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Micah

Jacobson

VP GTM Enablement

Zendesk

Micah is the VP of GTM Enablement at Zendesk, where he leads global onboarding, program management, field enablement, systems and tools, operations, and learning experience design initiatives supporting the company’s GTM organization. With more than 20 years of experience in enablement and organizational development, he is passionate about helping teams unlock performance, accelerate growth, and deliver impactful customer experiences. Prior to joining Zendesk, Micah built and led enablement organizations at Informatica and Salesforce, where he helped redesign go-to-market enablement strategies, onboarding programs, competency development frameworks, methodology rollouts, sales play execution, and program measurement practices. Micah is also an author and thought leader in experiential learning and debriefing, with multiple published works and certifications in organizational learning and development.

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24 July 2025 12:45 - 13:15

The psychology of coaching effectiveness: Why the best frameworks fail without the right mindset

Give a sales manager the best coaching framework in the world and they can still leave a rep deflated, defensive, and completely unchanged. Frameworks do not coach people. People coach people. And people are complicated. Research from Gallup found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement, yet most coaching programmes invest everything in methodology and almost nothing in the psychology behind it. The GROW model means nothing if the rep does not trust the manager. A scorecard changes nothing if the manager is too conflict-averse to use it honestly. This session goes beneath the surface to examine why reps resist feedback, why managers avoid hard conversations, and what it actually takes to build the conditions where coaching creates real change. Less framework. More human.