All Podcasts

Listen

Podcast: Tech Sales Insights
Date: September 9, 2022
Title: E92 Part 3 – Culture Driven Sales Prioritizes People with Kelly Wright
Length: 20 Minutes
Episode: E92 Part 3
description:

This episode of Tech Sales Insights is the last part of our conversation with Kelly Breslin Wright, President and COO of Gong, and Founder and Thought leader at Culture Driven Sales. Culture-driven sales recognizes that people are behind every single interaction in business.

Kelly shares what it means to prioritize people in terms of valuing your team and truly understanding the customer journey. She discusses how teams must be aligned in putting the customer first to reduce confusion and build up customers to be successful.

 

HIGHLIGHTS

People build great companies, so companies must prioritize people

Be authentic with mistakes and own them

Managing sales and customer success management

When the going gets tough, companies need to have very tight focus

 

QUOTES

People are the priority no matter your stage of growth - Kelly: "What are the top 3 priorities? Priority number 1 is people. Priority number 2 is people. And what is priority number 3? It's people, you got it, Randy. Because, you know, it's people who actually build your product and services. It's people who engage with your customers and sell to your customers and support your customers."

Sales and customer success are not mutually exclusive and loop together - Kelly: "Most companies, because they have 1 team that's selling and then another team with customer success, I think that it's really important for us as companies to understand the entire customer journey. So it's not just there's sales that's 1 function and then they go to post-sales because everything is a continual loop."

Recent Podcast

what if

Culture as the Real Corporate Operating System with Kelly Wright

May 6, 2026

Length: 52 Minutes

What if culture isn’t what your company says - but what your people actually experience when it matters most?

In this episode of What If?, Leslie Grandy sits down with Kelly Breslin Wright, veteran executive, former President/COO of Gong, and founder of Culture Driven Sales, to explore a leadership challenge that becomes impossible to ignore as organizations scale:

Misalignment.

As companies grow, what once felt clear and shared begins to fragment. Leaders use the same words - innovation, customer obsession, growth - but mean different things. Teams move in parallel, not together. And the gap between stated values and lived experience quietly widens.

Then AI enters the picture - and amplifies everything.

AI doesn’t just accelerate work. It exposes inconsistencies. It surfaces where culture is unclear, where leadership signals are mixed, and where organizations say one thing - but reward another.

Together, Leslie and Kelly explore:

  • Why culture is defined by what happens when people take risks, not what’s written on the wall
  • How to diagnose misalignment by asking a simple question: Does everyone describe our purpose the same way?
  • Why companies often lose sight of their “why” as they scale - and what that costs them
  • The critical role of leaders as “Chief Belief Officers” in aligning and inspiring teams
  • How AI is leveling the playing field, making people and leadership the true differentiators
  • Why psychological safety and honest conversations matter more in moments of disruption
  • How to build cultures where experimentation is expected - and failure is not punished
  • The risk of treating employees like outputs instead of humans - and how that erodes performance

Kelly also shares lessons from her early experience running a door-to-door sales business - where resilience, adaptability, and emotional intelligence weren’t theoretical concepts, but daily survival skills. Those same capabilities, she argues, are now essential for navigating modern organizations.

Because while AI can increase speed, efficiency, and access to information, it cannot replace what great cultures create:

Belief, trust, and the willingness to take risks together.

This episode is a clear reminder that in a world where technology is advancing rapidly, the organizations that win won’t just be the most technically capable.

They’ll be the most aligned.

Reflection question:
If you asked your leadership team to describe your company’s purpose, would you hear one answer - or many?

Learn More
Show All