What separates high-performing sales teams from everyone else isn’t the tools they use or the process they follow—it’s the behaviors woven into everything they do.
Sales leaders have long searched for the lever that unlocks team performance. They invest in better CRM systems. They redesign the sales process. They roll out sales training programs. And yet, within the same organization—with the same tools, the same products, the same training—some sellers consistently outperform everyone else. Why?
That question is at the heart of a recent webinar featuring Spencer Wixom, president and CEO of The Brooks Group, and David Brock, CEO of Partners in Excellence and author of The DNA of Sales Excellence.
Their discussion cuts through the noise and lands on a framework that challenges how most sales leaders think about performance development.
Watch On-Demand Webinar: From Process to Performance: Critical Behaviors for Sales Outcomes
The Problem With “Either/Or” Thinking
Most sales improvement efforts fall into one of two camps:
- The Mechanisms Camp focuses on the tangible infrastructure of selling: sales processes, CRM adoption, training curricula, sales coaching programs, and technology stack. These are the systems and structures that give teams a repeatable way to operate.
- The Behaviors Camp focuses on culture, mindset, and interpersonal qualities: curiosity, accountability, and customer centricity. These are the human elements that drive how people show up and engage.
The mistake, as Brock argues, is treating these as either/or. Organizations launch a sales process initiative in isolation. Then, months later, they run a culture workshop. The two efforts never talk to each other. The result: Neither delivers its full potential.
The insight that changes everything is this: Behaviors and mechanisms only produce elite performance when they’re integrated—not run in parallel.
The DNA Model of Sales Performance: Two Strands, One System
Brock’s model draws on the structure of DNA: two interwoven strands that constantly interact. One strand represents behaviors and mindsets. The other represents mechanisms: the processes, tools, strategies, and programs that run your sales organization. The rungs connecting them represent the integration points where real performance lives.
Just as DNA isn’t static, the most effective sales organizations treat the relationship between behaviors and mechanisms as dynamic and ongoing, not a one-time alignment exercise.
The practical implication: Every time you introduce a new mechanism (a new process, technology, or performance metric), ask what behaviors need to be reinforced to get the most out of it. Every time you want to develop a behavior, ask which mechanisms can drive and reinforce it.
8 Sales Behaviors That Drive Sales Performance
Based on years of working with high-performing individuals and organizations, Wixom and Brock identified eight core behaviors that consistently differentiate top performers.
- Caring: Genuinely caring about the customer’s success, not just closing the deal. As Mitch Little, former CRO of Microchip, put it: Customers can tell the difference between attention and intention very quickly.
- Curiosity: Asking consultative questions about a customer’s business, challenges, and goals before ever talking about a product. Curiosity is how caring manifests in a sales conversation.
- Commitment to Continuous Learning: Staying relevant in a changing market requires ongoing development. High performers never stop growing.
- Customer Centricity: Keeping the customer’s outcomes at the center of every decision, not just the close.
- Embracing Change and Complexity: Salespeople are selling change. The ability to navigate ambiguity and help customers do the same is a real competitive differentiator.
- Discipline and Daily Execution: Structuring the work week intentionally rather than constantly reacting to the latest fire. High performers have a plan and stick to it.
- Personal Accountability: Owning commitments and following through, without needing to be managed into action.
- Purpose: Understanding why the work matters, for the organization and for the customer.
These aren’t soft skills. They’re the foundation from which all performance emerges. And critically, they’re learnable, not fixed traits people either have or don’t.
The F1 Analogy: Process Is the Track, Behavior Is the Driver
Here’s one of the most useful reframes from the conversation: Think of your sales process like an F1 track. Every driver races on the same track, but the ones who win adapt how they drive it: when to brake, how to take the corners, when to push.
Your sales process gives your team a shared framework for how deals progress. But it’s curiosity, customer centricity, and the ability to embrace complexity that allow your sellers to adapt that process to the specific customer in front of them. Process without behavior produces compliance. Process with behavior produces performance.
One exercise worth doing with your team is to map your sales process and, for each stage, ask two questions:
- What behaviors should this step reinforce in our sellers?
- What value does this step create for the customer?
If you can’t answer both questions, then the step is a checkbox, not a performance driver.
The Sales Performance Gap Most Leaders Miss
Here’s an uncomfortable truth Wixom shared: Many organizations are achieving their numbers—and still dramatically underperforming their potential.
Consider the data he cites. In SaaS and technology, 15–20% win rates are often treated as normal. Only about 35% of salespeople hit quota. Average sales tenure runs 11 to 18 months. These aren’t just operational inefficiencies. They represent an enormous untapped opportunity most leaders have learned to accept.
Brock recounted advising a $21 billion company whose goal was to grow to $25 billion. After his analysis, he told them they were aiming too low. Their potential was closer to $35 billion. They’d been so focused on hitting their targets, they’d stopped asking what they were actually capable of.
The question for every sales leader: Are we optimizing for hitting our number or for reaching our potential?
Implementation: Three Levels That Matter
Integrating behaviors and mechanisms isn’t a one-time training event. It requires intentional effort at three levels of the organization.
Level 1: Individual contributors need to own their development.
Not just hitting quota, but asking: How can I get better at this? How can I apply what I learned in training to actually help this customer? Quota, as Brock put it, is something you pass on the way to achieving your real goals.
Level 2: Sales managers are the critical connectors.
Their job is to bridge the organization’s initiatives with each seller’s individual development. Great managers coach the behaviors, reinforce the mechanisms, and create accountability that moves the needle, not just tracks it.
Level 3: Organizational leadership sets the standards.
Sales leaders need to stop settling for underperformance that’s dressed up as “making the number.” That means designing development programs that explicitly connect behavioral goals to mechanism rollouts, not treating them as separate workstreams.
Key Takeaways for Sales Leaders
Stop treating behaviors and mechanisms as separate initiatives.
Every new tool, process, or program you introduce should be explicitly connected to the behaviors it requires and reinforces.
The eight critical behaviors are learnable.
Curiosity, discipline, accountability, and customer centricity aren’t personality traits locked at birth. They can be developed and strengthened with the right coaching and reinforcement.
Your sales process is a starting point, not a script.
The sellers who win adapt the process to the customer. Build a culture that values intelligent adaptation, not just compliance.
Hitting your number doesn’t mean you’re performing.
Ask what your team is actually capable of, not just what they’ve been asked to achieve.
Start somewhere.
If you’re not sure whether to focus on a behavior or a mechanism first, just pick one and make the connection. There’s no wrong starting point—only the wrong decision to keep them separate.
The organizations that pull ahead in this environment won’t be the ones with the best process or the most advanced tech stack. They’ll be the ones that figure out how to weave great behavior into everything they build, making excellence not an occasional outcome, but an inevitable one.
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