Management fundamentally requires direct interaction between sales managers and their reps, yet many overlook the power of coaching despite evidence showing its positive impact on sales quotas. The gap in coaching effectiveness often stems from managers' uncertainty about how to coach and a lack of consistent application. This paper highlights the importance of professional capability coaching, particularly call coaching, and identifies four types: holistic, in-call, post-call, and trial by fire, recommending a shift away from the less effective 'trial by fire' approach.

Effective coaches embody qualities such as credibility, competence, and consistency, essential for fostering a productive manager-rep relationship. The use of AI role-play simulators is advised for regular skill practice, offering a modern solution for continuous development. Personalizing coaching to align with reps' goals enhances engagement and effectiveness, motivating them to improve.

Emphasizing specific, measurable outcomes and utilizing supportive technologies can significantly boost coaching efforts, leading to improved team performance and sales results. By adopting a structured, personalized coaching approach, managers can unlock the full potential of their teams.

We argue that good coaching ticks the following boxes:

COMPASS

Continuous - it is happening regularly
Organized - it follows a structured approach
Measured - its impact can be measured
Practical - it trains and applies feedback into practice through i.e. role-plays
Appealing - it is varied and related to personal goals
Safe - it creates a safe & trusted environment
Specific - it focuses on few measurable outcomes

Current situation

Let’s start with a short definition of the word ‘manage’. It originally comes from the Latin word ‘manus’, which means ‘hand’. It then evolved from the Italian word ‘maneggio’, which is the act of handling or training a horse, to its current meaning. So we can conclude that management is a direct action and not an indirect endeavor. Sales managers have all sorts of tasks nowadays but rarely find time to work directly with their sales reps, which is the literal definition of their job.

Teams that are coached are already 35% more likely to reach quota than their non-call-coached peers. 97% of sales managers say that sales coaching is crucial to improve performance, but only 50% claim to make time for it. Lastly, the quality of their sales coaching is vastly overestimated by sales managers themselves, which agree to 93% that their coaching is of high quality, whereas only around 60% of sales reps would agree.

To summarise, the average manager knows about the importance of sales coaching but doesn’t apply it often and is not simply trained enough to create maximum impact.

In this guide, we will address the main factors inhibiting better coaching:

Managers do not know how to coach
Managers do not know where to start
Coaching is not being applied consistently

Types of coaching

Coaching is about developing capabilities. Pipeline Reviews are no coaching, neither are KPI reviews. I differentiate between three sorts of coaching in the context of sales:

Personal capability coaching - which is meant to unblock sales reps from fears, doubts etc.. The final aim here should be to create a happy and confident sales team that finds meaning in their work.
Professional capability coaching - which involves learning and refining techniques that are applied every day in one’s sales job.
Deal coaching - on-the-fly coaching with concrete deals has elements of professional coaching, but is mostly on a much more tactical level with little transferable value to other deal trajectories.

This guide will solely focus on professional capability coaching in a sales context and more specifically call coaching, which is synonymous with ‘client interaction’ coaching (in case calling is not your preferred way of communication).

Types of call coaching

There are 4 types of call coaching:

Holistic call coaching or simply ‘call coaching’
In-call Coaching
Post-call Coaching
Trial by fire (learning by doing with live leads)

Holistic-call Coaching

This coaching type focuses on making sure that the foundational elements of a salesperson's skills are being improved. The clearest application of this is during onboarding, where a rep gets familiarised with the company’s sales methodology, objections, personas etc.. Nevertheless, this coaching type also applies to seasoned reps who have areas of improvement in their current sales game or are exposed to new personas and objections. The battle-proven method to apply holistic call coaching is by role-playing topics/scenarios and reviewing them together.

In-call Coaching

This coaching form means providing in-call assistance about questions/objections or hints about areas for exploration in i.e. a live discovery call. The key to effective in-call coaching is to keep interruptions to an absolute minimum, as they can easily derail a talk flow. It reminds me of times, when a manager of mine was holding up a piece of paper, hecticly gesturing towards what he had written in bold letters - not a pleasant experience.

Post-call Coaching

Analysing a call after the call has happened has many merits, as it allows two parties to have a common basis to discuss. This coaching should, however, not only include feedback or discussion but also elements of role-plays to create a muscle memory of the feedback that was discussed. The issue with post-call coaching is also timing. When conducted directly aftera call, the rep is still in stressed state and not open to criticsm, whereas feedback based recordings is often easily dismissed as ‘oh my manager doesn’t know the full story of the deal and why I said what I said.’

Trial by Fire

Sadly the 4th one is used way too often and should be reduced as much as possible. Reps are asked to just try things out in actual calls. You are outsourcing the responsibility of teaching a sales rep how to sell, to your leads. It provides a horrible experience towards the leads, is demoralising for reps and most of all - very expensive.

The Coach

Who owns this?

