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 →Chris Bogue writes jokes for a living and trained in the Chicago improv tradition. On Numbers Known he told Rob Jones how the rules of improv, give gifts and never play the main character, make sellers better listeners.
ReadTom Boston went from a DIY store to My Sales Coach and more than 50 million views as the creator behind Larry and Barry. Here are the numbers he runs his LinkedIn personal brand on, in his words.
ReadA growing camp wants to kill the weekly pipeline review. Our host used to be in it. Crispy Barnett and Matt Bolian argue the meeting is worth keeping, for the story behind the data and for the question that trains the rep.
ReadGoodhart's law says a measure that becomes a target stops measuring. So should sales teams eliminate activity metrics? Matt Bolian and Caleb King both said no, and explained how to use calls and emails to find the gap worth coaching.
ReadLindsay Rios was premed, sold BMWs, went to HubSpot and now fixes messy pipelines as a CRO and fractional operator. Her numbers explain why sales culture is built from disciplined, boring habits and a pipeline people care about.
ReadDom Odoguardi gave himself one year to go from SDR to AE, made it in 11 months, then moved into marketing and started Do Content. On Numbers Known he walked Rob Jones through the numbers behind that path.
ReadA list of sales skills tells you what good reps can do. Sales competencies tell you whether your reps are doing it, at what level, and what to coach next. The core list by role, a sample matrix, and how to score it from evidence.
ReadEveryone builds a 30-60-90 day sales plan and few reps run one. Here is the template, the day-30/60/90 gates, and the loop that turns the document into a faster ramp.
ReadMost 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.