The myth of more: why coaching needs structure
Organizations have long wanted to scale coaching, but have been limited by cost and capacity. With AI, that's beginning to change —new platforms are making coaching more accessible, flexible, and available on demand, extending support beyond a select group of leaders to entire populations.
For talent leaders, this shift creates both opportunity and complexity. With greater reach comes a new set of trade-offs: how to balance access with depth, flexibility with accountability, and efficiency with meaningful development.
The limits of unlimited (coaching)
Unlimited coaching sounds like the obvious answer. Remove the barriers, give everyone access, let people engage on their own terms. What's not to like?
In practice, quite a bit.
When coaching has no defined structure or cadence, engagement tends to become episodic - people show up when something feels urgent and step back when it doesn't. The coaching relationship never quite deepens. Conversations cover ground but don't build on it. And the development that was supposed to happen keeps getting pushed to the next session, and the next.
Three patterns emerge:
- Sporadic engagement over sustained development. Without a rhythm to anchor the work, coaching becomes reactive. Clients bring whatever is most pressing that week rather than working toward something larger. Progress happens in bursts, if at all.
- Insights that don't compound. Great coaching reveals patterns over time - things a client can't see in one session but can't unsee after several. Without continuity, and without a consistent coaching relationship to hold the thread, each conversation starts close to zero.
- Outcomes that are hard to measure. No milestones. No defined endpoint. No clear way for the organization, or the client, to know whether it's working. Activity fills the gap where impact should be.
The result is a model that's easy to scale and hard to defend. Which is exactly the problem talent leaders are navigating right now.
The relationship is the lever
Decades of research into what makes coaching work keeps arriving at the same answer: it's the relationship. Not the platform, not the methodology. The relationship.
When a coach and client build trust over time — developing shared language, returning to the same themes with increasing depth — something shifts. Conversations get more honest. Insights stick. The client starts doing the work between sessions, not just during them. That's when coaching becomes genuinely transformative, and it can't be rushed or replicated in a one-off session.
The ICF and EMCC are clear on this: continuity is what dives outcomes. The coaching engagements that produce lasting change are the ones where each session builds on the last, not the ones that simply offer more access.
Three principles make that possible: Consistency, Continuity, and Completion.
1. Consistency
The foundation everything else is built on.
The temptation when designing a coaching program is to treat flexibility as a feature — let people book when they want, swap coaches freely, engage on their own schedule. But frequent coach changes reset the clock. Every new coach has to earn trust, learn context, and find their footing with the client. That's time spent getting started, not getting somewhere.
A stable coaching relationship works differently:
- The coach starts to see around corners — patterns the client can't see themselves
- The client stops performing and starts being honest
- The relationship itself becomes a source of accountability, not just the sessions
Consistency doesn't constrain the work. It's what makes the deeper work possible.
2. Continuity
What turns a series of sessions into genuine development.
Without continuity, coaching tends to be additive at best- each session offers something useful, but nothing compounds. With it, the work builds on itself in ways that can't happen in isolated conversations.
What continuity makes possible
- A limiting belief surfaced in session three becomes a thread that runs through the rest of the engagement
- A behavioral pattern the client couldn't see at the start becomes impossible to ignore by the end
- Space opens up for the harder work - the kind that requires sitting with discomfort across multiple sessions, not resolving it quickly and moving on
That slower, deeper work is where lasting change actually happens. It doesn't come from more sessions. It comes from the right sessions, in the right order, with the same person.
3. Completion
The most underrated principle of the three.
In a world of unlimited access, there's no finish line, and without one, it's surprisingly hard to know what you're working toward, or whether you've gotten there. A defined endpoint changes the entire shape of an engagement.
A clear endpoint
Creates urgency and focuses every session on what matters most
- Shifts the question from "what should we talk about this week?" to "what do we need to accomplish before we're done?"
- Gives both coach and client a body of work to look back on, not just a log of conversations
For talent leaders, this is also what makes coaching legible as an investment. Sessions logged is an activity metric. A cohort of leaders who completed a structured engagement and can articulate what changed, that's a result.
Don't just scale it, design it (here’s how)
The opportunity in front of talent leaders right now is significant. The organizations that will get the most from this moment are the ones that treat coaching design as seriously as coaching delivery.
Practical design decisions
- Define the arc before you launch: set the number of sessions, the cadence, and the goals upfront, not after people have already started booking
- Protect the coaching relationship: Make coach switching the exception, not the default, and design your program to discourage unnecessary re-matches
- Build in milestones: create structured check-ins at the midpoint and end of each engagement so progress is visible to both the coach and the organization
- Separate on-demand support from developmental coaching: Use AI-enabled tools for in-the-moment guidance, and reserve structured engagements for the deeper work
- Measure completion, not just activation: Track how many people finish an engagement, not just how many start one
Questions to pressure-test your design
- Does every participant know what they're working toward before their first session?
- Can your coaches see enough context about a client's journey to pick up where they left off?
- Would you be able to show, at the end of a cohort, what changed, and for whom?
Access opened the door. Intention is what makes it worth walking through.
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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.
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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Three decisions that changed everything.
Two years ago, we made three deliberate decisions about how BTS would move with Applied AI.
We would become our own Customer Zero.
While others were building strategies, defining governance, and waiting for clarity, we made a different call: we decided not to wait. Not because the stakes were low, but because they were high. And because in a space evolving this quickly, clarity wouldn’t come from planning. It would come from movement.
So instead of starting with a roadmap, we started with three principles:
- No top-down mandate. The people closest to the work figure it out.
