It’s Not a Sales Problem - it’s a Culture Problem
Your sales figures are actually a direct reflection of your company culture. If you don’t have the right environment, your bottom line will be impacted.
When sales numbers dip, most C-levels share a go-to reaction: tweak the marketing strategy, double down on sales training, or push the team harder (especially that last one). But what if the real issue isn’t in your sales funnel at all? What if the problem is your team’s culture?
Here’s the thing: Your sales figures are a direct reflection of your workplace culture. If there’s a culture problem, you’re likely to see any of the following warning signs:
Low engagement, low effort. Employees who feel disconnected or uninspired won’t go the extra mile to create exceptional customer experiences. And your customers will let you know that with their dollars.
Misalignment between teams. Sales, marketing and customer service struggling with culture tend to operate in silos, leading to mixed messaging, inefficient processes and lost opportunities.
High turnover, low trust. If employees don’t trust leadership or they feel undervalued, they leave. And that constant turnover in customer-facing roles damages relationships and leads to inconsistent service.
At Luminal, we see this pattern time and again: disengaged, misaligned culture eroding performance at every level, and the sales department is often where the cracks begin to show. It’s hard to hear (we get it!), but if your employees don’t trust leadership, if they don’t feel valued, or if they don’t believe in the mission, no amount of lead generation or sales training will turn things around.
To determine if you are dealing with a crisis of culture in your workplace, look to these telltale (but often unexpected!) signs:
Feedback requests are met with crickets
So often, companies believe that simply by asking for feedback they’ve created a safe space for providing it when in actuality, creating a culture of feedback needs to be done with intentionality. If you find that when you ask people what they think in meetings or 1:1s and you’re met with a blank stare or, worse, an assurance that everything is totally great, you have a feedback problem. If you send out surveys to assess morale and the results are 100% glowing – but you’re still seeing sales numbers dip – you have a feedback problem. If you’re afraid to give your direct reports critical feedback…you get the idea.
Feedback is foundational to truly excellent culture, and if yours doesn’t allow people to share it? Your sales numbers will see the impact.
Personal lives are (totally) private
You may think it’s super professional: we’re here to get a job done and thus our sales personas are all we need to address. In reality, this old-school style of “professionalism” is actually pretty toxic. If people feel like they can’t be, well, people, in the office, they are going to become disconnected and tuned out pretty quickly.
After all, why give extra of yourself to a group who doesn’t even know you’re mourning your grandmother, or that you got a new puppy, or that you’ve been so tired because you’re battling a long-term illness?
People play the blame game
When culture is crumbling, people are quick to point everywhere but at themselves as to why. This is because, with a lack of psychological safety, your employees know that it isn’t safe to speak to their own challenges – they might be shamed or otherwise punished for doing so.
When this happens, everything is somebody else’s fault, shared solutions aren’t sought or found, and no one wins…especially not your impacted customers.
Employees work in silos
If you hear a lot of, “I don’t know, that’s not my job,” on your teams, you’ve got a culture problem. Employees in siloed environments often prioritize their own tasks over the bigger picture, leading to inefficiencies, miscommunication and missed opportunities for innovation.
When collaboration feels like an added burden rather than a shared goal, and when staff don’t feel rewarded for going the extra mile they simply won’t do it. Plus, employees who have learned it’s “safer” not to ask for help are unlikely to seek out collaborative opportunities, no matter the reason.
Results are prioritized over relationships
Think about it – when you provide accolades to your team, are you focusing on sales numbers, or individual contributions? Are you providing critical feedback on output, or targeted (private) feedback on individual employee areas of growth? There’s a difference and it’s a big one; at the end of the day, your staff needs to feel connected to you – their boss – in order to deliver the results you’re seeking.
OK, so it’s a culture problem…
Many C-suite leaders assume culture is an HR issue or a secondary priority behind strategy and financials. But here’s the reality: culture is a leadership issue. If executives don’t actively shape it, it will develop on its own, often in ways that hurt the business. But YOU’VE already done the hard work of looking at the challenge and diagnosing its root – which means it’ll be a heck of a lot easier to fix.
Next week, we’ll talk about how to build a culture that fuels trust, accountability and shared purpose, because from there? The numbers will follow.
Need help sooner?
At Luminal Development, we work with leaders to identify cultural gaps that lead to disengagement and misalignment. Through organizational assessments, leadership coaching, team development and personalized plans, we help create cultures where people feel invested in their work; because when employees are engaged, customers notice.