The obvious answer is and should be - sales management. However, there are situations where sales enablement gets involved in call coaching, namely onboarding use cases. Nevertheless, this is an exception to the norm, as in the vast majority of the career of a sales rep, the manager will need to fulfil this duty. Sales enablement should be the caddy, to a golfer (sales manager). Enablement prepares the material and can occasionally advise with tactics, however, the actual coaching needs to be done by the manager.

Who makes a good coach?

We tend to promote our best performers into management. As it has often been discussed, this is not necessarily a wise idea as sales skills don’t translate naturally into sales management skills. If the opposite would be true, then all top league coaches should have had an all-star player background - it happens, but surely isn’t a predictor of success. Granted it helps if a good coach has done the work in the trenches, however, it is not necessary.

Hilmon Sorey gave a good definition of the qualities of a sales manager that also apply to a sales coach - he called it the 7 Cs of good sales managers. These Cs very much resemble the 4Cs of trust that were popularised by Dean Crisp. It shows that trust and good management & coaching are the oxygen that makes the relationship between a rep & a manager work. Beware, the following model is a weak-link model, you are only ever as strong of a coach as your least developed C.

7Cs	Explanation	4Cs of Trust
Credibility	This relates to the experience of a sales manager.	Competence
Consciously competent	The manager needs to articulate why certain behaviours lead to better performance. Being a good rep does not qualify you to transfer knowledge to others.	Competence
Confidence - instilling competence	Coaching is about positivity and encouragement.	Care
‘Champion maker’	A new coach needs to be able to step away from the rep's POV of trying to be the best, towards embracing 'nurturing the best' in her team.	Care
Communicate	Coaching & management is more about listening than talking. The way feedback is communicated is vital in coaching.	Clarity
Consistency	Coaching requires repetitions and therefore demands structure and consistency from the coach.	Consistency

Operating Model

How often?

Generally speaking, we can say the more coaching the better. It is, however, important to differentiate between the types of coaching as well.

True professional capability coaching should happen consistently. The spacing between professional coaching sessions should vary between 1 to 6 weeks. The wider the spacing, the more elements of automation and asynchronous checks should be applied to see if the feedback is implemented.

Tooling tip:

Using an AI role-play simulator with a set routine helps sales reps continuously practice specific skills. It also provides managers with clear progress reports on these skills. All the while, saving both parties time on 1on1s.

Type	How often to coach?
Personal capability coaching	Every 2-3 weeks
Professional capability coaching	Every 2-6* weeks *depends on automation capabilities
Deal coaching	Continuous (i.e. use the pipeline review or forecasting meetings)

Appeal

Connection to personal goals

The core to anchoring any coaching in the mind of the coachee is that the coachee is bought into the necessity of the coaching. The only way to influence this is to relate the coaching to something valuable to them, something that they want to achieve as well. On a macro level, this means personal & career ambitions and on a micro level this means that the coachee herself needs to come up with the weak points that shall be addressed. My strategy is to therefore discuss the following points in the very first session of the coaching:

Macro-level	What motivates and demotivates you? Where do you want to be in 5 / 10 years? How do you like to learn new things?
Micro-level	What are your Strengths and Weaknesses? (name 3 each) What would you like to learn/improve in your ‘sales game’?

Once you have this information you can start to connect the dots between the personal ambitions of the individual, their objectives and your focus points. If they already align, Happy days. If they don’t align, you should have a conversation about it and create a story that the coachee can identify with.

Variety in sales coaching

I made the mistake of not thinking about the format or style of my coaching, whilst going on and on about the need to improve one facet of a coachee of mine. The result, he snapped at me at one time and asked - “Can’t we focus on something else?”. Although I was convinced that switching to another coaching point was not yet appropriate, as I hadn’t seen the necessary improvement - I do admit that my chosen format, of continuously playing call recording snippets from his mediocre discovery, wasn’t appealing after a while. So here are various formats of coaching that you could apply in some shape or form to your coaching:

Group coaching - learning from peers.
Roasting of call - as a fun activity like comedy roast.
Creative role-plays - (with funny/creative instructions [accent; weird problems etc]).
Abstraction role-plays - role-play situations that are not related to your company (i.e. selling a bike rather than software).
Take a walk - Rather than sitting in the office or in front of a computer, take the coaching session to the road.
Post-mortem analysis of calls - analysis of won and lost deals and discussion feedback.
Pre-mortem analysis - discuss a deal and come up with all the reasons that could happen that would make the deal fail.

What to Focus on?

In the book ‘Cracking the Sales Management Code’, the authors Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana, suggested a simple perspective on sales management: manage what you can influence aka. manage inputs. Managing outcomes is not helping anyone, as it is like saying “please create more revenue” without showing how.

For professional capability coaching, we focus on improvement through training/coaching the quality of the input. The sheet below shows a more detailed overview of the KPIs that you could diagnose to be relevant for performance enhancement.

As a rule of thumb, the earlier in the sales funnel you find a discrepancy with best practice, the more impact it will have on the results that you ultimately would like to achieve. I.e. Closing (late-stage activity) is rarely the underlying problem, but not establishing a problem in the discovery phase of a sales process (early-stage activity) could be could focal point.

