Sales Transformation

How to Build a High-Performance Culture in Sales Teams

Sales teams that prioritize collaboration and client needs experience higher win rates and quota attainment.

March 17, 2025

Need More Wins? Try a Culture Shift in Your Sales Team

You’ve probably tried many different ways to improve the performance of your sales teams, with varying success. But there’s one way that has been proven to work and yet is often ignored by sales leaders—improving your sales team’s culture.

Culture is hard to characterize, hard to measure, and hard to change. So it gets ignored on the list of levers to pull when transforming a sales organization plan.

What does a high-performance sales team culture look like?

Imagine a culture where the primary goal is not just to make your numbers in the short-term, but instead to deeply understand client needs and provide the right solutions.

This approach leads to stronger relationships, higher customer retention, and, ultimately, greater long-term revenue growth.

Think of an environment where colleagues collaborate within and between lines of business instead of competing with one another, and where sellers come to work genuinely excited to contribute and to excel.

These are a few of the ways the characteristics of high-performance culture can manifest in a sales environment.

The Benefits of a High-Performance Culture

Broadly speaking, a culture of high performance is one in which individuals feel ownership of, and accountability towards, the pursuit of shared success.

“Everyone is committed to something bigger than individual numbers,” explains Korn Ferry’s Lou Turner, who is based in the UK. “It really is a matter of a rising tide lifting all boats.”

Sales leaders can expect quantifiable results from implementing this type of culture shift. According to Korn Ferry’s 2024 Sales Maturity Survey, compared to their peers, sales organizations with a culture of high performance:

Achieve 19% higher quota attainment
Enjoy 22% higher win rates
Are three times more likely to be considered a trusted partner by clients

And this type of sales team culture has never been more relevant. As buyers involve more decision-makers and take longer to make purchasing decisions, traditional sales management tactics rarely pack the same punch.

But a high-performance culture doesn’t just emerge organically.

Here’s how you can start creating the cultural foundation for more sustained sales success.

Assess Your Sales Team Culture

Building a culture of high performance on your sales team should start with two questions:

What does our culture look like now?
What could our culture look like tomorrow?

For the first question, a full and clear-eyed diagnostic review of your team is an important, albeit not always comfortable, exercise, says Korn Ferry’s Sam Tepper.

“You need to understand where your culture is working well, where it isn't, and what’s getting in the way of your success,” he says.

For the second question, experts advise mapping out a few details about how you’d like a high-performance culture to manifest within your organization and under your leadership. Tepper recommends a few guiding questions to help you define and customize the end state you’re aiming to reach:

What are your customer needs?
How can your sales team better align to meet them?
How would the individuals on your team adapt to, and perform in, a culture of high performance?
What kind of leaders will you need to create a high-performance culture?
What mindset will people need to shift to in order to create a high-performance culture, and which systems and structures will be needed to support it?

These exercises will give you facts about where you are and where you want to go—both of which will inform the actions you take to develop a culture of high performance in your sales team.

If you know, for example, that some reps may resist balancing collective goals with individual targets, you can help them adjust early—or start recruiting better-aligned talent—before disengagement or conflict arises.

This review may also help you discover structural issues that could get in the way of collaboration—for example, if your incentives are designed to create a lone wolf or hero mentality.

“If you don’t assess what’s creating your culture issues, you’re just going to keep trying the same things,” Tepperexplains. “You won’t know why you’re having issues and how to start fixing them.”

Avoid This Mistake: Replicating Work-Arounds

When planning a transformation of your sales team culture, you might look to follow the habits and tactics of your star performers. There’s value in that, says Tepper, but it’s important to evaluate such best practices in context.

“High performers always have some sort of hack around the system,” Tepper explains. Perhaps they don’t bother updating the CRM, for example, or they skip over the first step of the company’s sales process.

“If you’re just analyzing what they do, you’re not understanding the problems they might be correcting for,” says Tepper. And it’s far better for long-term sales success to remove a barrier than to replicate a rainmaker’s work-around to it.

