How Coaching Improves Sales Team Performance in Food Service Industry

A food service salesperson can visit ten outlets in a day, speak to several chefs and restaurant owners, and return with a full activity report. Yet the sales results may remain disappointing.

For a sales manager, the immediate questions are often about call frequency, sales targets or outstanding orders. These are important, but they do not always explain what is happening during customer conversations. Did the salesperson understand why the chef was unhappy with an ingredient? Did they explore how the restaurant was managing food costs? Did they agree on a meaningful next step with the customer? These details can make a difference to sales performance. They are also difficult to understand from sales reports alone.

Having spent much of my career in the food service business, I have seen how demanding this selling environment can be. Salespeople deal with chefs, purchasing teams, outlet managers and business owners, each with different priorities. This is where coaching becomes particularly useful. It gives sales managers a practical way to understand how their people sell, identify where they need support and help them improve during their everyday work.

What Coaching Means in a Sales Role

In food service sales, managers have several responsibilities competing for their attention. There are sales targets to deliver, customer complaints to resolve, promotional activities to execute and distribution issues to manage.

Coaching can easily become something that happens only when a salesperson is underperforming. However, effective sales coaching should be part of how managers support their teams throughout the sales cycle. Consider the difference between these two conversations:

Manager: “Your sales are below target this month. You need to push harder and visit more customers.”

Manager: “Let’s look at your last few customer visits. Which opportunities are progressing, and where are you finding it difficult to move forward?”

The first conversation gives direction. The second creates an opportunity to understand what may be affecting performance. Both have their place. Sales managers still need to set expectations and make decisions. Coaching is especially valuable when the salesperson needs to develop the judgement, confidence or skills to handle similar situations independently.

Coaching in Food Service Sales: What It Looks Like

Food service selling involves more than presenting products and negotiating prices. A salesperson may need to understand kitchen operations, menu requirements, ingredient performance, food preparation practices and the commercial pressures facing an outlet.

For example, a chef might complain that a particular ingredient is too expensive. An inexperienced salesperson may immediately offer a discount or recommend a cheaper alternative. A more capable salesperson would first explore the concern. Is the chef comparing purchase prices? Is the ingredient producing too much wastage? Is the portion cost too high? Or has the restaurant experienced a change in customer demand? Each possibility requires a different response.

A sales manager observing this conversation can identify whether the salesperson explored the customer’s concern thoroughly or moved too quickly towards a solution. After the visit, the manager might ask:

• “What did you understand about the chef’s main concern?”
• “Which question helped you uncover that?”
• “What would you explore further if you had another opportunity?”

The discussion is grounded in a real customer interaction. The salesperson can connect the feedback to something they have just experienced and decide how to improve the next conversation.

Coaching the Quality of Customer Conversations

Three areas are particularly worth observing during a food service sales call:

Customer understanding: Does the salesperson explore the customer’s business needs, kitchen challenges and priorities before recommending a product?

Value communication: Can the salesperson explain how the proposed product or solution addresses a specific customer concern, using relevant information rather than relying on generic product benefits?

Securing the next step: Does the salesperson end the conversation with a clear agreement, such as arranging a kitchen trial, providing costing information or following up with the purchasing team?

These are observable selling behaviours. A manager can listen for them during a joint customer visit, discuss what happened afterwards and help the salesperson strengthen one area at a time.

Coaching for Sales Leaders: Leading with Clarity

Sales managers often spend considerable time reviewing numbers, checking activities and following up on sales commitments. The challenge is deciding what to do when performance falls short.

Suppose two salespeople are achieving only 70% of their monthly sales targets. One has a healthy pipeline but struggles to convert product trials into regular orders. The other has strong relationships with existing customers but rarely develops opportunities in new outlets. The performance result looks similar. The underlying problems are different. Giving both salespeople the same instruction to increase customer visits may generate more activity without addressing either problem.

