When a salesperson on the team is underperforming, coaching is often prescribed as the answer. Schedule joint sales calls and set up a coaching cadence. The assumption is that more coaching will, eventually, produce better results.
But sometimes this is a faulty assumption. Sometimes, sales coaching is the wrong management intervention for a performance problem.
In many sales organizations, “coaching” has become a catch-all term — a single label covering a broad range of distinct management actions to address underperformance among salespeople, each appropriate for a different combination of skill and motivation. When those actions get conflated, managers can waste time on situations where coaching isn’t the right development tool.
Ask different sales managers within a sales organization what coaching looks like in practice, and you will likely receive a variety of answers. For one manager, “coaching” means a weekly skill-development conversation. For another, it means a deal review. For a third, it’s a thinly veiled performance conversation. For a fourth, it’s the manager modeling selling skills on a customer call.
These are not the same activities. They serve different purposes, and calling them all “coaching” creates confusion and poor results. Average performers who would benefit from genuine sales coaching get the same conversation as a struggling salesperson who needs performance counseling, or a seasoned high performer who needs to be empowered, not coached. The manager’s time gets distributed evenly across situations of vastly different shape — and the return on that time gets diluted accordingly.
Imagine assessing each of your salespeople’s selling skills along two dimensions: proficiency (how capable they are at a specific skill) and motivation (how willing they are to apply it). Plotting a salesperson’s skills against those two axes reveals where they sit — and the corresponding management action that will produce the most improvement. This proficiency-and-motivation diagnostic is a foundational element of SBI’s sales management training, and it underpins each of the five actions below.
Consider these five common management actions for developing salespeople.
This is the situation coaching is designed for: a salesperson with a solid baseline of skills and a reasonable level of motivation who needs guided self-discovery to refine and elevate their performance. Most of your salespeople will fall into this category because it applies to the broadest range of skill states — coaching is about “moving the middle.” Coaching is collaborative, question-led, and rooted in the 3 A’s mindset: ask first, actively listen, assume best intentions. It works because the salesperson has the foundation to learn from their own behavior when a skilled coach helps them reflect on it.
For a more in-depth discussion of sales coaching, see this whitepaper.
When a salesperson is motivated but lacks the underlying skill or knowledge, coaching will frustrate both parties. The salesperson can’t yet be guided to self-discover an approach they’ve never been taught. Training is the right action: explain the skill, demonstrate it, give the salesperson opportunities to practice in a safe environment, and reinforce what worked. Training is commonly used for new hires who need to learn several skills at once, or for experienced salespeople when the organization rolls out a new sales methodology, product, or go-to-market strategy. See SBI’s sales coaching services for guidance on integrating training and coaching as the salesperson develops.
When both proficiency and motivation are low for a particular skill, the manager’s job is to direct, not to coach. Directing means giving specific instructions on what, how, and when to perform the task — describing the expected behavior, identifying the consequences of not doing it, and documenting the next steps. Directing is appropriate with new hires who are still learning the basics and used sparingly with experienced salespeople in situations where there’s no room for negotiation. Trying to coach a salesperson who lacks both the skill and the will leads to circular conversations and a slow erosion of the manager’s time.
This management action is often mislabeled as coaching, and this confusion does the most damage. A salesperson who has previously demonstrated strong proficiency, but whose motivation has dropped — they’ve stopped prospecting, stopped preparing for calls, stopped following the process — does not need coaching. They need a structured performance conversation. Performance counseling is an investigation-and-intervention action focused on observable behaviors, not judgments. It requires preparation, documentation, and HR involvement. Calling it “coaching” softens the conversation, delaying the salesperson’s accountability and signaling to the rest of the team that performance issues will be handled gently rather than directly.
A skilled, motivated salesperson doesn’t need coaching for that skill. They need more responsibility. Empowering means reducing supervision, increasing decision-making authority, and giving the salesperson more flexibility in how they solve problems. Coaching a high-skill, high-motivation salesperson can backfire — top performers tend to read it as micromanagement, and the manager wastes time that could be spent on average performers, where the return on coaching investment is highest.
See here to learn how to allocate sales coaching time across high, average, and low performers for the strongest return.
Two practical disciplines, both reinforced in SBI’s sales management training, are critical to applying the right management development action for your sales team.
Assess by skill, not by salesperson. Few salespeople are uniformly average across every selling skill. A seasoned salesperson might be empowered for relationship building, coached for negotiation, trained on a new product, and counseled on prospecting — all at the same time. Assess each salesperson on your team, skill by skill, and avoid hanging a single label on them. That’s what makes the diagnosis precise enough to act on.
Co-assess with the salesperson. A useful skills assessment isn’t something the manager does alone. Both the manager and the salesperson complete the sales skills profile and then compare. Where the assessments align, the path forward is clear. When there is a significant divergence in either dimension, the gap itself becomes the area to investigate — and that conversation often surfaces the real driver of the performance issue, which may be very different from what the manager assumed.
When a sales manager applies the correct management action to develop their team’s sales skills, three things change in the team’s rhythm.
One-on-ones get more specific. Instead of a general “how are things going” conversation, the manager arrives with a clear view of which skills they’re coaching, which they’re training on, and which they’re empowering. The salesperson knows the difference because the manager names it.
Coaching time concentrates where it produces the most return. Average performers — the largest segment of most sales teams — get the lion’s share of coaching time, because that’s where coaching has the most leverage. High performers get empowerment and stretch goals. Low performers get the management action their situation calls for, which is often directing or performance counseling, not more coaching.
Performance issues get addressed as performance issues. When motivation drops in a previously strong salesperson, the manager doesn’t extend the coaching runway, hoping the issue will resolve on its own. They move to performance counseling, which is a different skill, a different conversation, and — handled well — often the action that recovers the salesperson before the situation becomes terminal.
The most effective sales managers treat coaching as one tool among several, not as the universal answer to every development need. They diagnose the situation first — proficiency and motivation, skill by skill — and then choose the management action that fits what they see. When coaching is the right action, they coach well. When it isn’t, they train, direct, counsel, or empower instead.
Want to help your frontline sales managers diagnose and develop their teams more effectively?
SBI’s Sales Coaching™ program equips frontline sales managers with the skills, frameworks, and tools to assess salesperson proficiency and motivation, choose the right management action, and conduct collaborative coaching conversations that drive sustained performance improvement. Schedule a consultation to learn how SBI can help your sales managers become great coaches.
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