What Top Sales Organizations Do Differently

What Gartner’s research suggests about customer evidence, role clarity, and commercial performance

When sales performance becomes inconsistent, the most familiar interventions are not always the most revealing place to begin. Gartner’s findings invite leaders to examine the evidence behind commercial performance before deciding what should change.

When sales performance becomes inconsistent, leadership teams often reach for familiar responses.

• Hire more people.
• Add training.
• Introduce another sales methodology.
• Invest in new technology.
• Increase activity expectations.

These actions may be appropriate. But Gartner’s research, The DNA of Top Sales Organizations, raises an important question:

Do these interventions address what is actually influencing commercial performance?

Gartner found that traditional productivity measures – including hiring, coaching, training and additional technology – can produce diminishing returns when they add further complexity to the seller’s role. Its research instead points toward a more evidence-led approach: understand the actions and workflows that contribute to commercial success, simplify roles around those activities and design the organization to adapt as conditions change.

Source: Gartner, The DNA of Top Sales Organizations (2025).

For leaders, this creates a useful opportunity to step back before deciding what needs to change.

Are sellers being asked to absorb too much complexity?

Sales roles have expanded significantly.

Many sellers are expected to prospect, research accounts, run discovery, demonstrate products, produce proposals, negotiate contracts, manage internal approvals, maintain CRM data, forecast accurately, and coordinate customer handovers.

They are also expected to adapt continually to new technologies, changing buyer behavior and additional reporting requirements.

Gartner found that 70% of sellers feel overwhelmed by the number of technologies required to do their work, while 72% feel overwhelmed by the range of skills expected of them. Its research also connects seller overwhelm with lower productivity.

That does not automatically mean that technology, training or individual capability is the problem.

It does suggest that leaders should consider whether the role itself has become too broad, fragmented or difficult to execute consistently.

The question is not simply: How do we make our salespeople more productive?

It may also be: Have we designed the work in a way that allows them to succeed?

Which actions genuinely influence commercial results?

One of Gartner’s central ideas is what it calls action-centered insight and design.

Rather than looking only at high-level sales stages, leading organizations develop a more detailed understanding of the individual activities and workflows that contribute – or do not contribute – to commercial performance.

Gartner reports that organizations using this approach were 2.5 times more likely to be among the top-performing sales organizations studied. Organizations that relied on role simplification were 4.5 times more likely to be in that group.

This raises a practical question for leadership teams:

Which customer-facing actions actually influence the outcome, and which activities exist mainly because they have always been part of the process?

That question sits close to the heart of my own work.

Why does a customer choose you the first time… and why do they choose you again?

It is a simple question, but there is a great deal inside it.

The first part explores how the customer makes an initial decision:

• What problem are they trying to solve?
• Why do they act when they do?
• What gives them confidence?
• What alternatives do they consider?
• Why do they ultimately choose one company over another?

The second explores whether the business delivers enough value to be selected again:

• Was the promise fulfilled?
• Was the experience consistent?
• Did the customer achieve the outcome they expected?
• Is the relationship with the company or with one individual?
• Has the business earned the next decision?

The purpose is not to tell the business what its problem is. It is to create enough evidence for the leadership team to understand what is really happening.

Are commercial decisions based on evidence or assumptions?

Many commercial systems are built gradually.

Processes are inherited. Roles evolve. CRM stages are added. Training reflects the experience of current leaders. Technology is purchased to solve the most visible problem at the time.

Over time, those elements can become accepted as the way the organization sells, even when the customer’s buying behavior has changed.

Gartner observes that many companies build processes and playbooks around assumptions about customer behavior. The leading organizations in its research continually establish and reverify the relationship between specific sales actions and commercial outcomes.

That distinction matters.

• A sales process may be followed consistently while still failing to reflect how customers actually buy.
• A CRM may be implemented correctly while reinforcing stages that have little meaning to the customer.
• A sales team may execute the prescribed activity while the activity itself has limited influence on the decision.

This is why Customer Truth comes before commercial redesign in my work.

Customer Truth is the process of gathering evidence from customers, the market, commercial data and the people closest to execution. Its purpose is to help leadership understand:

• why customers buy;
• why they return;
• why they leave;
• what they genuinely value;
• where trust is created or lost;
• where internal assumptions differ from the customer experience; and
• what the evidence suggests should change.

The evidence does not remove the need for judgment. It gives leaders a stronger basis on which to exercise it.

Is the commercial system designed around the customer journey?

Gartner’s research also introduces the idea of radical role simplification.

