Growthential"Only 34% of sales leaders have received any coaching training. We expect them to develop high-performing teams anyway. Fix the managers first. Everything else follows."
The Data Is Stark
The 2026 State of Sales Coaching report (MySalesCoach, 2026) paints a clear picture: the people responsible for developing your sales team have never been taught how to do it.
- 34% of sales leaders have received any formal coaching training
- Only 1 in 5 sales leaders has their own coach
- Managers spend less than 15% of their time on coaching activities
- Sales reps who receive consistent coaching outperform those who do not by 20-30%
The gap is not about intent. Most sales managers want to coach their teams. The problem is structural: they were promoted because they were good sellers, not because they were good coaches. Then we hand them a team and expect them to develop people using skills they have never been taught. This problem is compounded when managers are also stretched across too many direct reports, a dynamic I explore in the megamanager problem.
Why Good Sellers Make Mediocre Managers (Without Training)
I have seen this pattern dozens of times. Your top-performing rep gets promoted to manager. They know how to close deals, handle objections, and build pipeline. But coaching requires a different skill set entirely:
Selling is doing. You are in the deal, making decisions, reading the room, driving the outcome. The feedback loop is immediate: you win or you lose.
Coaching is enabling. You are watching someone else do the work, asking the right questions, providing targeted feedback, and resisting the urge to jump in and take over. The feedback loop is delayed. You might not see the impact for weeks or months.
The hardest transition for new sales managers is moving from "I'll show you how it's done" to "Help me understand your thinking." The first approach creates dependency. The second builds capability.
What Effective Sales Coaching Looks Like
After managing 46+ salespeople across multiple countries, I have refined my coaching approach to a few core principles:
1. Coach the Person, Not the Deal
Most sales "coaching" sessions are actually pipeline reviews. The manager asks: "Where is this deal? What's the next step? When will it close?" That is management, not coaching.
Real coaching focuses on the skills and behaviours that drive deal outcomes:
- "I noticed you spent 80% of the discovery call talking. What would change if you spent 80% listening?"
- "When the CFO raised the budget concern, you jumped to discounting. What if we explored the business case instead?"
- "Your emails to this account are feature-heavy. How could you reframe them around the outcomes they care about?"
The difference is specificity. Good coaching points to a specific behaviour, explains the impact, and helps the rep develop an alternative approach.
2. Create a Coaching Cadence
Coaching that happens only when there is a problem is not coaching. It is firefighting. Effective coaching requires a consistent rhythm:
- Weekly 1:1s (30 minutes minimum): Dedicated to skill development. Not pipeline updates; those belong in a separate meeting.
- Call reviews (bi-weekly): Listen to recorded calls together. Identify one specific area for improvement. Practise the alternative approach.
- Deal strategy sessions (as needed): For complex deals, work through the strategy together. This is where coaching and management overlap productively.
- Quarterly development reviews: Step back from the day-to-day and assess progress against longer-term development goals.
3. Use Data to Guide Coaching
Conversation intelligence tools and AI-powered sales tools that actually work have transformed coaching from subjective opinion to data-driven development. You can now see:
- Talk-to-listen ratios across every call
- How quickly reps respond to objections
- Which topics correlate with deals progressing or stalling
- Whether reps are multi-threading in accounts
This data does not replace the coach. It directs the coach's attention to where it will have the most impact.
4. Coach to Strengths, Not Just Weaknesses
Most coaching focuses on fixing problems. But the research is clear: developing existing strengths produces more performance improvement than remediating weaknesses.
If a rep is exceptional at building rapport but weak at commercial conversations, do not spend all your coaching time on financials. Help them use their relationship skills to have more honest conversations about value and investment. Play to the strength while addressing the gap.
Coaching Your Managers: A Framework
If you are a VP of Sales, CRO, or CEO reading this, the question is: who coaches your coaches?
This is the framework I recommend:
Invest in Formal Training
Send your sales managers through a coaching certification programme. Not a one-day workshop, a sustained programme that includes practice, feedback, and ongoing development. The investment pays for itself within one quarter through improved team performance.
Give Managers a Coach
Every sales manager should have their own coach, whether that is you, an external coach, or a peer coaching arrangement. Managers who are being coached model the behaviour for their teams. Managers who are not being coached often revert to command-and-control management under pressure.
Protect Coaching Time
The biggest enemy of coaching is the calendar. Managers get pulled into deals, internal meetings, forecasting calls, and operational tasks. Coaching falls to the bottom of the list because it does not have an immediate deadline.
Set an expectation: managers should spend at least 40% of their time on coaching and development activities. Track it. Make it part of their performance evaluation. If a manager keeps cancelling 1:1s or skips call reviews, that is a performance issue, not a scheduling issue.
Measure Coaching Outcomes
What gets measured gets managed. Track:
- Coaching frequency: Are 1:1s happening weekly?
- Rep development: Are reps improving on specific metrics over time?
- Ramp time: How quickly do new hires reach full productivity?
- Retention: Are good reps staying? (A common reason for departure is poor management.)
- Promotion readiness: Are you developing the next generation of leaders?
The ROI of Closing the Coaching Gap
The numbers make a compelling case:
- Teams with consistent coaching see 20-30% higher quota attainment than teams without
- Effective coaching reduces new hire ramp time by 30-40%
- Organisations with strong coaching cultures have 25% lower voluntary turnover in sales
- Every 10% improvement in coaching quality correlates with a 6-8% improvement in revenue
These are not theoretical numbers. They reflect what I have observed across the teams I have built and the organisations I have advised. Coaching is not a "nice to have." It is the highest-impact investment you can make in sales performance, and it should be central to any serious B2B sales strategy.
Getting Started
If your sales managers have never received coaching training, start there. If they have been trained but are not coaching consistently, the problem is likely time and accountability. If you are a sales leader who has never had a coach yourself, consider what you are missing.
The organisations that win in B2B sales are not the ones with the best products or the biggest budgets. They are the ones that develop their people most effectively. And that starts with coaching the coaches. If you are building a team from the ground up, I have written a detailed guide on how to build a high-performing sales team from scratch.
If you want to discuss building a coaching culture in your sales organisation, explore my sales team coaching services or get in touch.