3 tips to get started in the novel world of hybrid selling
At a workshop on virtual selling for the Key Account Managers of a Fortune-100 technology corporation, Anna, a participant with over 20 years of experience said:
“I can’t wait for this to be over and to go back to visiting my clients as usual.”
In today’s environment, comments like these are not uncommon – reluctance to change is a constant of human behavior and the world of hybrid selling is challenging for even veteran sellers. At the end of a recent Sales Transformation updating the sales model of a leading pharma company, Luis, a sales representative, commented:
“In our work, face-to-face meetings are all you need, all these tools (you just showed us) are no good.”
The number of people resistant to virtual selling in the last several months has soared to new heights, but this is not a sustainable mindset for the future.
Virtual selling in today’s environment
Virtual selling is not new. What is new is the speed at which it is being adopted under the current circumstances – at some organizations, by force, and at others, with great reluctance, as in the examples of Anna and Luis respectively. Mindsets like theirs are present in all sales organizations and purchase departments and represent the innate human response to a perceived threat, fight or flight. Employees will either take flight, mentally checking out, experiencing denial, and waiting for the storm to pass, or they will fight, taking action to sell virtually, but longing for things to be “back to normal”. What these Salespeople don’t realize is that virtual selling is here to stay and that its adoption cycle has shortened. In fact, virtual selling can be a significant advantage if they get a few things right. Welcome to the world of Hybrid Selling, where Salespeople strategically mix face-to-face with virtual client interactions to boost their productivity and results.
Does this imply that, once the physical access to clients is back, Salespeople will hardly leave the office? Nope. Or that building a great business relationship with new and potential clients will happen online with the same effectiveness? Also, no.
Still, looking ahead to the future of Salespeople like Anna and Luis, it is easy to picture them being outperformed by more dynamic colleagues, those who keep using virtual selling as another weapon in their arsenal once the pandemic is over. But how?
3 tips for Hybrid Selling
Trends from organizations across geographies and industries where face-to-face meetings are now possible suggest that there are 3 things Salespeople need to define:
- Determine your “efficient” time. This is the percentage of your time that could be more productively used for tasks other than meeting clients in person. What if, instead of travelling around to visit clients, you used part of that time to look for new prospects? Or to attend more industry events? Or to craft better proposals? Or to think of insights to bring to the existing clients? You get the idea. This percentage of your time and what you use it for are highly subjective, though our early findings suggest that it should account for less than 20 percent of the total work time. To determine your own percentage of efficient time, think of how many hours in a week you wished you had available to be more productive through tasks other than face-to-face meetings. If you are still undecided go with 10 percent for now (four hours per week). Then make a wish-list of what you would use your efficient time for – two or three elements will be enough.
- Implement a set of criteria to determine what meetings can go virtual. Now, look at your agenda for next week and decide what client meetings should go virtual to free up your goal efficient time. There is no magic formula here, though a checklist of criteria can help you weight the pros and cons. To aid in this, organizations can create defined guidelines to help make this decision easier for Salespeople – e.g. all first meetings with new potential clients should be face-to-face, if the key decision maker for the client is attending through videoconference you should do that too, etc. In most cases, multiple variables come into play, which makes the decision more nuanced. Still, it is helpful to review a set of criteria / dimensions such as in the example below. (Note: the content of the “Face-to-Face” and “Virtual” columns is specific to each Sales organization and should be agreed upon internally).
- Create a checkpoint plan to learn as you go. Steps one and two are a trial-and-error process: in the new reality most Salespeople are still learning how to engrain virtual selling into how they work. Leverage the process above once or twice before assessing your outcomes and make adjustments to create your own plan. Here are a few questions to help you get started:
a. Do you still need the same percentage of efficient time for the following weeks?
b. What quick wins are you observing, if any, in your new way of working? Are they scalable? What is their potential?
c. To what extent are you missing out on important face-to-face interactions? Include your clients’ feedback to get a full perspective.
COVID-19 has brought a shift in how Salespeople work and how clients expect Salespeople to interact with them. The good news is that traditionalist clients who would never take a virtual meeting in the past have now been forced to experiment with virtual communication tools and are more likely to accept some meetings as virtual interactions. Still, many seasoned account managers are dying to go back to the “good old days” of face-to-face meetings as soon as possible. These Salespeople are right to assume that face-to-face interactions will play a key role in the future, but their refusal to embrace hybrid selling is a big mistake – and will result in a missed opportunity for increased performance.
Who wants to be the next Anna or Luis? You have an opportunity to become a more productive Salesperson in the new normal, now it’s up to you to take it. If you don’t… others will.
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Want to create lasting behavior change? Stop only assessing behaviors, and start assessing mindsets
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.
If you want your sales team to be effective, focus on business acumen
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.
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From top-down to judgment all around: The AI imperative for organizations
Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.
In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.
Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.
Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.
Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.
But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.
Why judgment matters more than ever
Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.
If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.
What organizations must do
To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:
- Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.
- Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.
- Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.
- Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.
What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.
BTS acquires Nexo to strengthen its position in Brazil and Latin America
P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.
Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.
Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.
BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.
“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”
“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.
Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.
The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.
BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.
For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com
Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19
High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.