Why You Should Question Your Sales Culture

Today, more than ever before, sales organizations are embracing change. Whether on a journey from product selling to solution selling, or on a transformation to build a Challenger organization, most of us are implementing changes to cope with increasingly informed buyers.

SLC’s research is helping sales organizations avoid being commoditized and to break away from the price-driven sale by identifying the winning sales behaviors for this new era of selling, outlining effective messaging strategies, and identifying best-in-class stakeholder management tactics.

However, in our conversations about successful transformation strategies with sales leaders around the world, we noticed that an area that is rarely talked about is that of sales culture. We all know that culture matters, and yet very few leaders are deliberately shaping the culture of their sales organizations to enable the behaviors that they strive to drive.  So, can long-lasting sales transformation changes stick in organizations that do not also transform their culture? And, can sales culture be changed anyway?

That is the question that our newest 2013 research study Driving Sales Transformation: Empowering Reps to Sell to Empowered Customers, set out to answer.  (CEB Sales Members, be among the first to know what our research says by registering now for an upcoming Executive Retreat or Regional Briefing session).

Here is a preview of what we found:

Sales culture is different  – unlike your company’s “corporate culture,” or the set of deeply held beliefs and assumptions that employees at your company have, which is hard to influence and evolves slowly over time; the culture of your sales organization (what we call organizational climate) can be influenced.
Climate is controllable – sales leaders, through explicit and implicit actions influence the climate of the sales function, or the shared perceptions that sales employees have about the work they collectively do every day. Sales climate is local and operational in nature, and therefore requires less time to change.
There is a Micro and a Macro sales climate – individual sales managers create micro sales climates (or team cultures) that exist within a larger sales force macro climate. While sales leaders set a tone for the sales organization’s macro climate, managers have a lot of influence over the climate or team culture that reps experience.

Most importantly, our research clearly showed that in the absence of the right sales climate, organizations looking to drive transformational change will not only waste valuable resources on initiatives that yield low ROI, but risk being relegated to price wars and become outcompeted by market players who can effectively sell to informed customers.

CEB Sales Members, learn more about the sales culture that your organization needs to have in order to drive winning sales behaviors in our upcoming webinar introducing you to the key findings from our latest research.