Ask most sales leaders what’s missing from their team and they’ll say training. More product knowledge. Better scripts. A sharper onboarding process.
Josh Cote, consultant, entrepreneur, and founder of EAW Consulting, sees it differently. In his experience, the teams that struggle rarely have a training problem. They have a coaching problem.
Training tells someone what to do once. Coaching is what happens after that, when the real work starts and the real gaps show up.
Most businesses spend heavily on the first and barely touch the second. Then they wonder why performance flatlines a few months after a promising start.
Training Is a Moment. Coaching Is a Habit.
Think about how most sales teams actually onboard someone.
There’s a week of shadowing. A folder of resources. Maybe a workshop or two. Then the new starter is let loose on real calls and real customers, and from that point on they’re mostly left to figure it out.
That’s training. It’s useful, but it’s a single event. It happens once and then it’s done.
Coaching is different. It’s ongoing. It’s the weekly check-in, the call review, the honest conversation about what went wrong on Tuesday and what to try differently on Wednesday. It’s not a one-time transfer of information. It’s a repeated process of correction, reinforcement, and small adjustments over time.
Josh’s view, built from years of working inside sales organisations, is that most leaders assume training equals development. It doesn’t. Training gets someone started. Coaching is what actually shapes them.
Without it, people plateau. They get comfortable with whatever level they reached in their first few weeks and simply repeat it, good or bad, for months or years afterwards. And that’s bad for business.
Why So Many Leaders Skip Coaching Without Realising It
Most sales managers aren’t lazy or careless. They’re just busy, and coaching is the first thing to slip when the pressure is on.
There’s always a target to hit, a report to send, a fire to put out. Coaching feels like it can wait until things calm down. So it gets pushed to next week, then the week after, until it quietly disappears from the routine altogether.
There’s also a common assumption that if someone is hitting their numbers, they don’t need coaching. Josh challenges this directly. Hitting a number today doesn’t tell you whether someone is building a sustainable habit or just having a lucky run. Some of the most fragile performers are the ones nobody is coaching, simply because their results look fine on the surface.
The other reason coaching gets skipped is more uncomfortable to admit. A lot of leaders were never coached properly themselves. They were promoted because they sold well, not because anyone taught them how to develop other people. So when it’s their turn to coach, they default to what they know: telling people what to do, rather than working through it with them.
That’s not a personal failing. It’s a gap in how most sales leaders are built in the first place. It just means the gap needs closing deliberately, rather than left to sort itself out.
What Real Coaching Actually Looks Like
Coaching gets a reputation for being soft or time-consuming, but done properly it’s neither.
Good coaching is short, specific, and frequent. It’s not a two-hour sit-down once a quarter. It’s a fifteen-minute conversation after a call that didn’t go well, focused on one or two things to adjust, not a full breakdown of everything.
It also isn’t just correction. Josh often points out that coaching a strong performer looks different from coaching someone still finding their feet. A new starter might need to be told directly what to change. Someone more experienced often just needs the right question asked at the right moment, so they work out the answer themselves.
The skill isn’t in having a script for coaching. It’s in reading where someone is and adjusting the approach to fit them.
Consistency matters more than intensity here. A short, honest conversation every week beats a long, intense one every few months. People improve through repetition and small corrections, not occasional deep dives that are quickly forgotten once the pressure of the week takes over again.
The Cost of Leaving People Alone
When coaching doesn’t happen, it’s rarely obvious straight away. Numbers can look fine for a while. People can seem settled. Nothing appears broken.
But underneath, small habits start to drift. A rep starts skipping a step in their process because nobody’s watching closely enough to notice. Another starts avoiding a certain type of objection because they’ve never been shown how to handle it properly and it feels easier to sidestep it.
None of this shows up as a dramatic failure. It shows up slowly, as a gradual dip in consistency that’s hard to pin down to any single cause.
By the time a leader notices, they’re often left wondering why performance has slipped when nothing seems to have changed. In most cases, something did change. The coaching simply stopped, and nobody replaced it with anything.
This is one of the quieter reasons growing teams lose momentum. It’s not usually a big visible mistake. It’s the absence of small, regular conversations that would have caught the drift early.
Building Coaching Back Into the Rhythm
The fix isn’t complicated, but it does require discipline. Josh’s approach with clients usually starts with putting coaching on the calendar in the same way targets and reports are scheduled. If it’s not protected time, it gets swallowed by whatever feels more urgent that day.
It also means leaders being honest about their own habits. Do they actually sit in on calls? Do they give feedback in the moment, or only when something goes wrong? Do they ask questions that help someone think, or do they just hand over the answer to save time?
None of this needs to be complicated or heavily structured. A short weekly review, a five minute debrief after a difficult call, a genuine question about what someone would do differently next time. These small habits, repeated consistently, do more for a team’s long-term performance than another training day ever will.
Training gets people ready to start. Coaching is what keeps them getting better long after that first week is over.
The teams that scale well tend to be the ones that never stopped doing this, even once they got busy enough to have a good excuse to.
FAQs
Isn’t coaching just something managers do naturally once they’ve got experience? Not always. Experience makes someone good at selling, not necessarily good at developing other people. Those are two different skills, and one doesn’t automatically produce the other.
How often should coaching actually happen to make a difference? Weekly, at minimum. Short and frequent works far better than long sessions once a quarter. People need small corrections often, not one big review that’s hard to act on.
What if the team is hitting target? Do we still need to coach them? Yes. Good numbers can hide fragile habits. Coaching then is less about fixing problems and more about protecting consistency before it slips.
Our managers are already stretched thin. How do we fit coaching in? It has to be scheduled like anything else important, otherwise it gets pushed aside every time. Even fifteen minutes after a call is enough if it happens consistently.
Is there a risk of over coaching and knocking someone’s confidence? There is, if it’s constant correction with nothing else. Good coaching includes asking questions and letting people work things out, not just pointing out what went wrong.
