3 tips to get started in the novel world of hybrid selling

Many organizations invest large sums in assessments and training programs, but too often, employees revert to their previous ways.

This occurs because the initial assessment and resulting intervention targeted the symptom (behavior), rather than the root cause (mindset), of a performance gap.

So, how can an organization create long-lasting, business-improving behavioral change?

Assessments should expose the subliminal thoughts, feelings, assumptions, and beliefs that drive an employee’s current performance, or that may obstruct their full potential. Only then can assessors accurately design interventions that shift mindsets, and therefore behaviors, for the better. Here are three instances of how your organization can use this approach.

From individual insight to customized coaching

Oftentimes, excellent salespeople-turned-sales managers struggle to share their wisdom and drive peak performance from their teammates. Why? Because their individual insights into the art of selling are not universal.

No one skillset nor tried-and-true script makes a great seller. Rather, successful salespeople have a certain belief system that drives their curiosity towards customers, reactions to rejection, and general stamina. A simple shift in any of these mindsets can transform a sales team.

So, how do you implement this within your own team? Start by leveraging a mindset assessment that identifies the beliefs, values, and experiences currently at play. Then, follow up with a behavior-changing tool, such as personalized coaching, to help team members shift to mindsets that cement learning and ensure long-term behavior change.

Mindset shifts in multitudes

Pod coaching, also known as small-group coaching, is another way to leverage mindset assessments. Mindset assessments can be deployed at scale to provide cohort-level data, helping you select the key mindsets that need to change within a larger community.

For example, a leading multinational energy organization leveraged mindset assessments to map out a pod-coaching journey for its teams. The organization assessed 80 employees, identifying and creating customized coaching content to address the group’s most-needed mindset shifts. As a result, the journey was highly relevant to the teams’ most critical needs.

Some organizations have adopted cloud-based, self-paced individual learning journeys, the design of which is informed by mindset assessments. These mindset assessments identify individuals’ most beneficial shifts, which are then incorporated into their individually-personalized learning journeys.

Armed with this data, organizations can prioritize the shifts they see as critical for their people’s development today and save the shifts that will be more impactful in the future for a later date. The result is an ongoing personalized journey that grows with employees.

To ensure that your people’s default behaviors are the right ones for your organization, consider using mindset-evaluation assessments rather than behavior assessments. Mindset assessments allow you to identify and address the root cause of your peoples’ existing beliefs, shift them to ones that are aligned to your organization’s values, and structure a sustainable future for your organization.

This article was originally published in Sales & Marketing Management here.

It’s not enough to prepare for a sales call with general industry knowledge. Sellers need business acumen: a customer-specific grasp of business objectives and the metrics a customer uses to measure success.

Sellers need these insights in order to be agile in conversation and adjust their talking points as needed to address the motivations of different executives. That’s how they can position themselves — and the companies they work for — as true partners in success.

As it stands, only 20% of salespeople are prepared to offer any real value during a sales call. For sales leaders, it’s essential to develop their teams’ business acumen so that sellers are equipped to develop ongoing relationships with customers.

Customer-Centric Sales

Business acumen brings credibility. A seller who can range around in a conversation, listening for cues to shift to different business priorities and genuinely landing on the executive’s radar, will be invited back for further meetings.

This savvy also allows sellers to engage around the entire sales cycle and open up opportunities throughout. When sellers can see things from a customer’s perspective, they become trusted advisors.

Sales leaders can build their teams’ business acumen by facilitating the following steps:

1. Gather deep industry knowledge.

It’s not enough to have company-specific information; sellers need a working knowledge of their customers’ industries as well. It goes beyond “show me you know me” to being able to demonstrate exactly how a product or service will benefit a business — or, more to the point, the person seated across the table or fielding the call.

Sellers need to gather in-depth information about prospects and customers. Hit up social channels, read their 10-Ks, and keep up with industry press to know what’s going on right now: What are prospects’ recent struggles? Successes? Competitors? Customers they serve? What are the personas and demographics? All this information can provide context, allowing the seller to speak directly to prospects’ pain points and develop custom solutions for their businesses.

