Two reps both hit 80% of quota, for completely different reasons. Revenue tells you what happened, not why — and that gap is where coaching breaks down.
Sales coaching is widely promoted as one of the most powerful tools available to sales managers.
Consultants, researchers and sales leaders regularly emphasize the value of managers spending more time helping salespeople diagnose problems, develop capabilities and improve performance.
But there is another question senior sales executives should be asking:
Are managers being given enough information to coach effectively?
Our research suggests that organizations using a broader and more diverse set of sales performance measures also experience higher levels of supervisory coaching.
The reason may be straightforward.
Revenue tells you what happened—not necessarily why
Most sales organizations track objective outcomes such as:
- revenue;
- quota attainment;
- margin;
- new accounts; and
- pipeline value.
These measures are essential.
But they are often lagging indicators. They tell a manager that performance is strong or weak without necessarily revealing what is driving that result.
Consider two salespeople who both finish at 80% of quota.
One may have excellent customer relationships but a weak prospecting pipeline.
The other may generate plenty of opportunities but struggle to qualify them effectively or advance complex deals.
The revenue number is the same.
The coaching conversation should be very different.
More measures create more coaching opportunities
A richer measurement system combines objective performance outcomes with information about behaviours, capabilities and how the salesperson is performing the job.
That might include measures related to:
- prospecting and pipeline development;
- opportunity progression;
- customer relationships;
- account development;
- selling behaviours;
- teamwork and internal collaboration;
- customer feedback; and
- manager assessments of salesperson capabilities.
These measures give managers more diagnostic information.
Instead of saying:
"You need to sell more."
the manager can ask:
“Where in the selling process are we losing momentum, and what can we work on together?”
Our findings suggest that this richer information environment can act as a catalyst for coaching by giving supervisors more specific performance issues to observe, discuss and develop.
What senior sales leaders can do
- Audit what you measure.
If most of your sales scorecard consists of financial outcomes, managers may know who is underperforming without knowing why.
- Add diagnostic measures.
Include selected behavioural, capability and customer-related indicators alongside objective results.
- Connect measures explicitly to coaching.
Performance dashboards should not simply trigger evaluation. They should trigger questions and developmental conversations.
- Avoid measuring everything.
The objective is not more metrics for their own sake. It is a sufficiently diverse set of 5 or 6 measures to help managers understand the causes of performance. Too many measures can create role ambiguity for salespeople, or worse, role conflict, where the different measures are at odds with one another.
The takeaway
Organizations that want more sales coaching may need to look beyond simply telling managers:
“Coach more.”
Managers need something meaningful to coach about.
A broader set of objective and subjective performance measures can provide the diagnostic information that helps turn performance management from a scorekeeping exercise into a developmental conversation.
For senior sales executives, the question may therefore be:
“Does our performance measurement system give managers enough information to coach effectively?”
