As leaders, we’re always looking for ways to maximize the impact of our teams. Sales, Onboarding, CS and Support are skills-based professions, and the way we coach our reps is arguably the single most important lever we have to drive sustainable growth. Unfortunately, most of us have never been taught how to coach well and don’t teach our managers to coach well either.
After years of trial and error, reading a mountain of books on coaching, pulling from high performance pursuits like professional sports and watching countless reps transform from average to high-performing, I’ve distilled great coaching into five key principles.
This is the foundation of what I call Coaching Mastery.
The 5 Coaching Mastery Principles
Great coaching requires focus
Great coaching is questions-based
Great coaching is built around deep practice
Great coaching comes from a place of caring
Great coaching requires great follow-up
Now let’s unpack it.
1. Great Coaching Requires Focus
Coaching can feel overwhelming. You listen to a call and spot ten areas that need improvement, and you want to give feedback on all of them at once because you’re eager and mean well. That shotgun approach dilutes the impact of coaching, confuses your reps and slows skill development.
Instead, focus on one critical skill at a time. This is where you’ll make the biggest difference.
Exaggerated Illustration:
Imagine you’re a golf coach and you give two students different training protocols. Which of these golfers do you think improved their scores the next round?
Student 1:
Day 1: 60 minutes session on the basics of chipping, with 45 minutes of hitting shots from a similar distance
Day 2: 60 minute session that starts with 10 minutes reviewing the basics from the previous day then you expand the distances that you’re chipping from (short, medium, long) for 50 minutes
Day 3: you spend 10 minutes on a variety of distances like the previous day then show them how to chip from slightly more challenging situations (on slopes, over hazards) for 50 minutes
Student 2:
Day 1: 60 minutes session with 10 chips, 10 wedges, 10 9-irons, 10 8-irons, 10 3-woods, 10 drives, 10 putts. end of training session
Day 2: 60 minutes session with 10 chips, 10 wedges, 10 9-irons, 10 8-irons, 10 3-woods, 10 drives, 10 putts. end of training session
Day 3: 60 minutes session with 10 chips, 10 wedges, 10 9-irons, 10 8-irons, 10 3-woods, 10 drives, 10 putts. end of training session
How to Identify the Focus Area:
The key is to find the reverse salient—the single biggest bottleneck that, if improved, will create the most significant leverage in their performance. Maybe it’s gravitas, asking follow up questions or maybe it’s how they frame the solution. Sales is sequential so usually the reverse salient is early in the process. There’s no need to coach objection handling if they can’t get a prospect’s attention in the first five seconds and get their value prop out.
Sometimes, it’s a foundation that touches everything, like tonality or presence. In these cases you don’t focus on a specific part of the process, you work on one skill that cuts across the entire interaction.
Here’s how you can apply this:
Start with the data to identify their biggest needle mover
Pick one area to focus on for an extended period of time. It may take multiple weeks to graduate them on to the next skill
Go deep (Principle #3) and give the rep clear feedback on that one thing
Resist the temptation to layer on additional feedback—even if you’re excited about helping them improve. It will be more powerful when you keep it simple
2. Great Coaching is Questions-Based
A great coach doesn’t just provide answers — they lead their reps to discover the answers themselves. The process of analyzing is an incredible learning exercise, as illustrated by Bloom’s Taxonomy. “Remember” is the lowest form of learning and is typically a big part of what people consider to be ‘coaching’ today. Conversely, analyzing and evaluating are two of the strongest forms of learning.
This is also critical because the goal isn’t just to fix a specific issue on a call, it’s to build self-sufficiency in your reps so they can analyze and improve on their own.
Start Wide, Then Narrow In:
Begin your coaching sessions with broad, open-ended questions. You want to gauge the rep’s self-awareness before diving into specifics.
Here are some examples of how you might start:
“How do you feel about that call?”
“What do you think went well?”
“Where do you think you could have improved?”
Then, as you start to narrow the conversation, focus on identifying the most significant gap in their performance. A powerful follow-up might be:
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