You can role play discovery calls all day. But none of it matters if the pipeline is built on bad qualification, false stage progression, and hope.
I sat in a board meeting last week where a CEO asked a simple question: "Why isn't the sales team hitting quota?"
The VP of Sales had answers. More activity. More calls. More demos. More pressure.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. And I'm convinced most sales coaching is useless. Not because the advice is bad. But because it's solving the wrong problem.
The Real Problem
Most sales coaching focuses on individual rep behavior. Better discovery. Stronger closing. More urgency. But here's what I've observed: even great reps struggle when the system around them is broken.
I've seen organizations pour money into sales training while their qualification process is a joke. Their ICP is vague. Their pipeline is full of deals that should never have been created in the first place.
Coaching can't fix that. Systems fix that.
What Actually Works
The best sales teams I've worked with don't win because they have better salespeople. They win because they have better systems:
None of this is sexy. It won't get you a TED Talk. But it works.
A Different Conversation
Now when I'm in those board meetings, I try to shift the conversation. Instead of "How do we coach the reps better?" I ask:
Sometimes the answer is coaching. Often, it's not.
The Bottom Line
If you're a revenue leader struggling with performance, before you book another sales training, look at your system. Because no amount of coaching will fix a broken process.
And if you're a rep being coached on your "activity" while the system around you is chaotic, know that it's not you. It's the system. And systems can be fixed.
Fractional CRO & Chief Growth Officer · GTM Advisor
Mark Solano is a revenue operator with 20+ years building and fixing sales systems for Fintech and B2B SaaS companies. He has led sales organizations from seed to scale, rebuilt broken pipelines, and helped companies achieve predictable, repeatable revenue growth.
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