2. Develop the skills to secure a meeting.

Of all the skills to master as salespeople, getting introductions tops the list. In fact, 70% of customers value “connected processes” — contextualized engagements. Think of it as a seamless hand-off between a person in the seller’s network and a decision maker at a company.

Introductions entail more than the introduction itself. They also involve a strong point of view and the right questions to ask so that the customer executives open up about their businesses. It’s all about being relevant and bringing value to the conversation.

‍Related Post: 4 Ways to Help Your Salesforce Excel

3. Understand customers’ metrics.

Many salespeople enter the room with some understanding of a customer’s business challenges. Not as many come in with knowledge around the financials, initiatives, and KPIs used to measure success. Knowing how an executive will measure success lets a seller speak to those points specifically.

The seller must focus on the customer by offering assistance, following up regularly, and even helping to strategize next steps. The goal here is to ensure that the customers adopt the company’s products or services and see its business value. After all, their success will encourage additional purchases and a stream of revenue over time.

‍Related Post: How to Lead High Value Meetings with Senior Executives

4. Pair the offer with the value proposition.

Sellers need to have an offer that’s helpful or valuable. They need to know the products or services that will address the customer’s business challenges.

These discussions should carry over into training and enablement. One way to prepare sellers is through simulations, which let customer-facing teams immerse themselves in a customer’s challenges. Being on the inside of a business allows sellers to become more intuitive and develop custom solutions for current customers. And practice, whether with a seller’s manager or a professional coach, helps sellers to develop confidence in a safe environment.

‍Business acumen opens up the playing field for sellers, whether that’s through a new opportunity, greater customer success, or increased influence with a different executive within the customer’s business. Conversational agility and opportunity will give sellers the consultative skills that foster successful relationships.

Technology choices are often made under pressure - pressure to modernize, to respond to shifting client expectations, to demonstrate progress, or to keep pace with rapid advances in AI. In those moments, even experienced leadership teams can fall into familiar traps: over-estimating how differentiated a capability will remain, under-estimating the organizational cost of sustaining it, and committing earlier than the strategy or operating model can realistically support.

After decades of working with leaders through digital and technology-enabled transformations, I’ve seen these dynamics play out again and again. The issue is rarely the quality of the technology itself. It’s the timing of commitment, and how quickly an early decision hardens into something far harder to unwind than anyone intended.

What has changed in today’s AI-accelerated environment is not the nature of these traps, but the margin for error. It has narrowed dramatically.

For small and mid-sized organizations, the consequences are immediate. You don't have specialist teams running parallel experiments or long runways to course correct. A single bad platform decision can absorb scarce capital, distort operating models, and take years to unwind just as the market shifts again.

AI intensified this tension. It is wildly over-hyped as a silver bullet and quietly under-estimated as a structural disruptor. Both positions are dangerous. AI won’t magically fix broken processes or weak strategy, but it will change the economics of how work gets done and where value accrues.

When leaders ask how to approach digital platforms, AI adoption, or operating model design, four questions consistently matter more than the technology itself.

• What specific market problem does this solve, and what is it worth?
• Is this capability genuinely unique, or is it rapidly becoming commoditized?
• What is the true total cost - not just to build, but to run and evolve over time?
• What is the current pace of innovation for this niche?

For many leadership teams, answering these questions leads to the same strategic posture. Move quickly today while preserving options for tomorrow. Not as doctrine, but as a way of staying adaptive without mistaking early commitment for strategic clarity.

Why build versus buy is the wrong starting point

One of the most common traps organizations fall into is treating digital strategy as a series of isolated build-vs-buy decisions. That framing is too narrow, and it usually arrives too late.

A more powerful question is this. How do we preserve optionality as the landscape continues to evolve? Technology decisions often become a proxy for deeper organizational challenges. Following acquisitions or periods of rapid change, pressure frequently surfaces at the front line. Sales teams respond to client feedback. Delivery teams push for speed. Leaders look for visible progress.

