4 steps you need to lead sellers and marketers through a downturn
To say the last three years have been tumultuous would be like calling a hurricane a rain shower—utterly understating the forces of change. A global pandemic, social awakenings, raw materials and labor shortages, supply chain issues, rising fuel costs, global conflict, volatile financial markets… The list goes on. While some aspects of the “good old days” of selling and marketing have returned (e.g., in person meetings), sellers are working in an environment irrevocably changed. And now, just as is in the late 2000s, we once again stand on the precipice of an economic downturn. As the COVID pandemic has mutated into a value-shortage pandemic, commercial teams of sellers and marketers are working to address a morass of new symptoms. Chief among them is unpredictability, which has led to a loss of trust with customers. Historically, sellers and marketers fostered trust by demonstrating understanding of the customer’s business, their industry, and their needs by delivering products and services to meet those needs, and by providing ideas and insights to help customers see needs on the horizon and get out in front of them. These were the active ingredients in the prescription for great selling and marketing. But this new unpredictability, due to digital transformation—along with societal, geopolitical, and macroeconomic maladies—has left those ingredients in short supply. Consequently, customers, marketers, and sellers are suffering withdrawal symptoms, as they struggle to rebuild their shared trust. Though communication has always been and continues to be critical when working with customers, with such volatility and uncertainty, there are four new treatment guidelines you need to know to help your sellers overcome the ill effects of the upheaval.
- Lead with empathy.While stress has always been a constant for commercial teams, the level of mental and emotional strain on your sellers and marketers has skyrocketed. The frequency with which they must have difficult, potentially trust-breaking conversations with their customers continues to increase. Daily, sellers and marketers must tell customers that their purchase is not available on schedule, communicate a price increase, or deliver some other unwelcome message. The wild ride has left commercial teams with wounds that are hard to recognize, even harder to expose, and that require different desk-side care from managers and leaders. Showing vulnerability, and allowing others to show it, is a reflection of strength and builds trust and confidence. Give your sellers and marketers the space to bare these wounds to you and offer a shoulder to share the newly heavy burden, as sellers and marketers are, likewise, called on to exhibit empathy to their customers. This is the perfect opportunity to allow your commercial teams to be vulnerable, but also to reward the healthy behaviors they’ve displayed through this difficult journey. Yes, this is a volatile ride, and everyone will encounter bumps in the road; however, acknowledging effective sales and marketing behaviors will go a long way in keeping morale high.
- Counsel against jumping to conclusions.In high-stress moments, our brain chemistry naturally leads us to find quick explanations or solutions—and worse, shuts off our ability to see options.1 For instance, sellers and marketers faced with a specific product’s lack of availability might assume a customer won’t be open to discussing alternative products, even though an alternative might suffice in the short term. Your commercial teams might be committing malpractice by diagnosing their customers’ needs prior to fully examining them. This not only makes the conversations that much more taxing—it also increases the likelihood of improper or irrelevant treatment of the customer’s symptoms. Staying open and continuing to ask the right questions to uncover a customer’s pain points will lead to larger and deeper sales opportunities. Refocus your commercial teams on the fundamentals of fully understanding their customer and their customer’s situation. Help your sellers and marketers become aware of the unfounded conclusions they may be drawing and how those preconceived notions may hinder their customer conversations.
- Guide sellers and marketers to redefine mutual success.Typically, the markers for success are defined early in vendor-customer relationships. Rarely are those success markers revisited, despite changing circumstances. Now more than ever, your sellers and marketers should spend time with their customers redefining those markers of a healthy relationship in a way that accounts for the realities of today’s volatile marketplace. By jointly redefining objectives with customers, commercial teams can systematically rebuild trust. Guide your sellers and marketers on how to co-create with their customers a new definition of what success is in these uncertain times.
- Help commercial teams stay agile.Raw materials and labor shortages combined with supply chain issues mean that some products and services are readily available while others are not. How has the health of your customer’s relationship with their customers changed? What alternative methods can your customer use to service their own customers? What new offerings might your customers need to build now to serve their customers in the future? For those alternative methods, where can your company and your commercial teams make it easier for your customers to service their customers? Brainstorm with your sellers and marketers the different directions customer conversations could go and then practice the conversations with them to help them get comfortable being agile in those conversations. This agility is not only critical for sellers and marketers; leaders also must commit to taking a more agile approach to working side-by-side with their teams to provide adequate care and value to customers.
