The Sales Coaching collection
Sales coaching is the work of improving rep performance through feedback on real deals. These posts cover coaching that scales beyond a manager’s calendar.
Start with the pillar: The Sales Coaching Guide →Most sales kickoff ideas lists are about the theme, the speaker, and the party. Here are the ideas worth running, sorted by whether they change behavior or just entertain, plus the after-plan that makes the energy survive Monday.
ReadMost teams measure time to productivity as a date, the day a rep is certified. That date tracks an input and predicts nothing. Here is the number that does, and how to shorten it.
ReadData-driven sales coaching promises objectivity. Most of it coaches the data that is easy to capture rather than the behavior that decides the deal, a bias old enough to have a name.
ReadThe best one-on-one meeting questions make the rep diagnose their own deals and skills, not report a status. Here are the questions worth asking, grouped by job, and the status questions to retire.
ReadThe weekly one-on-one is the most frequent coaching a rep gets, and most of it is a status meeting the CRM already covered. Run it as a deliberate-practice session instead, and the same 30 minutes change.
ReadMost sales coaching apps record and grade calls after the fact. Why that rarely moves win rates, the two categories on the market, and what to look for instead.
ReadGROW, OSKAR, CLEAR, FUEL: the sales coaching models look like competing systems and are the same arc in different vocabulary. Which to pick, and the variable that matters more than the model.
ReadMost sales coaching questions ask the rep to report a fact. The ones that develop a seller ask them to reason about their own deal. The difference, the science of self-persuasion, and the questions worth asking.
ReadMost sales coaching plans are a calendar of big events: a kickoff, a workshop, a quarterly review. The plans that change behavior are spacing schedules, and a 1880s memory finding explains why.
ReadSales coaching software promises to make managers better coaches. The good tools do not coach for you; they remove the one thing that crowds coaching out of a manager's week. Here is the buyer's frame.
ReadMost sales coaching technique lists are a bag of tricks. The ones that work share a single mechanism, named by a tennis coach in 1974, and it is the opposite of what 'coaching' usually means.
ReadSales coaching is the most praised and least defined act in sales management. What it actually is, the science of why it works, who to coach first, and how to make the hour.
ReadSales contest ideas are easy to find and easy to get wrong. The behavioral science says a badly designed contest can leave reps less motivated than before. Here is how to design one that adds energy.
ReadSales meeting ideas usually mean ways to fill the slot. The research on meetings says the slot itself is the problem: most are a status broadcast that one email would replace. Here is what to run instead.
ReadMost sales onboarding front-loads knowledge in week one, then watches it evaporate. Why ramp stalls, what the science says, and how to onboard the behavior instead.
ReadSales performance management usually means tracking quotas and outcomes. But you cannot manage a result, only the behavior that drives it. Here is what SPM is and how to do the version that works.
ReadWhat is sales coaching, precisely? It is not training and not managing, and the blur between the three is why the highest-impact thing a manager does is the first one cut. A clear definition, with the science.
ReadSee it run on your deals.