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Podcast: The Founder’s Sandbox
Date: May 2, 2024
Title: Purposeful Culture Driven Sales
Length: 59 Minutes
description:

On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda McCabe speaks with Kelly Breslin Wright, Founder & CEO of Culture Driven Sales. They discuss resilience and purpose related to the Culture Driven Sales methodology where Kelly Breslin Wright operates as a C-level executive, board director, advisor, and adjunct university professor.

Kelly Breslin Wright 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 and has helped companies navigate multiple stages of growth. These include 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 Breslin Wright served as President and COO of Gong, an artificial intelligence platform that serves revenue organizations to deliver insights at scale. There, she managed all go-to-market functions, including Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing. For nearly 12 years prior to Gong, Kelly Breslin Wright was Executive Vice President of Sales (Chief Revenue Officer) at Tableau Software (formerly NYSE: DATA). She joined as the company's first salesperson, where 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 Breslin Wright spent time at Bain & Company, McKinsey & Company, Bank of America, Dale Carnegie Training, AtHoc, and Southwestern Advantage.

You can find out more about Kelly Breslin Wright at:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellybreslinwright/  

Culture Driven Sales Website: https://culturedrivensales.com/  

University of Washington Foster School of Business Website: https://foster.uw.edu/faculty-research/directory/kelly-wright/  

 

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?

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