When Arjun was promoted to regional sales manager at a rapidly scaling SaaS firm, the transition seemed natural. He was a high-performing sales professional, known for building relationships and closing complex deals. But within months, the dynamics shifted. His team lacked consistency, morale was dropping, and newer members struggled to gain traction. His instinct was to step in—to fix, advise, and sometimes even close deals himself. But something wasn’t working.
A senior executive offered a sharp observation: “You’re solving problems, not developing capabilities.”
That one line exposed a broader issue in many sales organizations—the false equivalence between managing performance and developing people.
In this article, you will read about,
The Manager-as-Coach Fallacy
In theory, frontline sales managers are expected to coach. In practice, few do. And even fewer do it well.
This is not due to negligence, but to a fundamental misunderstanding of what coaching actually entails. Coaching is not inspection. It’s not advice-giving. And it’s certainly not rescuing deals. Coaching, when done right, is a structured, intentional process to elevate a professional’s thinking, skills, and self-awareness.
Yet according to data from Gartner, while 82% of sales leaders believe coaching is critical, only 26% of sales professionals rate the coaching they receive as effective. This discrepancy isn’t just a missed opportunity—it’s a structural failure that undermines long-term performance.
Understanding Why Sales Managers Don’t Coach
To solve the coaching gap, we must first understand the systemic blockers that prevent managers from delivering meaningful coaching.
1. Promotion without Preparation
Most managers are elevated based on individual sales success, not coaching aptitude. The assumption that high performance equals coaching ability is flawed. Selling is transactional. Coaching is developmental. The skills are not interchangeable.
2. Time Poverty and Tactical Overload
Sales managers are often overwhelmed with administrative tasks, forecasting, reporting, and internal firefighting. Coaching becomes a “nice to have”—not a strategic priority. In reality, it should be the core lever for building a high-performing, self-sustaining team.
3. Lack of Process and Tools
Coaching without a framework is just conversation. Most managers lack a structured approach to coaching—how to diagnose skill gaps, create learning agendas, or measure progress over time.
4. Performance Anxiety
In high-pressure environments, managers often default to short-term interventions to hit targets. This includes taking over calls, reworking proposals, or micromanaging. These actions erode autonomy and signal a lack of trust. Coaching, by contrast, is about equipping professionals to succeed independently.
The Case for Dedicated Sales Coaching Expertise
Given these challenges, many progressive organizations are introducing sales coaching as a specialized capability—either through embedded sales coaches, external partners, or upskilling initiatives that redefine the manager’s role.
Here’s what that shift enables:
- Objective Development: External coaches bring neutral, structured perspectives that go beyond pipeline pressures.
- Skill-Centric Focus: Coaches are trained to work on root-level skills—questioning techniques, stakeholder mapping, objection handling—not just deal mechanics.
- Behavioural Change: Sustained coaching creates behavioural shifts, not just performance spikes.
- Cultural Uplift: Coaching builds a culture of ownership, reflection, and continuous improvement—key to navigating today’s BANI world (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible).
According to a study by CSO Insights, companies with a dynamic and embedded coaching culture reported 27% higher quota attainment than their peers.
Also Read: 10 Tested Strategies for Sales Managers to Set Expectations and Achieve Consistent Results
Here are 3 case studies of how our coaching impacted a sales managers’ growth, in orchestration of a deal and at the customer interface.
Coaching Sales Managers across Asia to appreciate and apply the power of coaching for sustained sales performance
Customer Situation
One of the world’s largest software companies decided to establish an inside (digital) sales team across Asia to help lower the cost of sale and to amplify the acquisition of net new customers. Given the relative newness of the team and the extent of their addressable opportunity, it was felt that coaching would be a good investment to build their self- awareness, self-discipline and raise their execution quotient to achieve their aspirational results.
Tripura Engagement
We designed a coaching engagement that brought together the best of our experience, coaching sales managers across the globe. There were three specific areas of focus that helped the managers over deliver on their aspirational commitment for the fiscal:
- Plan for adequate number of coaching sessions (15 sessions over a period of nine months), to help the managers truly appreciate and absorb the power of coaching.
- Balance the coaching sessions equally between the appreciation of coaching and the application of coaching.
- Identify individual, team and organizational challenges that the coachee could effectively apply their coaching skills to, which included their customer and their partner as well.
