. We change our product focus and branch out into a different sector. Over the course of 6-8 months, we struggled to get deals with the economic downturn and he begins to micromanage us and ask for work on various spreadsheets, quantifying every single email we send out. Our emails are getting sent to spam due to a lot of emails being sent from a relatively new company. I begin to quiet quit. I stopped responding to slacks on weekends, emails and pause my notifications after 5pm. During a 1:1 we go through some of our emails that I had sent and he mentioned I should be personalizing a lot more and begin to implement that. By the time I get a cadence of personalized emails going, boss tells us that we can't email due to 30-40% of emails landing in spam. On Wednesday, 12pm, 1 hr before the board meeting with the VC firm, I get called into a meeting. Both co-founders are there and I already know where this is going. I get let go for not following directions after not improving performance over the course of a few weeks, during which our email deliverability went to shit and we were stuck with LinkedIn outreach only. I was told that I had been given numerous verbal and written instructions. The CEO was so choked up and teary eyed, I could hear him choking up to fire me and how “hard” it was for him. Honestly, I felt so relieved. I was burnt out from working with such a micromanaging boss. Numerous times our boss had said, with the advent of AI and AI based marketing copy software, our jobs could be replaced. The one sales rep that they kept is the sister of the CTO. We had an event we were sponsoring in Las Vegas for Hacker Week and the sister got to fly in because she was the sister of the CTO. I was told if I wanted to fly in and join the rest of the team, everyone is paying out of pocket to go so I can go if I can pay out of pocket. I told my CTO, I don't have funds to afford it. From that moment, (3 weeks ago) I began to take a step back and not work extra to try to go the extra mile. I knew the sister was building a repertoire with the team and our clients.
TLDR: CEO cries and tears up and fires me after I stop responding to emails and slacks after 5pm.