When Sales Cultures Go Bad

Wells Fargo Bank has given sales culture a bad name.

As someone who believes in the worth of the sales profession and strives to promote professional sales practices, I’m outraged and saddened by the actions of Wells Fargo Bank. They have tolerated, encouraged and incentivized a culture of outright fraud, and I believe responsibility extends to the highest levels.

I also have a personal connection to the banking industry: I was a commercial banker for ten years before getting into training. I was in lending, and our unique challenge was that we first had to sell the product, and then immediately begin trying to get it back! Back then, there was always tension between sales and sound banking practices. When business slowed down, we were urged to go out and find more businesses to lend money to, and the strictness of our underwriting seemed to be inversely correlated to where we were relative to quota.

But we had checks and balances, and I never saw an instance where ethical lines were crossed just to make a sale. In fact, we found that if we did a better job at selling, we had full pipelines and we could afford to be more choosy. That’s how a good sales culture works.

CEO John Stumpf’s response reminds me of the line from Casablanca: “I am shocked- shocked– to find that gambling is going on in here!” They act like they did not know what was going on, but when at least 5,300 employees were involved over five years, don’t you think anyone would notice? When accounts are systematically opened and then immediately closed after the person received quota credit, when many of the email addresses of the “account holders” used the wellsfargo.com domain name, don’t you think anyone would notice? When the person who ran the program is punished by receiving $124.6 million as she leaves, don’t you think responsibility applies to the highest levels? (And it’s not as if they’re actually taking responsibility for their actions, as this analysis shows)

Bad sales cultures don’t just happen—not to this extent and for this length of time. When a sales culture goes this wrong, there has to be responsibility and repercussions all the way up to the CEO. As the old saying goes, the fish stinks from the head first.