Customer Outcome
All of the market areas across Asia over delivered on their commitment for the fiscal. It was quite obvious that their appreciation and application of coaching helped create bonding and aspiration within their teams that still sustains their collective passion for excellence.
Traversing the journey from “hopecasting” to forecasting for one the largest software companies in the world
Customer Situation
When the deals start slipping, the quantum of reviews only go up. With multiple quarter commitments getting missed, our customer realized that turning the dial on reviews was becoming counter – productive. They decided to use our expertise to give a third-party verification and validation perspective to help their sales teams confront reality and the quality of qualification of their deals.
Tripura Engagement
Along with the customer, we identified the top 10 deals for the fiscal that are crucial for success. Deal coaching calls were structured with the entire opportunity team in attendance. After establishing a container of safety and showcasing empathy for the current deal situation, we leveraged the art of powerful questioning to help the opportunity teams think deeper and smarter about their value and differentiation. Combined with coaching around stakeholder management, competitive strategy, partner eco-system linkage and customer consensus, the opportunity teams were able to identify the top risks that confronted them and then built a strategy to mitigate those risks.
Customer Outcome
Over 60% of the top 10 deals were closed as forecasted. In addition to learning the finer nuances of deal management, sales managers and regional leaders understood the importance of taking a coaching approach to progressing top deals towards closure. Sustenance of these learnings and their application to other deals in the pipeline is another positive fall out of this engagement.
Coaching at the customer interfaces that matter
Customer Situation
One of the largest business applications providers in the world, discovered that their customer loyalty scores were trending lower in addition to their renewals getting more and more challenged. Some of their initiatives with e-learning and lunch and learn sessions were hardly making any difference to these customer scores. Moreover, high turnover at the leadership level was also impacting morale. We were brought in to re-energize, re-engage and rejuvenate the entire sales team so that they could start operating as a team to achieve more for their customers.
Tripura Engagement
Nothing happens until a customer buys something. Therefore, all our engagements were indexed around winning at the customer interface. This meant that every sales team member understood and appreciated the new normal at which they needed to operate with their customers. In addition to knowledge and skills, we focused more on behaviors, role-plays and the power of articulation / story telling.
Customer Outcome
It is amazing how much learning can happen in a sales call, especially when it has a sales coach observing and providing feedback. Every sales call we participated in resulted in a rich harvest of observations and powerful feedback for the seller, helping them raise their awareness on how they could be operating at a different level. Credit goes to this customer who believed in the power of investing at the customer interfaces. With powerful feedback the teams started to operate differently with their customers and were able to gain better access to customer executives. This helped them to focus on organizational priorities for their customer and therefore craft larger deals that ensured their success. Customers were now happier that their organizational issues were getting resolved and our customer was happier for the greater morale and better results that this initiative provided.
Redefining the Role of Sales Managers
As the landscape of modern sales grows more complex and consultative, the role of sales managers is undergoing a quiet but necessary transformation. No longer just administrators or crisis responders, today’s effective sales managers act more as enablers than enforcers—moving from firefighting to foresight, and from issuing directives to developing talent. This shift calls for a more intentional rhythm of coaching—not the occasional check-in, but structured, consistent conversations that go beyond pipeline updates. It means focusing not just on what deals are moving, but how individual sellers think, plan, and adapt in the face of resistance. Relying on instinct is no longer enough; managers need coaching frameworks that bring clarity and consistency—whether it’s the GROW model or situational grids. And just as sales metrics are tracked with rigor, coaching must be measured for its effectiveness, using real feedback and performance shifts as guideposts. In this evolving ecosystem, the most successful sales leaders aren’t just pushing for targets—they’re building the thinking capacity of the teams that deliver them.
This doesn’t mean sales managers should be passive observers or administrators. Their role needs to evolve—from firefighting to foresight, from directing to developing.
We recommend the following strategic pivots:
The Way Forward
At Tripura Multinational, we’ve coached thousands of sales professionals across industries—and the lesson is clear: coaching done well is not an expense. It is a strategic multiplier. It builds capability, resilience, and long-term value.
Whether it’s the $5 billion in pipeline enabled through our programs, or the $3 billion in opportunities filtered and qualified through structured coaching interventions, the numbers tell a simple story: when you coach at the interface, performance transforms.
The path to a world-class sales organization isn’t paved with more activity. It’s built on better conversations—led by leaders who know how to coach.
Is your sales organization ready to coach beyond performance? Let us get started
