(Reuters) - Groupon Inc's Lee Brown, who oversees the daily deal company's national sales, has decided to leave, following other senior executives who left the company this year, according to an internal memo obtained by Reuters on Thursday. 
 
 Brown, who was senior vice president of national sales and joined in 2010 from Yahoo Inc, will be replaced by Raj Ruparell, the memo from Groupon's operations chief Kal Raman said. A Groupon spokesman confirmed the changes and the accuracy of the memo. 
 
 Groupon has lost about three quarters of its market value since the company's IPO last year on concern that the growth of its main daily deal business is slowing. 
 
 There have also been reports of staff departures in recent weeks. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Jayna Cooke, another top salesperson at Groupon, had left the company. 
 
 Brown was credited with the creation of Groupon's National Sales team, which arranges nationwide deals, rather than local offers. 
 
 "Under Lee's management, the team has secured a number of key customers, and I'd like to personally thank Lee for his contributions and wish him the best in his next opportunity," Raman wrote in the memo. 
 
 Ruparell, who is taking over the National Sales team, previously headed Groupon Goods, the company's fast-growing consumer products business, Raman added. 
 
 "Raj will report to Chris Muhr, SVP of Sales, and will be immediately focused on getting to know the team and delivering on our Q3 forecast," Raman added. 
 
 (Reporting By Nivedita Bhattacharjee; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer) 

 A top-earning Groupon salesperson, Jayna Cooke, has left the company, the Wall Street Journal reports. 
 
 At one point, Cooke handled big deals for national brands like Gap and Nordstrom, which showed that Groupon could break out of its niche of Brazilian waxes and sky-diving discounts. 
 
 More recently, Cooke worked as a local sales rep in the Chicago market, a source close to Groupon told us. 
 
 We've heard a lot of reports about unrest within Groupon's salesforce—which admittedly had it easy during Groupon's early days, when the daily-deals business model seemed to be minting money. Commissions are harder to earn these days. 
 
 Cooke previously worked for a company, Echo Global Logistics, which was started by Groupon cofounders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell. She's headed to Eventup, a startup backed by Lefkofsky and Keywell's Lightbank. 

 Zynga’s CityVille Loses Mayor to Kixeye 
 
 With Zynga’s stock price sinking — and morale along with it — employees have started to head for the door. 
 
 The latest exit, following its COO John Schappert, is Alan Patmore, Zynga’s general manager of CityVille, who has joined Kixeye as their VP of Product. 
 
 Compared to its social gaming counterparts, Kixeye flies under the radar because, unlike other games found on Facebook, its games are fairly hardcore. In fact, 97 percent of its players are male. 
 
 As I wrote in May: 
 
 Kixeye is currently registering about one million users a day, and while most social game companies make roughly four cents per user, Kixeye claims it makes closer to 60 cents. The San Francisco company has been profitable for the past two years, and this year it is projecting revenue in excess of $100 million. It’s similar to a story that Kabam and other midcore game makers have started telling as Facebook becomes a mature gaming platform. Developers are starting to see that if they target a more hardcore demographic, then the players will be more engrossed, and, therefore, spend more time and money in the games. 
 
 Kixeye said Patmore will be responsible at Kixeye for overseeing all aspects of product strategy and development. 
 
 “I’m a big fan of Kixeye and what they’ve been able to accomplish over the last couple of years,” Patmore said in a statement. “I couldn’t be more excited about the team, strategy and product roadmap. There are some launches coming later this year that are going to set the industry on fire.” 
 
 While at Zynga, Patmore also oversaw Mafia Wars, one of Zynga’s key franchises early on, and before that, was VP of Product Development at Double Fine Productions. Patmore was also president and CEO of Surreal Software, which he co-founded and later sold to Midway in 2004. 
 
 The departure of such top talent is a blow to Zynga, which whiffed its last earnings report and reorganized its management team. As part of that, Schappert left the company after only 15 months on the job. The two departures may signal that the company, which has been fairly stable until now, will lose others. 
 
 Kixeye, which has more than 250 employees, makes equally hardcore recruiting videos to get the word out that it is hiring. Parental discretion is advised:
– Not only are many of Groupon's top investors leaving the company due to the share price dropping by three-quarters since its IPO last year, many of the company's senior executives are jumping ship, too, reports Reuters. The latest to leave is Lee Brown, the head of Groupon's national sales. Janya Cooke, one of the company's top sellers, has also left, reports Business Insider. Sales, easy when the company was a hot new thing, have been hit hard since Groupon started to lose its luster. All is not well at Zynga, either...