How Do I Develop My Sales Managers Into Better Coaches?

Most sales managers want to coach their teams well. Most of them are not doing it. The gap between intention and delivery is not a character problem — it is a system problem that most sales organisations have built without realising it.

The manager who is supposed to be developing their reps is spending their week on forecast updates, pipeline reviews, deal escalations, and the admin that flows upward from a leadership team that wants visibility on everything. By the time Friday arrives, the coaching that was supposed to happen has not happened. Again.

Rich Smith, Head of Growth at MySalesCoach and a former sales leader who has managed and developed sales managers across multiple organisations, explains what gets in the way — and what actually changes when managers become better coaches.

The four habits that stop managers from coaching

When sales managers are not coaching, they are usually doing one of four things instead. Each of these feels productive. None of them develops the rep.

Running pipeline reviews as coaching sessions

The most common substitution. A manager schedules a one-to-one with a rep, the conversation moves quickly to deals, and forty-five minutes later the manager has a clear picture of the pipeline and the rep has received no coaching.

As Rich Smith describes it:

"If you were a fly on the wall, what you'd see is a lot of fluffy talk and conversations that quickly divert into pipeline reviews. The sales leader is saying things like 'how can I help?' and the salesperson is feeling like they have to give updates on deals. What they're getting is instructions, feedback, guidance from their manager — versus actual coaching focused on helping that salesperson develop the skills, the behaviours, the mindset to become self-sufficient."

Pipeline reviews have their place. They are not coaching. The manager who leaves a one-to-one believing they have coached their rep has almost certainly only reviewed their pipeline. What a sales coaching session actually looks like — and how to structure one so it doesn't default into deal review — is worth understanding before attempting to change the habit.

Jumping on deals instead of coaching through them

When a rep has a difficult deal, the fastest solution is for the manager to get involved directly — join the call, send the email, apply their own relationships and experience to move it forward. The deal progresses. The rep learns nothing.

Rich Smith is direct about the cost:

"All of the thinking is usually always about this month, this quarter — improving the metrics in the here and now, versus thinking about the months and quarters that lie ahead."

Jumping on a deal saves this quarter's number. Coaching the rep through it improves every deal they run for the rest of their career. Managers who default to the first approach consistently are building dependency, not capability. The alternative — deal coaching — is using the live deal as the coaching stimulus rather than the thing to be rescued.

Relying on training to do the coaching job

When performance gaps appear, the default response in most organisations is to commission training. A methodology refresh, a new framework, an enablement programme. The training runs. The managers are expected to reinforce it. They do not — because they do not have the time, and often do not have the coaching skills to bridge from the training content to each rep's individual application of it.

As Rich Smith observes:

"They will roll out some training and they will often tell me that the key to success of that training actually being reinforced and being implemented is with the sales managers. Yet in the same breath they know that their managers aren't coaching regularly."

Training and sales coaching are separate activities. Training creates awareness of what good looks like. Coaching is what converts that awareness into changed behaviour on live calls. A manager who attends a training rollout and considers the development work done has stopped at the first step. If you want to improve your sales coaching techniques, learn how here.

If you want to understand the difference in sales training vs sales coaching, we have an article here. 

Filling the week with upward reporting

The fourth habit is the one managers have least control over. In most sales organisations, managers spend a significant portion of their time providing forecast updates, pipeline data, and performance reports to the people above them. This is not malicious — it is how most organisations are structured. But the time it consumes is time that cannot go to coaching.

Rich Smith puts the responsibility where it belongs:

"Companies are saying they want their managers to improve performance, yet at the same time they're filling their managers' schedules with tasks that directly conflict with their ability to carry out the activity that actually materially improves the number."

If a sales leader wants their managers to coach more consistently, the first question is not what coaching training to send them on. It is what to remove from their calendar to make space for it.

Why most managers have never been shown how to coach

Behind all four of these habits is a more fundamental problem: most sales managers do not know what good coaching looks like, because nobody has ever shown them.

Only one in five sales managers has received any meaningful training or support on how to be a good coach The other 80% were promoted because they were good at selling — and then expected to make other people good at selling through a skill they were never developed in. The data on sales coaching is consistent on this point.

Rich Smith saw this firsthand working with a sales manager at a large software company:

"The conversation I had with that manager was all about elevating performance in their team. That was ultimately the thing the sales manager was being hired to do and was being measured on. When it came down to peeling back the onion, the sales manager said the number one thing they could be doing to impact that specific metric is spending more time coaching their sales reps. The reality was that the sales manager had all of their time spent being a manager, dealing with people problems — and more so than that, providing consistent, regular forecast updates to the people above them. They had very little to no time whatsoever to focus on dedicated coaching."

This manager was not failing. They were operating in a system that made coaching almost impossible — and without the skills to coach even if the time had been available.

