Why Nobody Changes What Everyone Knows Is Wrong
Might no be what you think...
In 1983 two American sociologists published a paper (*) that should be required reading for every sales leader who has ever asked why their organization keeps doing things that clearly do not work.
Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell called the phenomenon they described institutional isomorphism. The title is academic. The observation is not.
Their argument was this: organizations within the same field tend to become increasingly similar to each other over time. Not because similarity makes them more effective. Because it makes them more legitimate.
This distinction - between effectiveness and legitimacy - is the key that unlocks something most sales organizations have never examined about themselves.
The Legitimacy Problem
Ask a sales leader why their organization uses a particular CRM, a particular methodology, a particular pipeline stage structure, a particular QBR format, and the answer is almost always some version of: because it works, because it is industry standard, because it is what serious sales organizations do.
These answers sound different. They are the same answer.
They are all arguments for legitimacy. And legitimacy, as DiMaggio and Powell observed, is not the same thing as effectiveness.
An organization adopts Salesforce not only because it is the best tool for the job. It adopts Salesforce because not having Salesforce raises questions. It adopts MEDDIC not only because it improves qualification. It adopts MEDDIC because investors, boards, and senior leadership recognize MEDDIC as a signal that the sales organization is serious. It runs QBRs not only because quarterly reviews improve performance. It runs QBRs because QBRs are what professional sales organizations do.
The practice and the signal have become inseparable. And over time the signal becomes more important than the practice.
This is isomorphism at work.
Three Mechanisms That Make It Inevitable
DiMaggio and Powell identified three distinct mechanisms through which organizations within a field converge toward similarity. All three operate simultaneously in sales.
The first is coercive isomorphism. Organizations adopt practices because powerful actors require them. Investors expect a certain pipeline methodology. Enterprise customers expect a certain account management structure. Boards expect a certain forecasting cadence. The organization conforms not because it has evaluated the practice and found it optimal but because the cost of not conforming is higher than the cost of compliance.
In sales this mechanism is visible everywhere. The organization that tells its board it does not run QBRs is not making a performance argument. It is raising a legitimacy question. The board does not hear “we have found a better approach.” It hears “we do not operate like serious organizations.”
The second mechanism is mimetic isomorphism. In conditions of uncertainty organizations copy whoever looks most successful. When you do not know what the right approach is, imitation feels like prudence. American technology companies scaled aggressively using a particular sales model. That model became the template not because it was evaluated and found universally optimal but because it was associated with organizations that appeared to be winning.
This explains something that earlier articles on this blog identified but did not fully account for. American sales methodology did not spread globally because it was proven to work in every cultural context. It spread because mimetic pressure made it the default signal of sales professionalism. Organizations that adopted it were not making a considered strategic choice. They were reducing uncertainty by copying the visible winners.
The third mechanism is normative isomorphism. Professional networks, training institutions, and certification programs define what legitimate professional behavior looks like. MBA curricula, sales certification programs, methodology training, industry conferences - all of these create normative pressure toward a particular understanding of what selling is, how it should be organized, and what competent practitioners look like.
A Rep trained in Challenger, certified in MEDDIC, and experienced in Salesforce is legible to any sales organization in the field. They speak the recognized vocabulary. They hold the recognized credentials. They fit the recognized profile. The organization that hires them is not only acquiring their capabilities. It is acquiring their legitimacy.
What Gets Locked In
The result of these three mechanisms operating simultaneously over decades is an industry that has converged on a set of practices, a vocabulary, and a set of assumptions that nobody designed and almost nobody questions.
The pipeline. The funnel. The stages. The conversion rates. The QBR. The SPIFFs. The President’s Club. The methodology certification. The activity metrics. The forecast call. The close plan. The champion. The economic buyer. The BANT qualification.
None of these were handed down from a mountain. They emerged from a competitive field in which organizations copied each other, responded to institutional pressure, and adopted the professional vocabulary of their industry. Over time they calcified into the furniture of sales culture - so present, so assumed, so embedded in the language that questioning them feels like questioning gravity.
