Create passionate movements inspired by high-performance winning cultures

Vision

To help companies create exceptional cultures that drive sales

Mission

Core Values

Founding Story

Over recent years, Kelly has met with over 150 companies, 100 CEOs, 50 venture capitalists, and legions of go-to-market professionals to talk all things sales. In these hundreds of conversations, consistent patterns popped and emerged. Leaders shared the same frustrations: missed sales targets, slowing growth, low quota attainment, high attrition, and trouble with scale. Executives shared that even with a cohesive strategy, great offering, and talented people, Sales was often falling short.

To Kelly, the challenge was deeper and more systemic. While companies believed they had a Sales challenge, she discovered they actually had a Culture challenge.

Kelly saw repeatedly that companies with the best go-to-market strategies and sales results have clear mission, values, and purpose. Best-in-class organizations align all stakeholders, including employees, customers, shareholders, and the communities in which they serve, around this unified purpose and culture.

A strong culture helps companies communicate their identity, brand, and story. It motivates employees with a sense of purpose and belonging. Culture helps people foster meaningful connections and inspires passionate customer movements. Companies with strong cultures win and sell more.

Yet, many companies focus so much on sales process and operational efficiency, their focus on culture gets muted, sometimes even lost.

Kelly became passionate about helping companies transform their sales approach by integrating culture into selling. She developed and taught a business school course on the subject. She brought this methodology to the boardroom. Her focus led to speaking engagements, publications, and podcasts.

One step led to another, and this is how Culture Driven Sales was born.

Why Culture Driven Sales?

The traditional approach to sales is broken. Old-school selling is highly tactical, focused on small incremental tweaks in operational efficiency. Sales teams are so focused on pushing the what and the how that they completely miss the why.

The best companies know exactly why they exist. They have a strong identity. Their mission, values, and purpose create a unifying culture. This culture captures the essence of the company. Companies amplify their brand, cultivate higher-performance teams, and achieve better results when culture threads through everything they do.

Sales is due for disruption and transformation, shifting the old way of selling to the new.

Traditional Old-School Sales

  • Slow and Inflexible
  • Unscalable
  • Vendor-Centric
  • Weak Culture
  • Disconnected, Siloed Strategy
  • Inconsistent & Uninspiring Results

Culture Driven Sales

  • Fast and Agile
  • Scalable
  • Customer-Centric
  • Strong Culture
  • Integrated, Aligned Strategy
  • Accelerating & Inspiring Results

Traditional Old-School Sales is out. Culture Driven Sales is in.

About Kelly Breslin Wright

Kelly Breslin Wright is Founder & CEO of Culture Driven Sales. Kelly has promoted and led the Culture Driven Sales methodology as a C-level executive, public and private company board director, advisor, and adjunct university professor.

Kelly is an experienced executive and corporate board director for both public and private companies, with over 30 years of experience in leadership, sales, operations, and strategy roles. She has served as an Independent Director and Advisor for multiple Boards. Kelly has helped companies navigate multiple stages of growth, including IPOs, enterprise expansion, CEO and leadership transitions, globalization, M&A, financings, business model changes, and global crises. She has a unique mastery of sales, go-to-market, leadership, transformation, strategy, growth and scaling, data and analytics, and culture.

As an operator, Kelly served as President and COO at Gong, an artificial intelligence platform that serves revenue organizations to deliver insights at scale, where she managed all go-to-market functions, including Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing. Prior to Gong, Kelly was Executive Vice President, Sales (Chief Revenue Officer) at Tableau Software (formerly NYSE: DATA) for nearly 12 years. Kelly joined as the company’s tenth employee and first salesperson, and she grew Tableau’s worldwide sales and field operations from zero to $850M in revenue and managed over half of the company’s 3,400 global employees. Tableau was purchased by Salesforce in 2019 for $15.7B. Before Tableau, Kelly spent time at Bain & Company, McKinsey & Company, Bank of America, Dale Carnegie Training, AtHoc, and Southwestern Advantage.

Kelly earned her BA from Stanford University and MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kelly is an accomplished speaker on topics including Sales, Go-To-Market, Scaling, Culture, Mission and Purpose, High Performing Teams, Diversity, and Women in Leadership.

She is an adjunct professor of Culture Driven Sales at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington.