Blog / How Sales Teams Become Dysfunctional
Published: 17 February 2026

How Sales Teams Become Dysfunctional (Without Anyone Planning It)

Published: February 17, 2026 | Part 2 of 6-part series

Last week we talked about the hidden cost of misdiagnosed sales dysfunction. Today, I want to address something that rarely gets said out loud: how sales teams actually become dysfunctional in the first place.

No one sets out to build a dysfunctional team. After all, we're looking at businesses that have done what most start-ups fail to do: they've survived those difficult first few years and grown to the point where a sales team is needed. That's no small achievement and points to the skill, creativity and energy that got the business there.

How does a sales team typically develop, then?

Before we look at the pattern, a quick note: this is a composite pattern I've observed across dozens of UK SMEs over the years. No single business follows this exact path, and many skip phases or experience them in different orders. But the overall arc is remarkably common. If you recognise elements of your own journey here, you're in good company. This pattern reflects the reality of scaling sales functions in resource-constrained growth businesses.

Like most business functions, it evolves. Quite predictably, through natural growth patterns that make perfect sense at each stage. Here's the most typical pattern of the evolution of a sales function:

Phase 1: Founder Energy

Sales starts with the founder, or a small founding team. All their experience, expertise, knowledge, passion flows into every customer conversation. Customers aren't just buying the product, they're buying into the founder's vision, their credibility, their commitment.

This works brilliantly at small scale. The founder knows every customer by name. They understand every deal intimately. They can adapt their pitch on the fly because they built the thing they're selling. Often, they can even adapt the thing they're selling to suit the pitch if they feel like it.

At this stage, nothing's documented because nothing needs to be. It's all in their head and there's no one to question that.

Phase 2: The First Team

Now the business is growing steadily but hitting its first ceiling. The founder can't carry all the sales work alone. So they bring in help, and it's here we often see family members joining, or sometimes friends who believe in the vision. Occasionally people from the technical or delivery side of the business who understand the product get moved over to sales, either fully or as a side-quest.

This kind of works for a while. Small company energy and everyone's still close to the source. The founder's still deeply involved in big deals. The team feeds off that founder energy. It's no longer a one-person show, but still essentially running on founder momentum.

Phase 3: Building Without a Blueprint

Assuming phase 2 pushed past that first ceiling, there's a clearer sense of the opportunity to scale. Now the team needs to grow further. Here's where the pattern shifts.

In many cases, the team is being built by people who don't know how to build sales teams. They're smart, capable business leaders, often with brilliant instincts and experience. But they've never constructed a sales function from scratch. They don't know:

Partly, because the founder kept it all in their head. Maybe an Excel spreadsheet helped track opportunities, but the real system was the founder's instinct, relationships, and expertise. You can't hire someone into that system if it doesn't exist outside one person's head.

This is often when various biases start to have more impact than they should. Confirmation bias sees the leadership team think that, because it worked for those in the business now, we just need more of the same. Because the founder and those first few hires were able to sell based on momentum and instinct, any new hires should be able to. In fact, there's often a sense of 'if we add in some experienced sales people, they'll know what to do so they'll be even more successful than we have been'.

Phase 4: More of the Same

First hires aren't big-ticket A-players, the budgets aren't there for that and the biases we just mentioned means the search is often focussed on finding more people who seem to have the same sort of comfort with chaos that a founder and initial team had to have. This is where the first cracks start to get baked in.

Candidates with some sales experience seem like a step up from what has come before. They are 'affordable' and perceived to be coachable, and they probably are coachable, if there is a coach and if they have been trained first.

Hiring more junior talent isn't wrong. When you're £3M revenue with thin margins, you can't afford to hire the sales director from a £50M competitor. So you hire people with potential and hope they'll grow into it.

Founder energy and momentum carry things forward for another year or two. Some of these hires do well, a few even become the foundation of a strong team and exceed all expectations. Others struggle and leave quickly. The point here is that success or failure at this stage is more often by accident rather than design. The businesses who get lucky build confidence; those who don't begin to doubt their hiring ability. Neither outcome teaches them how to build a repeatable model. Regardless, any success has not established a repeatable model.

Phase 5: The First-Time Manager

Before long, someone needs to manage this growing team. The natural move is to promote the most successful salesperson, someone who's proven their worth and earned the team's respect. This makes perfect sense: they understand the product, they know what good looks like, and they've demonstrated commitment to the business. On paper, it's the right decision.

Except:

This person is now a first-time manager who, accidentally, also has to make up for the lack of a more senior sales leader. They're figuring it out as they go, and doing their best with the knowledge they have.

Some people make this transition brilliantly. Natural managers who invest personal time studying leadership, seek out mentors, attend courses, and figure it out through determination and self-awareness. These individuals build management capabilities alongside their sales skills and become the backbone of strong sales organisations.

But this relies on the individual having the aptitude, time, and resources to essentially train themselves in a complex discipline. Without formal management training, clear frameworks, or an experienced leader to model best practices, even talented people struggle. Not because they're inadequate, because management is a distinct professional skill that requires development, just like sales expertise did.

We shouldn't ignore the fact that, at this point, that top salesperson will have been a key driver in growth to this point and so well-intentioned leaders want to reward that effort and contribution with career progression. The team becomes increasingly variable in performance. Some thrive under minimal direction, others flounder without structure. Frustration and resentment build in direct proportion to the unpredictability of results. The SLT wonders why the production manager and finance managers can make their functions work predictably and so the sales manager finds themselves under increasing scrutiny.

This phase can carry on for years. Sometimes the pattern stabilises with a capable manager who figures it out. Other times, businesses cycle through different approaches, trying different management styles, bringing in different profiles, searching for the combination that works. Without clear diagnostics, it's hard to know whether the issue is the manager, the system, or the underlying sales model itself.

Phase 6: The Imported Solution

This pattern only tends to get broken when there is some other pressure that forces the issue. At its most extreme, the performance variability becomes an existential crisis for the business. But, more typically, there's some other pressure that forces the SLT to act: shareholders, potential investors, an MD who wants to plan their exit, a CFO who is fed up with flaky forecasts.

So now they bring in a Sales Director. Someone with experience from another business. Someone who's "done it before." They arrive with tools that worked in their previous company, a sales process from there, a forecasting methodology, a management cadence and they start pulling levers.

Often, this works. An experienced Sales Director brings much-needed structure, proven frameworks, and management capability the business has been missing. They implement pipeline reviews, forecasting rigour, and coaching rhythms that immediately improve visibility and performance.

But sometimes the tools that worked in a £30M business with 20 salespeople don't quite fit a £12M business with 8 people. Or the culture is different, or the product requires a different sales motion. When this happens, biases kick in. "This worked at my last place, so it should work here." Confirmation bias is back. Sunk cost fallacy creeps in.

Before you know it, you've got the dysfunction patterns we discussed last week. A patchwork sales function that's part founder-led, part copied from somewhere else, part made up as people went along.

The Key Insight 1: The People Who Built This Are Not Incompetent

It would be really easy, at this point, to think I'm saying the people who run businesses with sales functions evolving this way are somehow lacking intelligence. None of these people are stupid.

The founder who kept it in their head? They were building a business, not writing process documentation; perfectly reasonable. The first hires from family and friends? Smart use of trusted networks when they couldn't afford to hire externally. Starting with cheaper salespeople? Financially sensible given the constraints. Promoting the best salesperson? Standard practice across thousands of UK SMEs so a move that looks and feels right. We shouldn't ignore the fact that, at this point, that top salesperson will have been a key driver in growth to this point and so well-intentioned leaders want to reward that effort and contribution with career progression. Bringing in a Sales Director with experience? Exactly what most advisors would tell you to do.

These are smart, capable business leaders who followed a very typical path. The problem isn't incompetence. It's that what they have now isn't what they'd build if they were starting fresh today with all the knowledge they've gained.

But they can't go to a blank sheet of paper. Because tearing it all down and starting over would mean the business stops. Revenue would tank while good people would leave and customers would suffer.

The Key Insight 2: Cross-Functional Resentment and Siloed Cultures Are Another Consequence

Most businesses are started around a central product or service. Maybe by someone with a practical technical or production background, often by someone who has seen how those functions run. Even if they haven't, once past prototypes and into production or delivery, most products are manufactured or services delivered using predictable methods and tools with clearly defined inputs and outputs. When something breaks, diagnosis is usually easy. The fix might be complex and expensive, but the cause is clear and so everyone feels confident.

Sales operates differently from technical functions. In production, manufacturing, or R&D, most processes are mechanical and repeatable. When something breaks, diagnosis is straightforward, the fix might be complex and expensive, but the cause is clear. Sales involves human psychology, variable buyer contexts, and external market factors that don't follow mechanical rules.

Over time, a pattern emerges across many businesses: technical functions mature with increasing predictability, while sales functions expand without necessarily maturing. The gap in predictability between revenue and operations widens, creating natural tensions.

Because revenue variability affects every function, from production planning to cash flow management, cross-functional tensions can emerge. Different parts of the business start working to different rhythms and timescales. What begins as operational friction can harden into cultural silos if left unaddressed. Meanwhile, leadership attention that should be focused on growth and strategic planning gets consumed managing internal dynamics.

The Human Cost

The common element to this that should never be forgotten: throughout this entire evolution, there are people. Sales teams experiencing stress, anxiety, doubt fuelled by:

Remember, salespeople already wear more masks than any other function. They have to project confidence to prospects even on the days when their personal lives might be in freefall or when they're drowning internally. They have to stay motivated even when the system is working against them. They have to project to the business that they are in control and bringing their best.

The anxiety that drives them forward also takes an enormous toll.

This isn't abstract. I've been in and seen sales teams where people are genuinely struggling. Not because they're bad at their jobs, but because they're trapped in a dysfunctional system that nobody designed.

Why Rapid Diagnostics Matter

Since blank-sheet rebuilds aren't possible, rapid diagnostics become the next best thing.

A proper diagnostic gives you:

It acknowledges where you are without judgment and then shows you the most direct route to where you need to be.

This matters for the business (revenue, predictability, valuation). But it also matters for the people doing the work.

What This Means For You

If you recognise any part of this pattern in your own business, you're not alone. I hope this highlights just how common this evolution is. I also hope it highlights that you are not interminably stuck, that there is a route out that doesn't leave people behind, and builds on all of the energy and capability that has fuelled the successes rather than dwelling on the accidental challenges.

Understanding how you got here is the first step. Next week, we'll look at the six categories of sales dysfunction and why most leaders focus on the wrong one when trying to fix it. Because once you see the pattern of how dysfunction evolves, you can spot which specific category is causing your problems. And that's when targeted fixes become possible.

Recognise your business in this evolution? You're not alone. Start with The Sales Dysfunction Diagnostic, a free self-assessment that identifies where your sales function is today and what needs attention first.

This is Part 2 of our 6-part series on sales dysfunction and diagnostic measurement:
• Part 1: The Hidden Cost of Misdiagnosed Sales Dysfunction
• Part 2: How Sales Teams Become Dysfunctional (Without Anyone Planning It) (you are here)
• Part 3: The 6 Categories of Sales Dysfunction (And Why Most Leaders Focus on the Wrong One) - Coming Feb 24
• Part 4: You Can't Fix What You Can't Measure: The Science of Sales Diagnostics - Coming Mar 3
• Part 5: Beyond Dashboards: How to Conduct a Real Sales Diagnostic - Coming Mar 10
• Part 6: From Diagnosis to Action: Building Your Sales Turnaround Roadmap - Coming Mar 17

Coming Next

Part 3: The 6 Categories of Sales Dysfunction (And Why Most Leaders Focus on the Wrong One)

Understanding how dysfunction evolves is step one. Next, we'll examine the six distinct categories of sales dysfunction and why fixing the wrong one wastes time and money.

Don't Miss Part 3

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