Fixing a Broken Sales Culture?
- Russ Eskew
- Jul 4
- 1 min read
Fixing a Broken Sales Culture? Don’t Start With Culture. Start With Winning.
If your sales team is dysfunctional—low trust, infighting, blaming others—it’s tempting to launch team-building sessions or rework your “core values.”
But here’s the truth:
Culture doesn’t fix performance. Performance fixes culture.
Just like in sports, winning heals dysfunction faster than any workshop ever could.
Take the early-2000s Los Angeles Lakers. Shaq and Kobe barely spoke off the court. The locker room was tense. The egos were massive.
But they won three championships in a row.
Winning didn’t magically make them best friends—but it did:
Align them around a common goal
Quiet the noise and finger-pointing
Give leadership the clarity to remove toxic contributors later
The same applies in sales:
Get your team a quick win (small goals, fast results)
Celebrate it loud and give credit generously
Watch how attitudes shift and excuses fade
And when the team is rolling—make the hard personnel decisions you were avoiding
Sales culture isn’t what you say—it’s what you tolerate.
Win, and you earn the right to rebuild it from a place of strength.
#salesleadership #salesteam #salescoaching #salesculture #highperformance #leadership #salesstrategy #winningmindset #SQEdge
Comments