- IT must evolve from gatekeeper to enabler - leading AI trials and fast experimentation.
- Don’t wait for certainty.
We set the organization in motion, and once we did, things started to move quickly.
What if we started this company today?
Waiting for certainty is itself a choice, and it’s costing companies more than they realize.
We started where we knew the work best: our simulations. No perfect plan, just teams moving, trying, and iterating.
Simulations are core to who we are at BTS. Companies that simulate don’t just make better decisions they execute faster and build more engaged cultures.
The team asked a simple question:
"What if we were to start our company today?”
That question started the flywheel.
They asked IT for a few licenses and started building - vibe-coding, writing agents, and testing tools - moving at a pace that would makeany VC-backed start-up smile.
The messy middle.
At first, the team was underwhelmed.
The early reports were blunt:
“Not good with math.”
“Poor graph capabilities.”
The team wasn't discouraged.
They kept tinkering - jumping between tools, staying on top of new releases, experimenting constantly.
This was a small team, across 24 countries, building off each other’s ideas. Laughing at crazy creations. Breaking things. Iterating in a sandbox alongside real clientwork.
Each cycle produced something:
- A sharper scenario
- A faster build
- A more powerful simulation
The flywheel was turning, and it was generating something real.
When the diamond appeared.
Then something shifted.
The team moved into client trials across five countries. They figured out ISO compliance and built the architecture to handle the complexity, the “spaghetti.”
And what emerged wasn’t incremental:
- What used to take weeks started happening in days.
- Limited creativity started to feel like unlimited innovation.
- Clients became self-serving.
- Agentic simulations were built directly into client systems for real-time updates and preparation.
This was our first AI diamond - a high-impact outcome created by many cycles of experimentation compounding into real value.
It only appeared because we kept the flywheel turning, each cycle increasing the odds that something would break through.
95% adoption in eight weeks.
Then it was time to take the AI diamond global.
BTS is decentralized and highly entrepreneurial. We operate across 24 countries and 38 offices, where local teams have real autonomy.
And historically? That’s meant a low appetite for adopting something built somewhere else and pushed from the center.
So we expected resistance.
Instead, something surprising happened.
In the first eight weeks, we saw 95% adoption across our global footprint.
It felt completely different from our own digital initiatives, ERP implementations, top-down rollouts of the past.
This moved on its own. Why?
We realized it didn’t start with a framework or a model, it started with a feeling.
The feeling of being at the leading edge of one’s craft and profession.
- Joy
- Excitement
- Pride
As we watched this play out across teams it stopped feeling like isolated wins.
There was a pattern to it. A repeatable, organic, innovation motion.
And the flywheel didn’t stop with simulations.
It spread across finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Some cycles led to small improvements, and others revealed new diamonds.
Not becausewe planned for them, but because we built the conditions for people to find them.
The question I'd ask any CEO right now: Is your flywheel turning, or are you still waiting for the perfect plan?
In part 2, I’ll share the key success factors behind the breakthrough, and what we’re now seeing across more than 120 global clients.
La maggior parte delle riunioni di vendita non fallisce.
Semplicemente non porta a una decisione.
Ed è lì che si perde valore.
I clienti di oggi sono più informati, più selettivi e hanno meno tempo.
Non hanno bisogno di altre presentazioni di prodotto.
Hanno bisogno di conversazioni che li aiutino a stabilire le priorità, decidere e andare avanti.
Eppure, il 58% delle riunioni di vendita non riesce a creare valore reale.
Non perché i venditori manchino di capacità, ma perché le conversazioni non sono progettate per far avanzare le decisioni.
“I clienti non agiscono su ogni esigenza che riconoscono.
Agiscono quando qualcosa diventa una priorità.”
In questo breve executive brief scoprirai:
- Perché la maggior parte delle conversazioni informa… ma non porta all’azione
- Cosa spinge davvero i clienti a stabilire priorità e muoversi
- Come creare urgenza senza compromettere la fiducia
- Il passaggio dal presentare soluzioni al facilitare decisioni
- Cosa distingue le conversazioni che si bloccano da quelle che accelerano il progresso
Se i tuoi team stanno affrontando trattative bloccate, decisioni ritardate o un pipeline lento, questo brief ti aiuterà a capire il perché e cosa fare in modo diverso.
Scarica l’executive brief e scopri come progettare conversazioni che portano davvero a decisioni.
A maioria das reuniões de vendas não fracassa.
Elas simplesmente não levam a uma decisão.
E é aí que o valor se perde.
Os clientes de hoje estão mais informados, mais seletivos e com menos tempo.
Eles não precisam de mais apresentações de produto.
Precisam de conversas que os ajudem a priorizar, decidir e avançar.
Ainda assim, 58% das reuniões de vendas não conseguem gerar valor real.
Não porque os vendedores não tenham capacidade, mas porque as conversas não são desenhadas para impulsionar decisões.
“Os clientes não agem sobre todas as necessidades que reconhecem.
Eles agem quando algo se torna prioridade.”
Neste breve material executivo, você vai descobrir:
- Por que a maioria das conversas informa… mas não gera ação
- O que realmente faz os clientes priorizarem e avançarem
- Como criar urgência sem prejudicar a confiança
- A mudança de apresentar soluções para viabilizar decisões
- O que diferencia conversas que estagnam daquelas que aceleram o progresso
Se suas equipes estão enfrentando negócios estagnados, decisões atrasadas ou um pipeline lento, este material vai ajudar você a entender o porquê — e o que fazer de diferente.
Baixe o material executivo e aprenda como desenhar conversas que realmente impulsionam decisões.