The term may sound dramatic, but the principle is practical: understand the work in detail, remove unnecessary or duplicated activity, place responsibility with the people best equipped to perform it and use technology where it can genuinely reduce effort.

Importantly, Gartner does not treat selling as the responsibility of sales alone.

Commercial performance depends on coordination across marketing, sales, finance, legal, product, implementation and customer success. The research highlights the importance of workflows and handoffs across the wider commercial organization, including activities such as marketing alignment, legal approval and customer implementation.

This reflects what I often see in practice.

• A conversion problem may begin with unclear positioning.
• A margin problem may begin with how value is communicated.
• A retention problem may originate in promises made during the sale.
• A forecasting problem may reflect inconsistent qualification or unclear decision criteria.
• A productivity issue may be caused by approval delays, poor information or responsibilities distributed across too many people.

That does not mean every revenue problem is organizational.

It does mean revenue performance should be viewed across the full commercial system rather than attributed automatically to the sales team.

Is technology making the work easier or adding another layer?

Technology remains an important part of commercial performance.

AI, in particular, can support account research, customer analysis, preparation, knowledge access, administration and pattern recognition.

But technology should follow an understanding of the work it is intended to improve.

Gartner recommends treating technology as a teammate rather than simply as another tool. In this framing, technology supports coordination, removes unnecessary activity and helps people perform clearly defined work more consistently.

This is also how I think about AI.

AI can help:

• analyze customer interviews;
• identify patterns across evidence;
• summarize commercial information;
• prepare teams for conversations;
• automate routine work;
• make knowledge easier to access; and
• support more consistent execution.

But it should not replace commercial judgment or accountability.

AI proposes. Humans decide.

Before introducing another platform or AI workflow, leaders should ask:

• Which activity are we improving?
• Why does that activity matter to the customer?
• What work should be removed rather than automated?
• Which decisions require human judgment?
• How will we know whether the technology improves the outcome?

The objective is not to make an overly complicated system move faster. It is to create a clearer and more effective system.

Can the organization adapt without repeatedly disrupting itself?

The third part of Gartner’s model is adaptivity by design.

An adaptive organization understands the connection between actions and outcomes, has clearer ownership and can make focused changes without redesigning the entire commercial organization each time the market shifts.

This is increasingly relevant.

Customer expectations continue to evolve. Buyers have access to more information. AI is changing how companies research, compare and engage with providers. New competitors and substitutes emerge quickly.

A commercial system built around historical assumptions may become less effective without the change being immediately obvious.

Adaptability therefore requires more than flexibility from individual employees.

It requires:

• current customer evidence;
• clear commercial workflows;
• defined ownership;
• feedback loops;
• measurable outcomes;
• regular reassessment of assumptions; and
• leadership willing to respond when the evidence changes.

The question for leadership is not whether the organization will need to adapt. It is whether adaptation has been designed into the way the business operates.

Questions worth asking before choosing the intervention

Gartner’s findings do not suggest that companies should stop hiring, coaching, training or investing in technology.

They suggest that these decisions should be informed by a clearer understanding of what drives performance.

Before choosing the intervention, leaders may find it useful to ask:

1. Do we know why customers choose us?
2. Do we understand why they return, expand or leave?
3. Is our commercial process based on evidence or internal assumptions?
4. Which actions have the greatest influence on customer progress?
5. Where have roles become too broad or unnecessarily complicated?
6. Are responsibilities aligned across the whole customer journey?
7. Is technology reducing complexity or adding to it?
8. Can we adapt without launching another major transformation?

These questions do not prescribe the answer. They help reveal where closer examination may be needed.

Begin with what is true

Main Takeaway

My main takeaway from Gartner’s research is not that there is one universal model for building a successful sales organization.

It is that better commercial decisions begin with better evidence.

Before redesigning the sales process, changing the team or introducing more technology, leadership needs to understand what customers value, which actions influence outcomes and how work moves across the commercial organization.

That is the basis of an evidence-led commercial system.

It begins with the customer, combines evidence with executive judgment and translates what is learned into clearer roles, practical workflows, appropriate technology and accountable execution.

The starting question remains simple:

Why does a customer choose you the first time… and why do they choose you again?

The value is not in assuming what the answer should be. It is in discovering what the answer reveals about the business.

Source

Gartner (2025), The DNA of Top Sales Organizations, Kelly Fischbein, Avi Krish Bedi, Jared Davis, Colleen Giblin and Betsy Gregory-Hosler, 29 January 2025.