Editor’s note: Whether you go to market with an internal sales team or through channel partners, your sales reps are critical to your success. In this article, Gartner Senior Director Analyst Shayne Jackson explains why a company’s sales culture is directly tied to performance, and shares tips on how to assess your sales culture and make any necessary changes.
Sales culture, in the eyes of most sales leaders, is just something that exists — it is not actively managed. A strong sales culture is crucial to a sales organization’s success. Effective sales culture enhances team performance by engaging the feelings of sellers, helping them navigate highs and lows, while also anchoring them in the expectations of day-to-day work.
CSOs must prioritize culture because sellers are struggling. They have limited deep connections to the organization, lack of cultural engagement and low intent to stay at their company.
Only 38% of the nearly 600 sellers surveyed in the 2024 Gartner Global Labor Market Survey say they feel understood. Twenty- five percent say the sales culture affects their day-to-day work and just 34% say they plan to stay at their organization.
When sellers don’t feel understood by colleagues and management, it leads to high turnover and low performance. When sellers lack cultural engagement, they don’t have clear expectations or guidance from leadership. This results in low intent to stay among sellers, which also leads to high turnover and low performance.
Cultural engagement elevates a sales team to the next level by improving seller performance and retention. Sales organizations where sellers feel connected to their culture experience a 24% improvement in performance and a 30% improvement in seller retention.
Assess Your Sales Organization’s Culture
Every sales organization has its own culture that aligns with the larger corporate culture, but with important differences that range from nuances to values and attitudes unique to sales. Before you start to change your sales culture, it’s important to deeply understand it.
To start a sales culture self-assessment, assemble a small and diverse team of sellers, managers and leaders to discuss and define your current culture. Make sure their assessment seeks different perspectives from all organizational levels to understand differences that may exist across the larger team.
Select Sales Culture Adjustments to Drive Performance
Culture can drive sales strategy if you manage it as the powerful tool that it is. Different cultural attributes drive specific types of performance. Identify the attributes of your sales culture that are critical to delivering your business strategy. Sales leaders identified 12 cultural attributes that are most important to the success of their sales organization. They are: collaboration, customer focus, organizational agility, innovation, shared vision, transparency, seller empowerment, career development focus, connectedness, internal competition, respect and psychological safety.
While it may be tempting to assume your sales organization needs all these attributes, it’s not practical to pursue all of them. It’s more effective to focus on developing and strengthening one or two attributes that drive significant performance impact of sales teams. The three most common attributes sales leaders identified — collaboration, customer focus and agility — do not impact team performance. In fact, half of the attributes do not have a performance impact at the organizational level.
The six cultural attributes that drive performance impact in sales organizations are:
- Innovation: Encouraging sellers to use new, cutting- edge approaches to their work.
- Transparency: Presenting sellers with meaningful insights into the sales organization’s operations.
- Seller empowerment: Encouraging sellers to use their discretion to complete their work.
- Career development: Supporting career development of sellers and paths for individual growth.
- Internal competition: Fostering competition among sales employees to meet their goals.
- Psychological safety: Providing opportunities for sellers to fail safely.
For example, organizations that have seller empowerment as a key attribute to their culture are 2.8 times more likely to see improved commercial performance. Similarly, organizations that prioritize transparency are 2.9 times more likely to see improved profit growth.
Drive Sales Culture Adoption with a Bottom-Up Approach
After choosing one or two of the sales culture attributes that best align with your growth strategy, focus on how to transform your culture. Drive culture change in your organization with a frontline-driven approach that involves sellers and managers as important contributors to the process. A bottom-up approach constructs effective change narratives that offer employees a clear rationale and practical guidance to implement the change.
Develop Team Buy-In
Co-developing change methods with the frontline team and leveraging peer-to-peer influencers to communicate the change are essential to securing buy-in from managers and sellers.
Sellers must feel the need for change and believe in the new culture attributes for them to be adopted. For frontline adoption to be most effective, it must be driven by the sellers themselves and their direct managers — they are the top culture influencers, significantly more so than sales leaders.
Identify and Remove Change Barriers in Systems and Rituals
Successfully transforming your sales culture requires evaluating systems and processes within the organization. Work with frontline managers and sellers to identify the barriers within sellers’ workflows and gauge how much resistance those systems and processes will create to hinder culture change.
Working with frontline sellers and managers, new routines and rituals can be built into the new sales culture that support the changes, such as a different approach to onboarding or new reward celebrations. Rituals reinforce the organization’s culture, so changing rituals helps change the culture.
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