When commercial teams won't push back, the diagnosis is almost never culture. It's structure, incentives, and a system designed to produce that behavior.
"They're just not aggressive enough. We've invested in training, but nothing works. It's totally cultural."
I heard this last month from a sales director about their Asia sales team. I heard it the month before, too, from someone else. I'll probably hear it again next month, and the diagnosis will be the same: something about how "that's just how they are over there."
It's become the default explanation, the thing people reach for when they've scratched their head so many times that they're losing hair, but still can't figure out why a team won't push.
The thing is, I think everyone's looking in the wrong place.
I've spent my career watching commercial teams across Asia negotiate, and when I see a team that won't hold the line, or won't lean into the friction that's actually required to get a deal done, I could easily reach for the bottle of Eau de Culture. It's right there, it's easy, and sometimes there's even a whiff of truth in it.
But more often than not, when you actually peel back the layers, the answer is far more tangible than culture. It's structure. It's process.
How's that team compensated? What happens when they push hard and lose the deal? Are they protected or are they punished for it? Is there psychological safety to walk away from a deal, or is every opportunity a must-win because someone upstream already promised the revenue?
The commercial DNA is off, and the system is producing exactly the behavior it's designed to produce.
And before you hand wave this away as something confined to one industry, one of the best examples I've seen of this dynamic is consulting partners. Hello, my sisters and brothers at the Big 4. Oh, the irony.
What's even more intriguing is that I see the exact same pattern in Western MNCs. Big ones, with operational layers and regional units that sit far from headquarters. The same conflict avoidance, the same tendency to fold early, the same finger-pointing at "soft" teams. Different contexts and sometimes continents, yet the same old misdiagnosis.
So if culture were really the only driver, how do we explain that?
Regardless of country or company, this shows up exactly where it costs you money: at the table. Conceding before they need to. Caving on price at the first sign of resistance. The most aggravating version might be the tendency to treat pushback like a relationship crisis instead of a normal part of the negotiation.
If you're coaching your team to "be more assertive" when the real problem is systemic and above their pay grade, you're patching symptoms while the system stays broken and the outcomes stay the same.
I once sold a six-figure negotiation training engagement to a team whose compensation structure punished them every time they lost a deal. Great training. Experienced facilitators. Didn't change a thing. The team went right back to folding, because the system told them that losing a deal was career-threatening and no workshop was going to override that math.
Before you assume this is just a seller problem, buyers have their own version of it. Different symptoms, same root causes.
We work with commercial teams on exactly these kinds of problems.