Why Sales Performance Is Increasingly a Collective Performance Challenge
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Sales performance is no longer just about the capability of individual salespeople. In complex B2B environments, winning increasingly depends on how effectively the whole organisation aligns behind the opportunity.
When Sales, Marketing, Finance, Operations, Product and other functions share ownership of the outcome, organisations can move faster, collaborate better and create a stronger experience for the customer.
The salesperson may own the opportunity, but the organisation wins the sale.
For years, we have tended to think about sales performance as an individual pursuit. Find the right people. Give them the right targets. Develop their selling skills. Incentivise them appropriately. Then send them out to win.
But in today's complex B2B environment, I'm not sure that model works anymore.
Because increasingly, the salesperson doesn't win the sale. The organisation does. The individual at the front of the customer relationship may still be critically important. But behind almost every significant B2B sale sits an increasingly complex web of people, functions, decisions and dependencies;
Sales. Marketing. Product. Operations. Finance. Technical teams. Supply chain. Customer service. Leadership. The salesperson may own the opportunity, but they rarely control everything required to convert it. And that changes the performance challenge fundamentally.
It turns sales performance into a collective performance challenge.
The world of B2B selling has changed
Today's sales teams are operating in an extraordinarily demanding environment. Customers are better informed. Buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders. Sales cycles can be long. Markets change quickly. Growth expectations remain ambitious. Resources and capacity are finite. Technology and AI are reshaping both buying and selling.
Also many organisations are increasingly matrixed, meaning the people a salesperson needs most may sit in entirely different functions, geographies or reporting lines.
The way customers buy has also become considerably more complex. McKinsey's 2026 Global B2B Pulse, based on nearly 4,000 B2B decision-makers across 13 countries, found that buyers now use an average of ten different channels during their purchasing journey.
Perhaps more significantly, inconsistent information across teams is now the number-one reason buyers give for switching suppliers.
That's an extraordinary finding. Because it suggests that customers aren't simply judging the salesperson anymore. They're judging how effectively the whole organisation operates around them.
The result is a fascinating paradox. We continue to hold salespeople individually accountable for results that increasingly depend upon people they don't control.
And I recognise that challenge. Because I've lived it.
I was accountable for the result. But I couldn't order people to deliver it.
In a previous life I found myself leading a team of 17 amateur sailors in the world's toughest around-the-world yacht race. We were going to race 32,000 miles, through some of the most hostile oceans on the planet, against 11 other identical yachts. The ambition we set ourselves was to finish on the podium.
There was just one slight complication. Around 70% of my crew had never sailed before. They were volunteers rather than employees. I couldn't hire them. I couldn't fire them. And I couldn't motivate them with bonuses, promotions or career progression.
Yet somehow I had to turn 17 very different individuals into one team capable of competing against some formidable opposition for ten relentless months.
I was accountable for the result. But authority alone was never going to deliver it.
Sound familiar? Because that's increasingly the reality for people trying to deliver results inside modern organisations.
Performance without control
A salesperson pursuing a major opportunity may need pricing support from Finance. Technical expertise from Engineering. Capacity from Operations. Product development to respond to a customer requirement. Marketing support. Leadership intervention. Fast decisions from people on another continent. Perhaps even resources from another business unit whose priorities are completely different.
None of those people necessarily reports to the salesperson. And every one of them may have perfectly legitimate competing priorities.
“The salesperson may own the opportunity, but they rarely control everything required to convert it”
So the question becomes: How do you create extraordinary performance when you are dependent upon people you don't control? That was ultimately the challenge I faced at sea.
And what I learned was that authority doesn't create collective performance. Belief and shared ownership does.
People perform differently when they believe in what they are trying to achieve, understand how their contribution matters, trust the people around them and feel genuine ownership for the outcome.
Compliance can get people to do their job. Belief and shared ownership gets them to do what it takes.
And in complex B2B sales, that distinction can be enormous.
Your customer experiences your organisation, not your org chart
There is another reason why this matters. From inside a company, the boundaries between functions can feel very real. Sales has its objectives. Operations has theirs. Finance has theirs. Product has theirs.
The customer couldn't care less. They experience one organisation.
If Sales promises something Operations can't deliver, the customer doesn't see a Sales/Operations alignment problem.
