How Top Sales Organizations Are Elevating the Manager Job

Across every client conversation, SellingInnovations sees some combination of four forces driving the same outcome: sellers need to have a fundamentally different conversation than the one they were having before.

Product and portfolio expansion. Whether through organic growth, new AI products, or M&A, sellers are moving from point solutions to platform selling. Bigger bags, more buyers, more senior buyers, and more complex conversations.

Segment shift. Some organizations are going upmarket to more executive buyers. Others are refocusing on growing the core — strategic renewals, cross-sell — which requires more senior, outcomes-oriented conversations.

Buyer evolution. Buyers are bringing more stakeholders to the table to de-risk decisions, especially with AI products. Procurement and CFOs are appearing in conversations where they never sat before.

Market tightening. Downsizing and restructuring leave fewer sellers with bigger territories and bigger quotas, which demands more strategic judgment — not just harder work.

Regardless of which forces are most present, the answer is the same: sellers need to have a different conversation, and managers need to lead that change and hold sellers accountable for it. And there is urgency — the market, the competitors, and the customers are not waiting.

Every organization already has its run-the-business cadences — pipeline reviews, deal reviews, forecasting calls, coaching sessions, performance conversations. The question is not whether these exist. It is whether they are truly buyer-focused or internally focused, and whether they are evolving as buyer expectations evolve.

A buyer-first operating rhythm starts with the mindsets being cultivated across the team, flows into how forecasts are run and deals are reviewed day-to-day, and extends to coaching culture, performance management, and operating standards. And there is a critical nuance for managers: they are being asked to coach towards a sale that they themselves may never have run as individual contributors. The sale has changed — different persona, different buyer, new complexity — and many managers were promoted and grew up in a different world. Supporting them in modeling the standard, not just coaching towards it, is part of the work.

Both organizations were experiencing the same forces from different starting points. At LinkedIn Talent Solutions, buying committees were expanding, executive scrutiny on budgets was increasing, and long-tenured customer relationships were changing behavior. Internally, the volume of tools and process rigor meant managers felt like they were inspecting rather than investing in their sellers' success. Luis Costa described a feeling of personal responsibility: the global enablement program was valuable, but the market was moving faster than it could accelerate.

At Veeam, the conversation had shifted from point-solution renewals to platform conversations about cyber resilience, AI data governance, and backup-as-a-service. The customer persona changed — from backup admins to the C-suite and procurement. Biljana Matovic's team had already started hiring a more sales-oriented profile into their renewals organization, but the managers needed a framework to coach this new kind of conversation at scale. Mihai Zota captured the shift: renewal predictability had disappeared, and the team needed to think about a renewal journey that starts the moment the customer buys, not 3–6 months before the contract expires.

Both teams hit the same wall: change fatigue. A Gartner study cited in the session found that employee willingness to support organizational change dropped from 75% in 2016 to roughly 25% today. This is not unique to LinkedIn or Veeam — it is everywhere.

The critical insight from both organizations: the problem is not a lack of will. It is that managers are buried in small, constant tasks. Adding "coach more" on top of that without a framework or reprioritization was not going to work.

Veeam's approach was to integrate separate motions — pipeline reviews, deal management, forecasting, coaching — into a reframed, integrated system. No dedicated time block for coaching; instead, coaching embedded into every meeting that already exists. LinkedIn's framing was similar: fewer things done better, focused on two fundamentals — talent and deals.

At LinkedIn, there was additional resistance from experienced, long-tenured managers who felt they already had the fundamentals covered. The external perspective was the unlock: it gave them a mirror to see where drift had occurred and what best-in-class looked like outside their own walls.

For years, Veeam's renewals organization was focused on activity KPIs — how many calls, how many emails. With 500,000+ customers, call volume mattered at face value. But when the team shifted to outcome-focused metrics, the results told a different story.

Talk time increased — reps were no longer under pressure to hit a daily call count and were instead spending time researching accounts and having more meaningful conversations. Upsell and cross-sell grew. The team overachieved in Q1 and Q2. Net revenue retention improved by 2 percentage points, a significant gain at Veeam's scale.

Mihai Zota illustrated the old approach with the Cobra Effect — the story of the British colonial bounty on dead cobras in Delhi that led people to breed cobras, leaving more snakes on the streets when the program ended. Making more calls is not necessarily more efficient. Measuring the wrong inputs incentivizes the wrong behavior.

Veeam also extended its forecasting horizon. Previously, leaders forecast in-quarter only. After the training, they began forecasting one to two quarters ahead, bringing future-quarter deals to every call. The result: leaders were proactively surfacing and de-risking deals before they became problems.

At LinkedIn, the biggest gains came from two things: quality and language. It was not about doing something new or additional — it was about raising the quality of the engagements managers were already having, both with their sellers and with customers.

The shared-language piece was especially important. Terms like "deal review," "territory plan," and "forecasting conversation" meant somewhat different things to different frontline leaders, each of whom had autonomy and experience. The external framework gave them a consistent vocabulary so that a deal review meant the same thing across the organization: helping the rep identify blind spots, ask the right questions, slow down, and focus on buyer outcomes — not just what was in it for LinkedIn.

The reframe landed. Reps began leaving deal conversations feeling like leadership and the organization were fully behind them. That was the earliest signal that the approach was working.

Both LinkedIn and Veeam had strong internal enablement teams. The challenge was making an external framework feel like an accelerant.

LinkedIn's approach had three elements. First, bring all stakeholders to the table — the enablement team, the external partner, and the frontline leaders — so everyone understood each other's curriculum and language. Second, be explicit about the intention: the external work accelerates and complements the internal investment, it does not replace it. Third, build a reinforcement plan with the enablement team to sustain momentum between quarterly sessions.

Veeam's enablement team was the one who connected them to SellingInnovations in the first place, based on prior work. The content was developed and delivered in roughly six weeks, condensed into two days per region — one session in Alpharetta, one in Bucharest. The compressed format worked because of what followed: the team continued reinforcing the material monthly and quarterly, embedding it into their daily operations.

• Frame any external framework as an accelerant for existing investments, not a replacement. Be explicit about the intention with the team.
• Bring enablement, the external partner, and the target population to the same table. Let each side learn the other's language.
• Build the reinforcement plan before the training happens. The sessions are the catalyst; the cadence after them is the work.
• Articulate "what's in it for me" clearly. Change fatigue means people need to understand why this investment of their time is worth it.
• Celebrate the wins that result from the new behaviors. Constant reinforcement keeps the language alive.

SellingInnovations is a B2B sales research, training, and advisory firm co-founded by Matt Dixon, Ted McKenna, Dave Anderson, and Rory Channer. Dixon and McKenna are the authors of The JOLT Effect, drawn from a study of 2.5 million recorded B2B sales conversations; Dixon also co-authored The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer.

The manager cadence work described in this session is part of the Sales Leader Academy — our program for frontline and second-line sales leaders. It sits alongside our JOLT Effect and Fearless Buyer work. Related reading in our research library.