I was browsing the tech news and business media this week and saw an interesting sales write up. It boiled down to “Your manager thinks he’s coaching you more than he was a year ago.”
Sixty-four percent of sales leaders believe that. Genuinely believe it. Not your experience, right?
My network is a lot of C-suite, Directors and Sales VP’s. And they’re all trying to get more time in with their teams. They want to dissect deals, understand compelling events, diagnose pipeline trends. Genuine help. I’m sure there are pencil pushers hiding amongst the real ones, but these people genuinely want to have an impact. However; recent ill-advised spend on overlapping AI tools and the expectations coming from above are squeezing that valuable time. Where the magic really sits. Development. Every hour spent coaching a rep is an hour not spent building the deck the VP wants by Friday and we all know which one gets prioritised. Rep > Manager > RSM > Director/VP presentation. The bottle neck means they just don’t have the time.
Now ask the reps if they’re being coached more or less…
Forty-five percent say the coaching they’re getting is below average. Forty-one percent say they’re rarely or never coached at all.
Somebody’s lying. It’s not the reps. Even when a rep’s excuse for a slipped deal is nonsense, the business still needs that rep to land the number. The reason to actually develop them doesn’t disappear just because the story they told wasn’t perfectly honest. Or what you want to hear. That’s a hard truth, and it’s a theme we’ll land on often here. One of my jobs is to tell you what teams really think.
Think of the anecdote that says procurement believes sales holds the leverage in a negotiation, while sales is convinced it’s procurement holding it. Both sides think the other one’s got the power. Managers and their teams run the same dance. The sooner that’s accepted, and directors stop LinkedIn-cringe-posting about how awful/lazy sellers are, the sooner everyone gets to the thing both sides actually want. Mutual assured success. Ie. cash.
The real state of affairs is your one-to-one isn’t coaching. It’s a firing squad style audit with a positive tone of voice. Seller pulls up the pipeline, manager asks why that deal slipped a stage, tells the seller to chase the champion harder, calls it development. If you think that’s coaching, it’s not. I didn’t do that as a Lead or Manager. The worst managers default to this.
I say with absolute certainty, you can hear the difference. I’ve spent years on both sides of the table.
“Why’d that deal slip, what’s the new close date” is an audit question. For the manager’s forecast meeting.
“What did the champion say when you asked for the meeting? What does that tell you about where you stand” is a coaching question. Leaders ask the second one, the rest ask the first one. It’s faster and it’s all that matters when they’re thinking about that forecast call.
Please take the perspective of the manager. Malcolm’s in the middle of it all. Life’s Still Unfair. The pipeline is measurable. He’s measured on it, by someone above him running the exact same audit on his forecast that he’s running on yours. Sellers are measured too, but we all know it’s not in the same way. Lower stakes for seller, higher for the approval chain. Pipeline’s one of the few predictors of success the business has, even setting aside that it’s wildly inaccurate and swings by individual, time of year, and geo. You, as a person trying to build something with your life past the quota, aren’t measurable in the same way. So that’s the part getting glossed over. Every time.
This isn’t just a management’s fault, it’s the whole model. Nobody in your professional life is developing people. The system is broken, but you can’t afford for it to impact you. Director. Manager. Marketing Lead. Seller. People are monitoring your output and mistaking that for care. And most of us have gone along with it, because at least someone’s paying attention to the number, even if nobody’s paying attention to us.
You can feel this if you’ve ever left a “great” review, bonus attached, and still felt completely unseen.
That’s not the manager’s failure solely. The enthusiasm gap should be the biggest concern on the next SWOT analysis. Are you brave enough to put it there?
Don’t be, just fix it.
Here’s why this isn’t just a feelings problem. Reps who feel unseen don’t quit over the coaching gap itself. They quit over a signing bonus at the next place that bothered to ask what they actually wanted from their career. The business calls that “market conditions.” Simply put, it’s just the audit-not-coaching cycle on display. Pair that with a pessimistic and stingy market…I’m looking at you, UK.
This all equates to the perfect recipe for disconnected reps and outcome$.
I’m not here to tell you how to fix your manager. Or managers, how to fix your team’s enthusiasm. (Yet)
I’m here to say: Notice the gap. Notice what you’d actually want coached: not the forecast, not win rate. The life underneath it. Sit with that this week. You may be hitting the number, but are you hitting your head against the wall to get there?
The single greatest thing I ever did as a seller isn’t advised by any SaaS company, anywhere. It’s frowned upon, but my best results are correlated. I build my own pipeline tracker in Notion. With my own 1:1 focus items, my own agenda.
Here’s what I want to discuss. Here’s the issues coming up in my deals. Here’s my key partners and channel strategy. Here’s what I want to do with marketing, and here’s the parameters I’ll operate within.
I walked into every 1:1 with that doc open before my manager had even pulled up the CRM, and it changed the entire shape of the conversation. I wasn’t being audited, I was running the meeting. That’s coachable. Show up prepared, not to hand your manager his tick-box (which depending on the industry is solely there for the “best laid plans” folder), but to get the information you actually want out of the dialogue.
If they can’t coach you inside it, document that, and ask them to spend their prep time either getting ready for the next one properly or finding you the resources you need to execute.
The manager’s side is next: what real coaching looks like from the other chair.