As a senior leader, it's likely that most of the time you don’t get involved in the details of sales conversations.
You see forecasts, dashboards and renewal numbers. You might hear some updates about “the big ones". But mostly it's run-rate trends you're watching.
You need to know your sales team are on track to hit their numbers. And if they are, you and your senior colleagues can have the confidence to invest in developing your business.
The focus of sales is clear. Sales must hit their numbers.
But this apparent clarity of purpose can lead to problems. Your sales team might prioritise achieving quota and budget at the expense of customers achieving the outcomes they expected from your products and services.
Two potentially conflicting priorities emerge for your sales team:
Push customers to get purchase orders to achieve revenue goals.
Or work with customers to define clear, deliverable outcomes, with a realistic path to achieving them.
Sales Reset is all about organisations like yours achieving both goals. The goal is for sales teams to become increasingly accountable for both quota achievement and ensuring their customers achieve expected outcomes.
Learning how to prioritise bespoke customer outcomes in a reliable sales process won’t happen at scale because of a training course.
It happens when the senior team designs the organisation, systems and processes so that using coaching skills with customers becomes the most effective way to sell, and the most reliable way to achieve revenue goals.
This article is about your role in that design.
What you are really asking sellers to do
If you want to sell in a way that prioritises the use of coaching skills with customers to articulate bespoke customer outcomes, you are asking your sellers to do something demanding.
You are asking them to:
Continue to be accountable for achieving quota.
Use their time in key conversations to explore a much broader range of stakeholders' needs and priorities
Help customers articulate how success will be measured and reported.
Qualify pipeline opportunities earlier where outcomes stay vague or undeliverable.
These changes are far from easy and straightforward. It takes much more commercial awareness, skill, judgement and courage than pushing for a quick demo or discount.
Done properly, it also speeds things up where it matters:
Weak opportunities are qualified out earlier.
Strong opportunities move faster because outcomes, stakeholders and risks are clearer.
“No decision” and late surprises are reduced.
Sellers will only work this way consistently if they believe two things:
They will not be punished for qualifying out early or reshaping deals so outcomes are deliverable.
The rest of the organisation will engage in developing these bespoke outcomes and the support required to deliver the promises they help customers make.
You cannot coach that belief from the bottom up. It has to be designed and modelled from the top.
Your system already tells sellers how to behave
Right now, your system already decides how most sellers behave under pressure. For example:
Compensation plans that pay out on purchase orders, regardless of whether outcomes are achieved.
CRM fields that focus almost exclusively on dates, values, and stages, not on outcomes, stakeholders, or delivery risk.
Deal reviews that ask “when will this close?” far more frequently than “what outcomes have they articulated, and can we deliver them?”.
Proposal processes that allow the sales team to make significant commitments without anyone in Delivery, Customer Success, or Product seeing them first.
Sales meetings that exclusively celebrate wins, not outcomes achieved.
You can stand up and say, “We want better coaching skills with customers”.
But if these signals stay as they are, the message sellers hear is:
“Talk fast, keep deals alive, get it booked. We’ll worry about outcomes later.”
If you want a different pattern, system signals and priorities must change.
How to make coaching skills the fastest route to good revenue
You don’t need a full reorganisation. You need a small number of visible design moves that make coaching-led conversations the smartest way for sellers to hit their number.
Here are three levers that are practical and high impact.
1. Make outcome clarity a visible gate for bigger deals
For significant opportunities, require a simple, standard check before proposals go out:
An outcome thesis in the customer’s words.
A named internal sponsor who is prepared to be accountable for delivering that outcome.
Clarity about how success will be reported and to whom.
A risk register and plan from Delivery or Customer Success on feasibility and timing.
This is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is an explicit choice:
“We will prioritise revenue where we have sufficient confidence we can deliver what we promise.”
Your sales team doesn’t want unnecessary meetings, friction, or delays. They need clear rules of the game. Over time, they can learn that using coaching skills with all stakeholders to get this clarity makes their pipeline cleaner and their wins more solid.
2. Change what you review, not just what you target
You can keep existing revenue, margin and growth targets. What changes is how you talk about deals.
In your own reviews with commercial leaders, add questions like:
“On our top deals, what outcomes have the customer actually articulated, in their words?”
“Who on their side owns those outcomes?”
“Where do we see evidence in transcripts or notes of proper digging deeper in conversations?”
“Which proposals have been shaped with input from Delivery, Customer Success or Product?”
You are signalling that you care about the quality of customer expectations, not only the size of bookings.
The practical effect is that opportunities with thin or vague outcomes are challenged earlier, so time can be reallocated to the ones that can actually close and renew.
3. Use AI to see the difference conversations make
Where you have call recording and AI summaries, you can ask for samples that show:
Old pattern: fast pitch, shallow questions, vague outcomes.
New pattern: exploring implications, stakeholder awareness, clearer outcomes, and sometimes a deliberate qualify-out.
Of course, as a senior leader, you don’t need to listen to everything. A few well-chosen examples, reviewed with your sales leadership team, will show whether coaching skills with customers are actually happening or just being talked about.
AI’s job here is simple: make it easy to see how language, promises, and outcomes change as you reset the system, and how these changes affect sales results and renewal quality.
A small experiment that will tell you a lot
Rather than announce “we are transforming how we sell”, run one contained Sales Reset pilot experiment on a specific range of opportunities.
For example:
Choose a threshold by value, strategic importance or risk.
For those opportunities only, require a short outcome-and-feasibility check before proposals go out.
Ask Sales, Delivery, and CS to note where current processes make it hard to quickly involve the right people, or where outcome information is missing.
You will learn three things:
Where sellers need more support to use coaching skills with customers.
Where your current processes slow down good deals or allow risky promises through.
Where incentives quietly reward hope over evidence.
The friction you uncover is not a failure. It is a map of what you and the senior team need to change if you genuinely want customer outcome achievement to sit alongside revenue as a measure of success.
At the same time, you should see signs of speed where it matters most: cleaner pipelines, fewer “no decision” outcomes, and less time wasted on deals that were never real.
Your part in Sales Reset
Sales Reset asks a lot from sellers. They remain accountable for achieving their quota. On top of that, you're requiring them to help their customers define clear outcomes, explore implications, engage more stakeholders and walk away from poor-fit deals.
They can only do that at scale if the system around them rewards clarity, feasibility and honest qualification.
Your role is to:
Make deliverable customer outcomes an explicit strategic priority.
Adjust a few key levers so coaching skills with customers are supported and seen as the fastest route to reliable revenue, not a slow, reflective luxury.
Use evidence from proposals, reviews and AI summaries to see where the shift is really happening.
Play your part and you will give your sales team permission to behave like outcome architects, not just persuaders.
Over time, you will get more of what you actually want: revenue you can rely on, relationships that renew and expand, and a reputation for customers achieving the outcomes they expected.
