How do you sell in a downturn?
Only 20 percent of salespeople are prepared to offer real value during a sales call. In a tough market, this won’t cut it. Sellers who prepare for sales calls with general industry knowledge are not able to demonstrate the unique value required to sell in today’s increasingly challenging environment.To successfully close deals, sellers need to be customer-centric and develop a deep understanding of their customer’s business objectives and success metrics, aligned to the organization’s specific context. This approach builds sellers’ credibility, conversational agility, and their ability to adjust their talking points to address clients’ different motivations, which are critical when spending isn’t really on the table.Customer centricity also allows sellers to engage with clients throughout all parts of the sales cycle, which enables them to find unexpected opportunities. A seller who can shift gears mid-conversation by listening for cues will be able to address business priorities that genuinely land with the client—and get them invited back for further meetings. When sellers can see things from the customer’s perspective, they become trusted advisors.By leveraging a customer-centric mindset to position themselves and their organization as a true partner for success, sellers will demonstrate value and win business, even in a tough economy. To build your teams’ customer centricity, sales leaders should facilitate the following steps:
1. Gather deep industry knowledge
It’s not enough to have company-specific history and context in your back pocket; industry expertise and context is critical to build rapport and trust. Going beyond “show me you know me” and demonstrating exactly how a product or service provides value to your customer and represents an investment is crucial in today’s market.Sellers also need to gather in-depth information about the people seated across the table—prospects and customers specifically. To prepare, sellers should comb through social channels, read 10-Ks, and keep up with industry press, and ask: What challenges are keeping your prospects up at night? What innovations do they have in progress? Who are their competitors? Are there any recent shifts in customers they’re targeting? The context allows the seller to speak directly to prospects’ pain points and develop custom, thoughtful solutions.
2. Develop the skills to secure a meeting
For salespeople, of all the skills to master, getting introductions tops the list. In fact, 70 percent of customers value “connected processes,” otherwise known as contextualized engagements. Think of this as a seamless hand-off between a person in the seller’s network and a decision maker at a company.Introductions go beyond the introduction itself. They also require sellers to share a strong point of view and ask the right questions so that customers will open up about their businesses. It’s all about being relevant and bringing value to the conversation.
3. Understand customers’ metrics
Many salespeople enter the room with some understanding of their customer’s business challenges. Not as many come in with knowledge around the financials, initiatives, and KPIs used to measure success. Knowing how a client will measure success allows a seller to speak to those points specifically.The seller must focus on the customer by providing insight, following up regularly, and even helping to strategize next steps. The goal is to ensure that customers see the value of the company’s products or services and seek to adopt them. Success will encourage additional purchases, and over time, generate steady revenue streams.
4. Pair the offer with the value proposition
Without a clear understanding of how the company’s products or services deliver value for clients and how to present this in a compelling way, sellers will consistently fail to close deals. Understanding and delivering the value proposition is so mission critical that it should be built into every organization’s training and enablement.One way to prepare sellers is through simulations, which immerse customer-facing teams in their customer’s challenges. Being on the inside of their customers’ business allows sellers to become more intuitive and thoughtful about developing solutions. Furthermore, they get to practice having challenging conversations, whether with their manager or a professional coach, in a safe environment that helps them to develop confidence.Developing a customer-centric mindset is ever more critical for sellers who need to close deals in a challenging economic environment. Knowledge, conversational agility, and consultative skills enable sellers to become strategic client partners, win new business, expand critical accounts, and foster successful long-term relationships with important stakeholders in the market.
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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, and almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. To understand what actually makes those teams work, BTS analyzed 6,702 leader coaching goals and 3,211 leadership team survey responses using our High-Performing Team Assessment model, comparing what leaders say they are working on with what teams say is getting in their way.