In these moments, technology becomes the focal point for action. Not because it is the root problem, but because it is tangible.

The real risk emerges operationally. Poorly sequenced transitions, disruption to the core business, and value that proves smaller or shorter-lived than anticipated. Teams become locked into delivery paths that no longer make commercial sense, while underlying system assumptions remain unchanged.

The issue is rarely technical. It is temporal.

Optimizing for short-term optics, particularly client-facing signals of progress, often comes at the expense of longer-term adaptability. A cleaner interface over an ageing platform may buy temporary parity, but it can also delay the more important work of rethinking what is possible in the near and medium term.

Conservatism often shows up quietly here. Not as risk aversion, but as a preference for extending the familiar rather than exploring what could fundamentally change.

Licensing as a way to buy time and insight

In fast-moving areas such as AI orchestration, many organizations are choosing to license capability rather than build it internally. This is not because licensing is perfect. It rarely is. It introduces constraints and trade-offs. But it was fast. And more importantly, it acknowledged reality.

The pace of change in this space is such that what looks like a good architectural decision today may be actively unhelpful in twelve months. Licensing allowed us to operate right at the edge of what we actually understood at the time - without pretending we knew where the market would land six or twelve months later.

Licensing should not be seen as a lack of ambition. It is often a way of buying time, learning cheaply, and avoiding premature commitment. Building too early doesn’t make you visionary, often it just makes you rigid.

AI is neither a silver bullet nor a feature

Coaching is a useful microcosm of the broader AI debate.

Great AI coaching that is designed with intent and grounded in real coaching methodology can genuinely augment the experience and extend impact. The market is saturated with AI-enabled coaching tools and what is especially disappointing is that many are thin layers of prompts wrapped around a large language model. They are responsive, polite, and superficially impressive - and they largely miss the point.

Effective coaching isn’t about constant responsiveness. It’s about clarity. It’s about bringing experience, structure, credibility, and connection to moments where someone is stuck.

At the other extreme, coaches themselves are often deeply traditional. A heavy pen, a leather-bound notebook, and a Royal Copenhagen mug of coffee are far more likely to be sitting on the desk than the latest GPT or Gemini model.

That conservatism is understandable - coaching is built on trust, presence, and human connection - but it’s increasingly misaligned with how scale and impact are actually created.

The real opportunity for AI is not to replace human work with a chat interface. It is to codify what actually works. The decision points, frameworks, insights, and moments that drive behavior change. AI can then be used to augment and extend that value at scale.

A polished interface over generic capability is not enough. If AI does not strengthen the core value of the work, it is theatre, not transformation.

What this means for leaders

Across all of these examples, the same pattern shows up.

The hardest decisions are rarely about capability, they are about timing, alignment, and conviction.

Building from scratch only makes sense when you can clearly articulate:

• What you believe that the market does not
• Why that belief creates defensible value
• Why you’re willing to concentrate risk behind it

Clear vision scales extraordinarily well when it’s tightly held. The success of narrow, focused Silicon Valley start-ups is testament to that.

Larger organizations often carry a broader set of commitments. That complexity increases when depth of expertise is spread across functions, and even more so when sales teams have significant autonomy at the point of sale. Alignment becomes harder not because people are wrong, but because too many partial truths are competing at once.

In these environments, strategic clarity, not headcount or spend, creates advantage.

This is why many leadership teams choose to license early. Not because building is wrong, but because most organizations have not yet earned the right to build.

This article was originally publish on Rotman Management

IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.

The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.

In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.

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You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”

Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.

‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’

A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.

Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:

• Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
• Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
• Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
• Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
• Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
• Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
• Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
• Merger integration.

Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.

The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs

Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context?  When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.

10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations

With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:

1. Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
2. Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
3. Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
4. Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
5. Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
6. Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
7. User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
8. Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
9. Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
10. Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.

Better Results, Faster

Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.

Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination

Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.

Putting Business Simulations to Work

Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.

Learn more about business simulations

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