Sales Coaching
Statistics & Benchmarks 2026

One of the most common questions sales leaders ask when they encounter the research is a simple one: where does my team sit? The benchmarks below are drawn directly from The State of Sales Coaching 2026 and The State of Sales Coaching 2025.

They represent what is actually happening across B2B sales organisations globally, not what best practice says should happen.

Use this table to benchmark your own team’s coaching reality against the industry. If your numbers are below the averages here, you are not alone — but you are losing performance and people because of it.

Of all the benchmarks above, one has the most direct commercial implication for any revenue leader:

For a team of 25 reps with a £500,000 annual quota per rep, the difference between coaching quarterly and coaching weekly represents approximately £3.6M in incremental quota coverage — based on 7 additional reps hitting their number. That is the commercial scale of the benchmarking gap.

The coaching frequency data reveals one of the most consistent and frustrating findings in sales leadership research: the gap between what leaders believe is happening and what reps are actually experiencing.

Despite 99% of reps saying coaching is critical to their role and job satisfaction, fewer than 1 in 3 receive it weekly. 41% say they are never or rarely coached. A further 14% — that is 1 in 7 salespeople — receive no coaching at all.

The frequency gap is not driven by a lack of belief — 99% of reps say coaching is critical to their success. It is driven by a lack of infrastructure.

Coaching depends on manager bandwidth, which is finite. Without a system to make coaching happen automatically, in the flow of work and at the moments it matters most, it will always be the first thing dropped when urgent tasks compete for attention.

That is the structural problem the data exposes year after year.

For the second consecutive year, The State of Sales Coaching report reveals one of the most counterintuitive findings in sales development: the longer a rep has been selling, the less coaching they receive — yet the more they want it.

Among reps with 6 to 10 years of experience, 50% are rarely or never coached, yet 80% want more coaching support.

Among reps with 10 or more years of experience, 67% are rarely or never coached.

The popular assumption that experienced reps want to be left alone to get on with it is not just wrong — it is costing organisations their best people. The mid-tenure cohort — reps with 6 to 10 years of experience — represents the single biggest missed opportunity in sales development today.

They are simultaneously the most under-coached group and the group with the highest appetite for more support.

They are experienced enough to know what good coaching looks like and motivated enough to want it, and are being systematically neglected.

The SDR role demands passion, grit and resilience every single day.

The data suggests that most SDRs are not receiving the support they need to sustain those qualities — and the gap between what they need and what they’re getting is significant.

Only 1 in 12 SDRs describe their role as very fulfilling. 44% find it only somewhat fulfilling, and a further 12% say they are not fulfilled at all. For a role that lives or dies on motivation, this is a troubling baseline.

And the context makes it more troubling still: 66.5% of SDRs believe their role is getting harder, not easier. The competitive environment is tougher, buyer expectations are higher, and the tools and techniques that worked two years ago are losing their effectiveness. SDRs feel the pressure of that shift acutely — yet only 10% of organisations have responded by making coaching more available.

The tenure picture compounds this. The data highlights SDRs are not disengaged from sales as a profession, but are becoming increasingly disillusioned with their current employers.

Only 10% think they won’t be in sales in five years, and 55% see their future as an AE. But 48% don’t expect to be with their current employer in 12 months — and 61% of those reps are on or over target.

This is not an underperformance problem. It is an investment problem. The reps who are hitting their numbers, who see a long future in sales, who are exactly the people worth retaining —are the ones quietly planning to leave.

The SDR retention data is where the business case for coaching becomes impossible to ignore.

74% of SDRs who receive frequent, high-quality coaching expect to still be with their company in 12 months. Among those who receive little to no coaching, that number falls to 34%.

That's a 40-percentage-point retention gap — the single variable measured between these two groups is coaching frequency and quality.

The career aspiration data from this study challenges one of the most common assumptions about SDR turnover: that it reflects disengagement from sales as a profession. It does not.

• 55% of SDRs see their future as an AE. 18% aspire to SDR management.

• Only 10% think they won’t be in sales in five years.

The remaining percentage selected other career paths.

The SDR function, for the vast majority of people in it, is the start of a career they intend to build — not a stopgap they are waiting to exit. This makes the retention picture more significant, not less.

These are people who believe in sales, who are working towards something, and who are asking — through the data — for the investment that would make staying at your organisation the obvious choice.

53% are in their first SDR role. They are early in their journey, forming the habits and beliefs that will shape their entire sales career.

The organisations that coach them well at this stage do not just retain an SDR. They develop the AE, the manager and the future leader that follows.