And this is the precise mechanism that explains what this blog has been circling from the beginning.
The language is seller-centric not because sales organizations deliberately chose to center themselves. It is seller-centric because the entire institutional infrastructure of the profession was built by and for sellers. The vocabulary, the methodologies, the metrics, the job titles, the training programs - all of it was constructed from the seller’s perspective and then transmitted through normative channels as the legitimate way to understand and practice selling.
Changing that language is not a vocabulary exercise. It is an institutional challenge. It requires an organization to accept a form of illegibility that the isomorphic environment actively punishes.
Which is why almost nobody does it.
Changing that language is not a vocabulary exercise. It is an institutional challenge.
The Rationality of Conformity
There is a phrase that circulated through technology sales for decades.
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
It was never really about IBM. It was about the institutional logic of the safe choice - the recognized vendor, the defensible decision, the option that protects the person making it regardless of whether it produces the best outcome. If it worked, you made a sound decision. If it failed, you followed industry consensus. Either way, your position was protected.
DiMaggio and Powell would recognize it immediately. It is mimetic isomorphism stated as folk wisdom.
For those who remember that phrase, the IBM era is probably a distant professional memory. The equivalent today - for a generation that grew up with SaaS, ARR, and pipeline dashboards - is Salesforce. Nobody ever got fired for choosing Salesforce. Or MEDDIC. Or Challenger. The names have changed. The logic is identical.
And that logic shapes every decision made inside a sales organization.
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, identified the behavioral mechanism that makes this so consistent across organizations. In his book Alchemy he observed that it is much easier to be fired for being illogical than for being unimaginative. The organization that adopts the recognized methodology and fails has a defensible explanation. It did what serious organizations do. The organization that abandons it for something genuinely different and fails has no defense at all.
He illustrates the underlying psychology with a deceptively simple thought experiment. Imagine you could only eat one food for the rest of your life. You would almost certainly choose the potato. Not because it is your favorite. Not because it is the most interesting or nutritious option available. Because it is reliable, it is defensible, and if it goes wrong you cannot be blamed for an exotic choice.
Now apply that logic to hiring. Most organizations do not make dozens of hiring decisions simultaneously. Each slot carries significant organizational exposure - budget, time, credibility. So they choose the potato. The safe profile. The recognized background. The candidate who looks like the people who succeeded before. Not because that profile is optimal. Because it is the one that cannot be questioned if things go wrong.
The result, across an entire industry making the same calculation in every hiring cycle, is a profession that looks identical from the inside of every organization. Same methodology certification. Same CRM experience. Same industry vertical. Same profile. The institutional field has converged - not through coordination but through thousands of independent decisions all governed by the same underlying logic.
But what potato-hiring actually produces is a team optimized for the deals that fit the existing playbook - and structurally unable to win the deals that do not. The unconventional opportunity, the customer whose buying process does not match the template, the market that requires a genuinely different approach - these fall to the Rep who can read situations the playbook never anticipated. And that Rep was screened out at the hiring stage because their profile was too difficult to defend.
The safe hire is the isomorphic hire. Not because it produces the best outcomes but because it produces the most defensible ones.
The organization that realizes it has been hiring for defensibility rather than capability has usually been doing so for long enough that the entire team has been shaped by the pattern. Changing the hiring profile at that point is not just a recruitment decision. It is an organizational identity decision. And organizational identity decisions are the most institutionally costly decisions of all.
This is why the problem persists even when it is clearly seen. The system has made conformity not just comfortable but rational. And rationality, as Sutherland understood, is a much more powerful force for inertia than stupidity ever could be.
None of this is inevitable. The institutional forces are real but they are not absolute.
I have spent most of my career being the unconventional hire. Not holding an engineering degree in technology companies. Moving into entirely new geographical markets without knowing the local language. Taking on solutions I had never sold before and building from nothing in territories where I had no existing network.
By the isomorphic logic described above, I was the risky hire every time. The profile that could not be easily defended if things went wrong.
Some leaders hired me anyway.
