3 months of embedded people & performance support inside a B2B sales agency
The short version
In three months, Meeting Secured, a small B2B sales agency, went from 52 meetings booked in March to 97 in June. Conversation rate rose alongside it.
Same team. No new hires. Different foundation and different type of support.
This is the story of how that happened.
Where it started
Meeting Secured came to me with what looked like a hiring problem.
They were a small, ambitious team: two co-founders, a handful of SDRs, and the energy of people who genuinely believed in what they were building. But performance wasn’t where it needed to be. Ownership felt low. Initiative was missing. And the founders, both first-time managers, were starting to wonder if they had made the right hiring decisions.
We started where they asked: hiring strategy, interview frameworks, evaluation criteria. But early conversations revealed something more interesting.
Understanding performance is at the core of what I do. And what I was seeing didn’t point to a hiring problem. It pointed to something that’s far more common in fast-growing small teams: the right people, in the wrong conditions.
No clear KPIs. No career progression framework. No consistent 1:1s between managers and employees. No shared language for what good actually looked like. The team wasn’t underperforming because they couldn’t do the work. They were underperforming because nobody had built the environment where they could.
The founders, brilliant at sales but new to leadership, were navigating management entirely by instinct.
The hiring question became a people question. And the people question became a systems question.
What we built together
Over three months, the engagement evolved into something broader than either of us had originally planned.
With the team: 1:1 coaching sessions with the SDRs using psychology-based tools and frameworks. What started as a performance challenge turned out to be something deeper: a confidence and mindset issue. The SDRs weren’t struggling with technique. They were operating from beliefs that were quietly limiting them. The work was about rewiring those beliefs at the root, helping each person reconnect with why their role matters and what they’re genuinely capable of.
With the founders: Weekly coaching and consulting sessions covering leadership development, accountability, how to give feedback, how to run effective 1:1s, and how to hold a team to a standard that aligns with their own.
The systems:
KPIs and performance metrics with clear expectations
A weekly 1:1 framework for manager-employee conversations
Vision, Mission, and Values work, with observable behaviours attached, not just words on a wall
A career progression matrix across six levels, so employees knew exactly where they stood and what it would take to grow
The turning point, in my view, was the KPIs and accountability work. Before that, expectations were implicit. After, they were concrete. And when people know exactly what’s expected of them, and believe they can meet it – something shifts.
The results
What the numbers show:
Month
Meetings booked
March
52
April
71
May
91
June
97
Consistent growth. Every single month. No dip.
Conversation rate rose alongside meetings booked. That means the quality of interactions improved, not just the volume.
Here’s how the founders described it:
“We brought Ilina in as both a people and performance coach, and in three months she transformed how our company runs. We weren’t starting from zero — we already had a culture, standards, and structure — but Ilina sharpened every one of them into something we could actually scale. What set her apart is that she didn’t stop at the business. She worked directly with our SDRs on their confidence and career growth, and the two things compounded. That’s the real proof: not a one-off spike, but a step-change we’ve sustained.”
— Filip Zhatev & Filip Sokolovic, Co-Founders, Meeting Secured
What this tells us about performance
Performance problems are rarely skill problems. More often, they’re people infrastructure problems.
No shared values to anchor decisions. No vision to connect daily work to something bigger. No KPIs to define what good actually looks like. No accountability or feedback structures that allow people to grow. When you build those foundations deliberately, the performance follows.
That’s what embedded work looks like in practice.
May and June are naturally strong months in sales. The founders came in with genuine commitment to their people and a sharp sales approach already in place. Both of those things matter and deserve acknowledgment. What changed was the structure, clarity, and consistent support that allowed those strengths to actually translate into sustained results.
What’s next
After a short summer pause, Meeting Secured and I will be continuing into the next phase of the engagement, building on the foundation we’ve laid and going deeper into leadership development as the company grows.
Thinking about something similar for your team?
If you’re a founder or People leader navigating underperformance, unclear expectations, or the gap between good people and great results, this is exactly the kind of work I do.
📩 Get in touch or book a discovery call to talk about what embedded people and performance support could look like for your company.