Encourage New Mindsets

Perhaps the most important step in building a high-performing culture is also the trickiest—you’ll need to change some minds.

For many salespeople, selling feels like a competitive, territorial, zero-sum game.

A culture of high performance requires sellers to adopt a growth mindset, embrace collaboration, and develop a willingness to occasionally sacrifice short-term wins for longer, healthier client relationships.

“In high-performing sales teams, a successful outcome for the client becomes the organization’s true north,” Turner explains.

When sellers start to believe this, he says, they begin to see hitting individual targets less as personal wins, and more as contributions to a greater good. And this can be a powerful motivator.

“It makes their work bigger and more important than quota attainment. It creates a sense of mission and purpose.”

For sales leaders, getting that kind of buy-in does take effort. How to start? By communicating the benefits.

Quantifying the life cycle value of client-centric thinking can be effective in persuading more number-driven sellers.
Skeptics can be reminded that, while the organization’s goals may be less individualistic than before, they own—and have autonomy over—their own pursuit of collective targets.
Inform sellers that as part of a high-performance team, they’ll have more opportunities to flex their skills, learn new things, and make an impact—all of which will help them feel even more engaged at work.

“It’s really important to convey your overarching vision,” Turner stresses. “That involves continually clarifying that your purpose is not just to hit a number—it’s bigger than that. And it involves reinforcing the principles that bind your team together in pursuit of it.”

Avoid This Mistake: Laissez-Faire Leadership

Many sellers like to operate independently, which is why sales leaders can sometimes skew a bit hands-off—especially when it comes to performance management.

But if you’re trying to get your team on board with a culture of high performance, you’ll need to get a bit more involved.

“Your job as a leader is not only to create the strategy but also to motivate and compel your people to want to achieve it with you,” says Tepper. “You can’t just leave this to chance.”

When you’re doing it right, sales is a team sport. The lone wolf survives, but it’s the pack that thrives.

Update Your Processes and Practices

Tepper recently asked a Chief Revenue Officer what he was doing to develop the talent on his team.

The response was one he hears often, “We hire the best.” That's it. The implicit assumption in the CRO’s quip is that top talent doesn’t need training.

That kind of thinking doesn’t work in a culture of high performance.

“People have to be motivated to continually improve, and you have to help them do so,” says Tepper.

In a high-performance culture, sales leaders are always adjusting the organization’s people, technical, and sales processes to better support their teams’ collaboration, performance, and growth. This can mean:

Not just hiring a talented new rep, but also introducing them to the key people within the organization who can accelerate their productivity.
Not just training sellers on how to better identify client needs, but also empowering them not to push a product that doesn’t serve those needs.
Not just mapping all the touchpoints in your sales process, but also making them as smooth and simple for your client as possible.

Over time, adjustments like these permeate all levels of an organization, bringing everyone from sales leaders and sales managers, through to sellers on board, Turner says. “That’s how these processes and practices become part of the DNA.”

Avoid This Mistake: Overemphasizing Outputs

As with any organizational change, you’ll want proof that your culture of high performance is working, but Turner recommends you evaluate progress with care.

“Past performance is no longer a great indicator of future success, because the world is moving so fast,” he says.

Unless your industry is purely transactional, a seller's ability to build relationships and understand client needs can be just as strong a sign of sales skill as recent numbers.

After all, those numbers may only reflect past buying trends. “Look at a blend of the inputs as well as the outputs,” Turner advises.

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Sales Transformation Takes Time

If pursuing a high-performance culture for your sales team sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is.

“This isn’t a quick fix,” Turner clarifies. “It’s not something you should think of as sales training. It’s sales transformation.”

But the benefits are worth it. “As a sales leader, you really can create the energy, optimism, and motivation for every single member of your team to bring their best,” Tepper says.

“When you’re doing it right, sales is a team sport. The lone wolf survives, but it’s the pack that thrives.”

Ready to start building a high-performing culture in your sales team? Check out how to optimize your team for growth.