Most Sales Coaching Is Useless

Every so often a CEO asks why the team isn't hitting quota, and the answer comes back as activity. More calls and more demos. More pressure on the reps.

Then somebody books sales training.

I think most of that money is wasted, and not because the training is bad. A lot of it is good. It's just pointed at a problem that usually isn't the one costing you the quarter.

Run the math before you run the role play

Here's a funnel I look at all the time. 625 leads at the top. 30% convert to a meeting, 60% of those to an opportunity, 40% of those close.

That gets you to roughly $420K against a $545K target.

You can coach discovery calls for six weeks and you will not close that gap. There aren't enough at-bats in the system. The reps could execute perfectly and still land 23% short, which means the miss was decided before anybody picked up a phone.

That's the part that bothers me. We put the shortfall on the rep when it was built into the model back in January.

Coverage, and the multiplier

If your win rate is 25%, you need 4x coverage to have a real shot, and I want 5x before I sleep well. Then model attainment at 77 to 80%, because assuming everybody hits is how you end up explaining yourself to a board.

I went through Pavilion's CRO School this year. One of the instructors, Karl Ortmanns, kept coming back to the same question: what's the multiplier? Meaning what has to go in the top for the number to come out the bottom, and can you say it out loud without going to look it up.

It sounds basic. I've sat with a lot of revenue leaders who couldn't answer it quickly, and I've been one of them.

What coaching is actually good for

I don't want to talk anybody out of coaching. It works on specific things.

It works when a rep is losing at one stage over and over and you can name the stage. In my channel it works on the middle of a bank deal, where somebody has to keep a champion moving through vendor management and a security review for four months with nothing visible happening.

What it won't do is manufacture pipeline or make an optimistic forecast come true.

Before the next training budget goes out, I'd ask what a qualified opportunity actually looks like at your company, and whether two of your reps would define it the same way. Then look at where deals stall and how long they sit there.

Usually the answer is sitting right in the funnel and nobody wants to say it in the meeting, because saying it means the plan was wrong and somebody signed off on the plan.

And if you're a rep getting coached on your activity while the system around you is a mess, it's worth knowing the math was probably against you from the start. That's fixable. It just gets fixed above your head, and generally the person who can fix it only needs somebody to walk them through the funnel.