What changes when managers actually coach

When a manager shifts from pipeline reviewing and deal rescuing to genuine coaching, the effect on the team is not gradual — it is visible within weeks.

Reps who are coached consistently start making better decisions independently. They ask better questions in discovery without being prompted. They handle objections without escalating. They prospect with more consistency because the habit has been reinforced often enough to hold. The manager stops being needed on every difficult call because the rep has developed the capability to handle it.

The business effect extends beyond individual performance. As Rich Smith describes it:

"We would see a culture built on more ambition and more hunger — an entire belief that the better we can become as salespeople individually, the better our sales organisation is going to become."

There is also a retention effect that most organisations underestimate. The reps most at risk of leaving are not the underperformers — it is the high performers who are not growing.

The link between coaching consistency and retention is explored in detail in how sales coaching retains your top performers — the pattern is consistent regardless of team size.

A manager who coaches consistently gives those reps a reason to stay. A manager who reviews pipelines and rescues deals gives them a reason to look elsewhere. For more on sales team management and its connection to retention, the pattern is consistent across organisations of every size.

What sales leaders can actually control

In 2026, a great deal of what determines sales outcomes is outside a sales leader's hands. Buyers complete most of their research before speaking to a salesperson. Inbound lead volume depends on marketing. Product development moves at its own pace. Competition is relentless and unpredictable.

What sales leaders can control is the performance and execution of their team. As Rich Smith puts it:

"What you can control is the performance and execution of your sales team — and the way that you do that is by becoming so much more serious about coaching and developing the skills, the behaviours, the mindset that is going to be, in some cases, the marginal gains that you will need to compete in B2B selling over the coming years."

Developing sales managers into better coaches is the most direct lever a sales leader has for improving what they can control. It compounds — better coaches develop better reps, better reps produce better results, and the organisation builds a capability that does not disappear when individuals leave.

The starting point is honest about the current state. If managers are spending their time on forecast updates, pipeline reviews, and deal rescues, the coaching is not happening — regardless of how much the organisation says it values it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get my sales managers to coach more consistently?

Start by auditing where their time actually goes. In most cases, coaching is not happening because forecast reporting, pipeline reviews, and deal escalations are consuming the available hours. Reducing those tasks creates space. The second step is capability — most managers have never been trained to coach, so giving them their own coaching support alongside the time creates the conditions for consistent delivery. Good intentions without both changes rarely produce lasting results. For a practical framework on how to build coaching into your team's weekly rhythm, how to coach your sales team covers the structure.

Why aren't my sales managers developing their reps?

Usually for two reasons running simultaneously. First, they do not have enough time — their calendars are full of the reporting, reviewing, and escalation work that flows upward through the organisation. Second, they have not been trained to coach — they know how to sell, but coaching someone else to sell is a different skill that most managers have never been developed in. Addressing only one of these without the other rarely produces change.

Do sales managers need coaching too?

Yes — and this is where most organisations stop short. Telling a manager to coach more does not make them a better coach.The managers who develop their reps most effectively are typically the ones who are receiving their own individual sales coaching from someone who has held a senior sales leadership role. Coaching the coaches is the highest-leverage investment a sales leader can make.

What is the difference between managing a sales team and coaching one?

Managing focuses on activity, pipeline, and performance metrics — understanding what is happening and directing resources accordingly. Coaching focuses on the individual — identifying specific skill gaps, building new behaviours through targeted repetition, and developing the rep's capability to handle situations independently. A well-managed team hits this quarter's number. A well-coached team hits numbers more consistently over time because the reps are getting better.

How much time should a sales manager spend coaching versus managing?

More than most currently do. The managers who develop the strongest teams typically spend the majority of their one-to-one time on skill development rather than pipeline review. A useful test: if you listened to a recording of a manager's last five one-to-ones, how much of the time was spent asking the rep questions about their development versus asking them for deal updates? The ratio tells you more than any coaching survey.

What should a sales manager focus on when coaching their reps?

The three areas that have the highest impact on deal performance and rep development are discovery discipline, prospecting consistency, and confidence in senior conversations. These are also the behaviours that regress fastest without consistent reinforcement. A manager who coaches specifically to these areas — before calls, after calls, and at the moments when a rep's confidence is most at risk — will see measurable improvement in pipeline quality and conversion within a quarter.

The question worth asking before the next performance review

If a sales manager in your organisation sat down with a rep today and was told "no pipeline updates, no deal reviews — just coach them," what would they do?

If the answer is uncertain, that is not a criticism of the manager. It reflects the environment they have been operating in and the development they have not received.

The organisations that build consistently strong sales teams are the ones that take that question seriously — and build the infrastructure to answer it properly. That means giving managers the time to coach, the skills to do it well, and the support to keep improving.

MySalesCoach works with sales managers as well as reps — matching them and with expert coaches who have held senior sales leadership roles and can develop their coaching capability directly. To understand how that works in practice, book a demo here.