If Finance takes too long to approve a commercial proposal, they don't see an internal governance issue.
If different people give them inconsistent information, they don't care which department owns the mistake.
They simply experience a supplier that isn't operating as one.
And the evidence suggests this internal fragmentation is widespread. Gartner research involving more than 400 senior sales and marketing leaders found that the two functions typically collaborated on only three out of 15 commercial activities.
Even more strikingly, 90% of the executives surveyed said their functional priorities conflicted with one another. 90%!
That's not fundamentally a sales capability problem. It's a collective performance problem.
So one of the great competitive advantages available to organisations may not simply be having the best salespeople. It may be their ability to align all the people behind those salespeople around winning and delivering for the customer.
Silos are expensive
Most organisational silos aren't created by bad people. They're created by good people pursuing legitimate but different objectives.
Finance protects margin.
Operations protects capacity and delivery.
Product manages priorities.
Sales pursues growth.
Individually, every decision can make perfect sense. Collectively, they can make winning incredibly difficult.
I saw versions of this aboard the yacht. We had different watches, roles, personalities, capabilities and priorities. But the ocean had very little interest in our internal distinctions. Neither did the race result.
If one part of the crew succeeded at the expense of another, ultimately we all lost.
The same is true commercially. You don't win because Sales wins. You win because the organisation wins.
That requires people to look beyond their functional responsibilities and understand the collective outcome they are helping to create.
And there is now academic evidence supporting precisely this shift in perspective. A study of 73 B2B cross-functional sales teams examined relationships both within sales teams and between sales and customer buying teams.
It found that stronger intra-team and inter-team social connections positively supported both adaptive selling and sales performance — with the researchers explicitly shifting the focus of analysis away from the individual salesperson and towards the B2B sales team.
In other words, sales performance isn't simply about the capability of the person doing the selling. The quality of the relationships and collaboration surrounding them matters too.
Alignment creates speed
And there is another consequence: pace. One of the greatest lessons I learned racing around the world was that speed isn't only about how fast you can go. It's about how little energy you waste.
A crew pulling in different directions creates friction. Decisions take longer. Execution becomes inconsistent. Problems bounce between people. Energy is consumed internally rather than being directed towards the competition.
Organisations are no different. Think about how much commercial momentum disappears through internal friction:
Who owns this?!
That's not our priority!
We haven't got the capacity!
Finance won't approve it!
Sales shouldn't have promised that!
We're waiting for somebody to make a decision!
Individually these can be entirely reasonable statements. Collectively they can kill pace. And in a highly competitive market, internal friction becomes external disadvantage.
The organisations that align fastest can often respond fastest.
Shared ownership changes the question
Perhaps the most powerful shift we achieved during the race was moving from a crew who were participating in my challenge to a crew who believed it was our challenge.
That distinction matters. Because once people genuinely own an outcome, the questions they ask begin to change.
Instead of: “What am I responsible for?”
They start asking: “What does the team need from me?”
Instead of: “Have I done my part?”
It becomes: “Have we achieved the outcome?”
Instead of: “Whose problem is this?”
It becomes: “How do we solve it?”
Imagine the impact of that mindset around a major sales opportunity. Not Sales asking other functions for favours. Not Finance defending Finance. Not Operations defending Operations.
But a group of people collectively asking: What do we need to do, together, to create the right outcome for the customer and the business?
That's collective performance.
Salespeople increasingly need to lead without authority
All of this also changes what we require from salespeople. Their ability to sell externally remains vital, but increasingly they also have to lead internally:
They need to influence people who don't report to them.
Create belief around an opportunity.
Build relationships across organisational boundaries.
Communicate the bigger picture.
Understand competing perspectives.
Create alignment without having the authority to demand it.
And sometimes persuade colleagues to prioritise something that creates more work for them today because it creates greater value for everybody tomorrow.
“You don’t win because Sales wins. You win because the organisation wins.”
That's leadership. Not leadership defined by hierarchy or job title. Leadership defined by the ability to create willing followership.
I couldn't command commitment from my crew. I had to earn it. And increasingly, people throughout modern organisations have to do the same.
Pressure reveals alignment
There is one final parallel with ocean racing that I think matters. It's relatively easy to look like a team when everything is going well. The real test comes under pressure.