A coaching-oriented sales manager investigates how the results are being produced. For the first salesperson, the discussion might focus on what happens after a product trial. Are customer objections being addressed? Has the chef confirmed the product’s suitability? Is the purchasing decision clear? For the second, the manager may examine how new outlets are identified, approached and qualified.

This requires managers to look beyond the final sales number and understand the selling activities and behaviours behind it.

Choosing What to Coach

Before a coaching conversation, a sales manager can consider three questions:

1. What specific performance gap are we trying to address? Identify the difference between the expected and actual result or behaviour.
2. What have I observed that may explain the gap? Use customer visit observations, sales records and discussions with the salesperson rather than relying on assumptions.
3. What is the most useful improvement to work on now? Choose a priority the salesperson can practise and demonstrate during upcoming customer interactions.

This helps keep coaching focused and manageable.

It also prevents managers from treating every sales problem as a selling-skills issue. Stock shortages, unsuitable pricing, territory limitations or unclear commercial policies may require management action rather than individual coaching.

Coaching in Daily Sales Activities

One advantage of food service sales is that managers have opportunities to observe selling behaviours in actual customer environments. A joint field visit to a restaurant, hotel or café can reveal details that are easily missed during an office discussion.

However, simply accompanying a salesperson does not automatically make the visit a coaching activity. The manager needs to be clear about what to observe, when to intervene and how to discuss the experience afterwards.

Before the Customer Visit

Agree on the purpose of the visit and the salesperson’s intended outcome. For example, if the visit involves a customer who has not reordered after a successful product trial, the manager could ask:

• “What do you want to understand from the customer today?”
• “How will you approach the conversation?”

The salesperson should know which behaviour the manager will observe.

During the Customer Visit

Allow the salesperson to lead the conversation wherever appropriate. Observe what the salesperson actually says and does. Pay attention to how they ask questions, respond to customer concerns, explain value and agree on follow-up actions.

If the manager takes over every difficult conversation, there may be little opportunity to understand the salesperson’s current capability. Intervention may still be necessary when a customer issue requires immediate management support.

After the Customer Visit

Discuss the interaction while the details are still fresh. Start with the salesperson’s own observations before sharing specific feedback. For example: “You asked the chef about the preparation process, and that helped uncover the wastage issue. What did you notice about how the conversation changed?”

Then explore one improvement. “When the chef raised the cost concern, what else could you have asked before discussing the price?”

Agree on what the salesperson will practise during the next suitable visit. At a subsequent joint visit, observe whether the behaviour has improved. This follow-through is important. Without it, coaching can become a pleasant discussion that has little influence on what happens in the field.

What You Can Apply Outside of Food Service

Although the examples here come from food service sales, the underlying approach is relevant to other B2B sales environments. A salesperson selling industrial equipment may need to explore operational problems before discussing technical specifications. A Key Account Manager may need to understand a customer’s commercial priorities before proposing a new agreement.

In both cases, the sales manager can improve the quality of coaching by paying attention to the actual customer conversation. The same practical principles apply:

• Observe before concluding. Understand what the salesperson did before deciding what needs improvement.
• Be specific about the behaviour. Discuss the questions asked, information uncovered or commitments secured.
• Work on one meaningful improvement. Give the salesperson something clear to practise.
• Check whether it changes. Look for evidence of improvement in subsequent customer interactions.

The objective is to help salespeople become more capable of handling their work, while ensuring managers provide the direction and support needed for success.

Conclusion

Food service sales performance depends on many factors, including customer demand, product availability, pricing, competition and the quality of sales execution.

Coaching has an important role in the areas that salespeople can learn to improve. When sales managers regularly observe customer interactions, discuss specific behaviours and follow up on agreed improvements, they gain a better understanding of their team’s selling capability. Salespeople, in turn, receive support that is relevant to the situations they face in the field.

For sales managers, a useful starting point is to choose one customer visit this week, observe one selling behaviour and follow through on one improvement. The value of coaching becomes clearer when better conversations lead to better decisions, stronger customer engagement and, over time, more consistent sales execution.