Sales Management and Coaching
You can’t manage a result — it already happened. You manage the behavior and pipeline that produce it, which is why the instinct to push on the totals (“you’re down three units, pick it up”) changes nothing.
Coach the leading indicators
Results are lagging; activity and pipeline health are leading, and a rep can still change them. Thin results almost always trace to thin activity or a stuck stage. Read an honest pipeline and you see next quarter coming and can act now; if a rep’s deals all die at the same stage, that’s a coachable skill gap, not a character flaw.
The tools, and developing people
Ride-alongs show you the actual behavior the numbers can’t — you can’t coach what you’ve never seen. Deal coaching teaches the process on real stakes and moves the deal at once. Regular structured one-on-ones about pipeline and development are where coaching happens; the manager who only talks to a rep when they’re behind is doing damage control. Develop the team rather than just hiring “closers” and firing whoever’s behind, and spend real time removing the obstacles in the way of their deals — a pricing decision, a program, a stalled trade — because that multiplies the team while pressure just adds weight.
Where it goes wrong
- Managing the scoreboard instead of the behavior behind it.
- Only talking to reps when they’re behind.
- Coaching from the numbers without ride-alongs.
- Holding people accountable to results they can’t change instead of inputs they can.
Related
The sales process · Reading the scoreboard · Pay plans and incentives · Coaching (management section).