When you're behind target.
When capacity is constrained.
When a competitor cuts the price.
When the customer changes the specification.
When the market moves.
When a critical deal starts slipping.
When everyone is already stretched.
That's when functional priorities start colliding. And it's why collective performance can't simply be something organisations talk about at conferences. It has to become a way of operating.
The strongest teams I've experienced don't eliminate pressure or disagreement. They develop the belief, trust, alignment and shared ownership that allow them to navigate it together.
From individual performance to collective performance
None of this means individual sales excellence has become less important. Quite the opposite. Great salespeople still matter enormously (oh to be one!).
But their ability to perform is increasingly amplified — or constrained — by the system around them.
And perhaps that means we need to broaden the question we ask when sales performance isn't where we want it to be.
Instead of only asking: “How do we get our salespeople to perform better?”
perhaps we should also ask:
“How do we get our organisation to perform better around our salespeople?”
Because the next major opportunity may not be won by the salesperson with the slickest pitch. It may be won by the organisation that aligns faster, collaborates better, responds more effectively and demonstrates to the customer that its people can truly operate as one.
We eventually crossed the finish line after 32,000 miles on the podium we'd set our sights on many months earlier. Seventeen individuals had become one crew. And the greatest lesson I took from that experience was remarkably simple:
Individual talent can achieve extraordinary things. But when the challenge is too complex for any one person to succeed alone, collective performance becomes the ultimate competitive advantage.
Together we triumph.
If your organisation is trying to improve sales performance, the opportunity may lie beyond the sales team itself. Mark’s Collective Performance keynote explores how leaders and teams create the belief, alignment and shared ownership needed to execute as one.
Article FAQs
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Collective sales performance is the idea that sales results depend on more than the individual salesperson. In complex B2B environments, winning an opportunity often requires input from multiple functions, including Sales, Marketing, Finance, Operations, Product, Technical teams and Leadership.
The salesperson may own the opportunity, but they rarely control everything required to convert it. Collective sales performance is therefore about how effectively the wider organisation aligns, collaborates and takes shared ownership of the outcome.
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Cross-functional collaboration matters because modern B2B buying journeys are increasingly complex and involve multiple stakeholders, channels and internal dependencies.
A salesperson may need pricing support from Finance, technical expertise from Engineering, capacity from Operations, product input, marketing support or leadership intervention. When those functions work in isolation, internal friction can slow decisions and damage the customer experience. When they align around a shared goal, the organisation can respond faster and more effectively.
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Salespeople increasingly need to lead internally as well as sell externally. That means influencing people who do not report to them, building relationships across organisational boundaries, communicating the bigger picture and understanding competing priorities.
Rather than relying on hierarchy, effective influence comes from creating belief in the opportunity, showing how each person’s contribution matters and building genuine shared ownership of the outcome. In this context, leadership is less about job title and more about the ability to create willing followership.
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Organisational alignment improves sales performance by reducing internal friction and helping teams move with greater speed and consistency.
When functions are pulling in different directions, decisions take longer, execution becomes inconsistent and energy is wasted internally. But when people are aligned around the same customer and commercial outcome, they can collaborate more effectively, respond faster and create a more consistent experience for the customer.
In competitive B2B markets, the organisations that align fastest can often respond fastest — making alignment a potential source of competitive advantage.
About Mark Denton
Mark Denton is a podium-winning round-the-world skipper, international keynote speaker and expert on Collective Performance. Drawing on his experience of leading 17 amateur sailors through the world's toughest around-the-world yacht race, he helps organisations strengthen leadership, align teams and successfully navigate change to deliver extraordinary performance under pressure.
His keynote speeches explore how organisations create belief, shared ownership, cross-functional collaboration and execution when authority alone isn't enough.
Research referenced
McKinsey & Company — 2026 Global B2B Pulse: The surprising economics of B2B growth: The new survival threshold—and what it takes to thrive.
Gartner — B2B Commercial Strategy Survey: Marketing and Sales Functions Collaborate on Only Three Out of 15 Commercial Activities.
Zhang, Ma & Ren — Journal of Global Marketing: Impacts of Intra-Team and Inter-Team Social Capital on Adaptive Selling and Performance in B2B Cross-Functional Sales Teams.