I want to acknowledge that directly because it is easy to read an argument about institutional conformity and conclude that the system always wins. It does not. There are leaders inside every organization who understand that complementary talent - to use Sutherland’s phrase - is more valuable than conformist talent. Who recognize that a team selected entirely for fit with the existing template has been optimized for the past rather than the future. Who are willing to carry the institutional exposure that comes with an unconventional hire because they believe the potential is worth the risk.
When those leaders exist and act on that belief, the least you can do is acknowledge their courage. Because the system was not making it easy for them.
When you are the black swan inside an organization you see things others do not. Not because you are smarter but because you are standing in a different place. You notice the assumptions because you did not arrive with them. You see the alternatives because the template was never entirely yours to begin with.
And if you are bold enough you raise your voice. You suggest different approaches. You propose alternative paths. You try.
What eventually makes you leave is not the resistance itself. Resistance is expected. What makes you leave is the wall. The moment you understand that your efforts - however genuine, however well-reasoned, however clearly in the organization’s interest - will not be acknowledged. Not rejected with argument. Simply not received.
You leave when you realize that the system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed. And it was not designed for what you were trying to do.
Perhaps that is also why this blog exists. Because some things that hit a wall inside organizations still need to find their way through. This is one of the ways they do.
The Exception That Proves the Rule
Apple does not have salespeople in its retail stores.
The people who work on the floor of an Apple Store are called Specialists, Creatives, and Geniuses. Their job is described in terms of helping customers understand, learn, and get the most from their technology. Not in terms of closing, converting, or selling.
The result: Apple is the number one retailer in sales per square foot, generating over five thousand dollars per square foot - more than three times the performance of the leading apparel retailer and roughly double that of Tiffany and Co. The highest revenue per square foot of any brick and mortar retailer on the planet. Generated by an organization that refused the isomorphic vocabulary of retail sales.
But here is what every competitor who has tried to study and replicate the Apple Store model has discovered. You cannot copy it by changing the job titles. You cannot copy it by redesigning the store layout or removing the cash registers or training the staff to ask different questions. Every organization that has attempted a surface-level replication has produced something that looks like imitation - because it is.
The Apple Store model is unreplicable not because Apple has resources others lack. It is unreplicable because it requires a level of institutional commitment to a genuinely different philosophy of customer relationship that cannot be performed. It has to be believed throughout the organization - from the product design to the hiring criteria to the compensation structure to the language used in every customer interaction.
Organizations that try to copy the behavior without the underlying commitment produce something the customer feels immediately even if they cannot articulate why. It sounds like the Apple Store. It looks like the Apple Store. It does not feel like the Apple Store.
This is what DiMaggio and Powell’s framework predicts. Isomorphic imitation produces surface similarity without substantive alignment. And in customer relationships, the customer always feels the difference between the two.
Why This Matters
The previous articles on this blog have identified the problem from multiple angles.
The language we use reveals whose perspective we are centered on. The methodologies we export carry cultural assumptions we never examine. The job titles we assign constrain how people understand their own purpose. The terminology in our proposals tells the customer, before a single meeting has taken place, whether we are thinking about their purchase or our revenue.
The institutional isomorphism framework explains why knowing all of this is not enough to change it.
The system rewards conformity. It punishes illegibility. It has made the familiar feel safe and the different feel risky. And it has been doing this for long enough that most practitioners experience its constraints as natural law rather than institutional choice.
But institutional choices can be remade. The constraint is real. It is not permanent.
What genuine differentiation requires - not the performance of it but the actual commitment to it - is the harder question. And it is the one worth asking.
Because the organizations that make that commitment authentically will be, like Apple, very difficult to replicate.
And the ones that perform it without the underlying philosophy will be visible immediately.
The customer always knows.
#B2BSales #EnterpriseSales #SalesLeadership #SalesStrategy #OrganizationalBehavior #TheB2BSpecialist
(*) Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizations,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, No. 2, April 1983.
(**) JAL Group joining ceremony. Every April, Japanese companies welcome their new recruits in a single coordinated ceremony. Same date, same suit, same bow. Institutional isomorphism does not begin when you start the job. It begins before you walk through the door.