Feedback

I tended to assume that my feedback must be aimed towards an improvement area to shine a light on that focus point. I mostly packaged it in a ‘sandwich’ format (good bad good), but my actual intent was quite obviously to criticise them in disguise. A much better starting point for coaching is to treat the coachee as the person that they could be, rather than the ‘slightly flawed’ status quo.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Treat a man as he appears to be and you make him worse. But treat a man as if he already were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he should be.”

The approach to any call feedback that I advise is:

Discuss
1. Ask ‘Why’ questions to understand the self-assessment of the coachee surrounding a call or a certain topic.
Feedback
1. Your feedback should be 75% positive and 25% focused on improvement.
Improvement areas
1. Be very specific in your feedback and don’t overwhelm the coachee.
Practice
1. Role-play the situation one more time with a focus on improvement.
Measure
1. Define a S.M.A.R.T. goal surrounding the coaching area.
2. Define role-plays that help with the practice.

Role-plays

The natural forgetting curve leads to forgetting 87% of desired behaviour that got promoted during sales training in 30 days. The only remedy that helps is repetition and applying what was trained in practice.

Through coaching and repetition, 85% of knowledge can be retained. Repetition through role-plays is the most effective way to simulate a real-life situation, which doesn’t endanger your actual leads directly.

Managers should apply low-key role-plays in their sales coaching to a) create muscle memory with the reps and b) test if feedback was received correctly and correct immediately if appropriate. Moreover, keep your role-plays short (max 5-10 min), as you do want to focus on specific skills in your role-play. Take sports teams as an example, their training also consists of training of specific in-game situations and not continuous replays of full i.e. 90 min soccer game.

An easy setup for a spontaneous role-play is:

Name participants.
Name the focus point.
Set the scene (i.e. who is who, situation & where to start).

Then ask if anyone still has questions - and go.

We recommend making time for at least one role-play (10 min) in your coaching sessions.

The issue with traditional role-plays

Let’s be fair, most role-plays are awkward. Manager-to-rep role-plays are unnecessarily difficult and uncomfortable, whereas rep-to-rep role-plays are mostly too easy.

The second challenge is that to truly embed knowledge into everyday practice, reps need multiple repetitions. AI technology allows you to schedule specific role-play scenarios for your reps and demand their completion before your next coaching session. This way you can see the progress on the focussed skill gap with each coachee.

Scorecards & process

To quote Wikipedia: the Hawthorne effect is a type of human behavior reactivity in which individuals modify an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed. In simple terms, what gets measured will be improved. So to book progress in coaching, coaching sessions should have very few key focus points that are measurable. A few examples are: # of questions asked in a call; # of decision makers in a call or % of calls that have a clearly defined impact.

The ideal coaching is happening regularly, however, is not mandatory for the coachee. This way the manager also receives immediate feedback, in case his/her coaching is lacking in relevance. Coachees should be asked to prepare the coaching session with topics and fill out a form (suggestion below), such a coaching scorecard allows for progress tracking and documentation of one’s coaching conversations.

The questions that we suggest to guide your coaching are:

Coaching [Coachee & Coach]; Date	Explanation
What happened since our last meeting? Wins: [Insights professionally or personally] What are the challenges that you have faced since our last meeting? What changes have you made since our last meeting and did you apply the agreed next steps of the last meeting?	You want to understand what is going on with your counterpart. This part is meant to reflect on the time that has passed since the last meeting.
I want to use my time with my coach to:	Ideally, the coachee determines focus areas herself to fully own the feedback that ought to be given. Hence, it is advised to ask the coachee to fill out their focal points before the coaching.
How would you rate yourself (1: bad - 10: good) on the following points since we last spoke: Accountability: Innovation: Happiness at work:	The rating might seem obsolete to many readers. However, if done right, a coaching meeting is a safe space. If this is true, the coachee will be honest about their performance and happiness, which can often be a great ‘early warning system’.
KPIs to focus on:	Agree on max. 2 KPIs to track the improvement of the focal points of the training.
Agreed on next steps:

Tooling

A tool has never solved a problem on its own. Nevertheless, in combination with the right processes, it can facilitate and improve the right behaviour. The following elements are relevant for call coaching and should therefore be considered if you want to professionalize your coaching efforts:

Category	Post-Call Analysis tools (ex. gong.io)	Sales Enablement Tools(ex. Ambition.com)	Pre-call training Tools
Coaching scorecards
Post-call analysis
Gamification
Role-play simulations
Team skill development tracking

Conclusion

There are two main things that sales managers can influence within their team daily: activities & quality of calls. With activities, a manager can simply demand more, whereas with the quality of calls, a manager must step up and show what the demanded best practice looks like. The most effective way towards this goal is sales coaching, more specifically call-coaching. This whitepaper should have given you a background into how to establish a coaching culture at your company that results in true sales performance.

Ultimate Sales Call Coaching Guide

TLDR