Don’t fall into the old routine of relying on statements like “we’re suffering right along with our customers” or “we’ll get through this” as the panacea to this economic pandemic. Serve your sellers, marketers, and customers by addressing both emotional and business needs through leading with empathy, avoiding jumping to conclusions, redefining mutual success with customers, and staying agile.
Sources
1Wemm SE, Wulfert E. Effects of Acute Stress on Decision Making. Appl Psychophysiol Biofeedback. 2017 Mar;42(1):1-12. doi: 10.1007/s10484-016-9347-8. PMID: 28083720; PMCID: PMC5346059.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5346059/
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Global spending on AI is forecast to reach $2.52 trillion by 2026, a 44% year-over-year increase, according to Gartner. At the same time, only about 10% of AI pilots scale beyond proof of concept.
What’s the disconnect?
Why aren’t most organizations seeing the ROI they hoped for, despite making such large investments?
It’s not because the technology isn’t ready. And it’s not because the use cases are unclear.
The disconnect exists because many organizations are investing in AI as a technology upgrade and expecting a business transformation in return.
The tools are advancing at breathtaking speed, and most organizations already have AI in motion. But the work itself often stays the same. AI gets layered onto existing tasks instead of being used to rethink workflows end to end. Adoption metrics go up, while decisions, operating models, and value creation remain largely untouched.
When teams first start using AI, they do what makes sense. They try to recreate today, just faster. Can it help me write this? Analyze that? Save a bit of time?
That’s a smart place to begin. But it’s not where ROI, or reinvention, actually shows up.
Getting over the hump
Real returns begin when teams experience what we often call “getting over the hump.”
This is the moment when two things click at once:
- AI can fundamentally change how work gets done.
- People don’t need deep technical expertise to make that change happen.
When teams see weeks of work compress into hours, or watch an end-to-end workflow suddenly run in a new way, something shifts. Confidence replaces hesitation. Curiosity replaces caution. The questions change, from “How do I use this tool?” to “What’s possible now?”
That shift matters, because ROI doesn’t come from using AI more often, it comes from using it to work differently.
Why ROI stalls as AI scales
As AI initiatives expand, many organizations discover that the limiting factor isn’t the technology itself. It’s the environment surrounding the work.
ROI shows up when teams are able to explore and redesign workflows, not just automate steps. That requires clarity on outcomes and guardrails, but also room to experiment, learn, and iterate. When AI is tightly controlled or narrowly deployed, pilots stay pilots. When people are trusted to rethink how work happens, value starts to compound.
Organizations that unlock ROI don’t chase perfect use cases upfront. They focus on learning faster and applying those insights where they matter most.
The early signal that ROI is coming
Long before AI shows up in financial results, there’s an earlier indicator that organizations are on the right path.
People are energized by the work.
You see it when teams start sharing experiments, when ideas move across functions, and when learning becomes visible rather than hidden. Progress feels owned, not imposed.
That energy isn’t accidental. It’s a signal that people feel trusted to rethink how work happens, and that trust is essential to turning investment into impact.
Reinvention happens closer to the work than most expect
AI reinvention rarely starts with a sweeping rollout or a multi-year roadmap. More often, it begins with one meaningful workflow, one team close to the work, and a willingness to ask a different question.
With the right support, that team gets over the hump. What they learn becomes reusable. Patterns emerge. Over time, those insights connect, creating enterprise-wide impact and sustained ROI.
That’s how organizations move from isolated pilots to real returns.
What this means for AI investment
No organization feels fully “caught up” with AI, and that’s true across industries.
The organizations that will realize ROI aren’t waiting for certainty or the next breakthrough tool. They’re reinvesting their AI spend into new ways of working that scale human potential alongside technology.
Handled thoughtfully, AI doesn’t distance people from the work. It brings them closer - to better decisions, stronger collaboration, and better outcomes.
For many organizations, that’s where the real return begins.
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.