Sustain Sales Coaching Across the Team: Make It the Culture

You’ve introduced regular field coaching, given managers practical tools and helped them develop their coaching skills. Your salespeople are beginning to receive more consistent support. But here’s something worth considering. What happens when the sales team faces a difficult quarter, managers change roles or business priorities shift? Will coaching continue, or will it gradually disappear from everyone’s schedule?

This is the challenge that Sustain, the third stage of my Sales Coaching Ecosystem™, is designed to address. In my earlier article, How to Build a Sales Coaching Ecosystem That Works, I introduced three connected stages: Activate, Enable and Sustain.

Activate establishes clear coaching expectations and field observations. Enable develops managers’ coaching skills and provides the support they need. Sustain is about making sure coaching remains part of how sales leaders manage performance and develop their people over time.

Let’s look at what sales leaders can do to make that happen.

1. Make Coaching Part of Sales Leadership Accountability

If coaching is important to the organisation, it needs to be part of what sales leaders are responsible for. That includes Sales Directors, regional sales leaders and sales managers.

Consider what happens during a typical monthly sales review. Leaders discuss sales achievement, business opportunities, customer issues and forecasts. These are necessary discussions. But how much attention is given to whether salespeople are becoming more capable of handling those business challenges?

If coaching is never discussed, managers may gradually treat it as something they do only when they have spare time.

Give Coaching a Place in Management Reviews

You don’t need a separate meeting. Include a short coaching discussion in your existing monthly or quarterly sales reviews. For example, a Sales Director could ask each regional leader to share:

• One sales behaviour their team has improved.
• One area where salespeople are still struggling.
• What managers are doing to address that difficulty.
• What support they need from senior leadership.

Keep the discussion practical. If a regional leader reports that several salespeople struggle to negotiate without offering unnecessary discounts, the next question should be: “What are your managers doing to help them handle those conversations better?”. This encourages leaders to connect sales performance challenges with the development of their people.

Make Responsibilities Clear at Every Level

Senior leaders set expectations and provide support. Regional leaders help Sales Managers improve their coaching. Sales managers work directly with salespeople to develop the required skills. When these responsibilities are clear, coaching is less likely to depend on the enthusiasm of one particular manager.

2. Look Beyond the Number of Coaching Sessions

One of the easiest ways to measure coaching is to count how many sessions managers have completed. That information is useful, but it tells only part of the story.

A manager may complete ten coaching sessions without helping anyone improve a specific selling behaviour. Another manager may conduct fewer sessions but achieve meaningful progress with salespeople who need support. That’s why sales leaders should review coaching activity alongside coaching quality and behavioural improvement.

Use a Few Measures That Tell You Something Useful

Start with measures you can obtain from existing field coaching records and manager discussions.

You don’t need a complicated dashboard to begin.

For example, if your team has been working on improving new customer prospecting, you could review whether salespeople are better prepared for prospect meetings, asking more relevant questions and securing clearer next steps. You can then examine whether those improvements are contributing to stronger sales opportunities.

Remember that sales results are influenced by many factors, including market demand, pricing, competition and customer decisions. Avoid assuming that every improvement or decline in sales is caused by coaching alone.

Ask for Evidence, Not Just Completed Forms

During a business review, a regional leader might report: “All our managers completed their coaching sessions this month.”. That’s a good starting point. But the next question should be: “What improvements have they noticed in their salespeople?”. If managers can explain what has changed and provide examples from actual customer interactions, the discussion becomes more meaningful.

3. Help Senior Leaders Demonstrate the Coaching Behaviours They Expect

Sales managers notice what their own leaders do. If a regional sales leader regularly asks managers to coach their teams but responds to every problem by giving instructions, managers may receive mixed messages. Senior leaders don’t need to conduct every coaching conversation themselves. However, they should demonstrate the same willingness to listen, explore problems and help others think through decisions.

Coach Your Managers During Business Discussions

Suppose a Sales Manager reports that the team is struggling to gain distribution for a newly launched product. The regional leader could immediately instruct the manager to increase outlet visits and push harder for listings. Sometimes direct instruction is necessary. But there may also be an opportunity to develop the manager’s thinking. For example:

• “What have you found out about why outlets aren’t taking the product?”
• “What have your salespeople tried so far?”
• “Where do you think they need the most help?“

These questions encourage the manager to examine the situation before deciding what action to take. The regional leader can then provide guidance where needed. This is one practical way to show managers what effective coaching looks like in everyday leadership.

Include Coaching in Manager Development Discussions

When reviewing a sales manager’s performance, discuss their ability to develop people alongside business results. For example:

• “Which salesperson has made the most progress under your coaching this quarter?”
• “What did you do that helped?”
• “Which part of coaching do you still find difficult?”

This makes coaching an expected part of the manager’s role. It also helps senior leaders identify where managers need further development.

4. Protect Coaching When Business Pressure Increases

Sales leaders know that business priorities can change quickly. A major customer issue, unexpected sales decline or urgent product launch can disrupt planned field activities. When this happens, coaching is often one of the first activities to be postponed. Occasional changes are unavoidable. The problem begins when postponed coaching is never rescheduled.

Review What Gets Cancelled

During your monthly management review, look at planned coaching activities that didn’t take place. Don’t use the discussion simply to question managers about missed targets. Find out what happened. Was the manager handling an urgent customer issue? Was the coaching schedule unrealistic? Was there insufficient time for field visits? Then decide what needs to change.

For example, a manager responsible for a large territory may need to combine field coaching visits with existing customer coverage plans. Another manager may need help delegating administrative tasks. The aim is to remove practical obstacles rather than repeatedly reminding managers to coach.

Make Coaching Part of Normal Planning

When managers prepare their monthly field schedules, coaching visits should be considered alongside customer appointments, account reviews and other responsibilities. This makes it easier to allocate time realistically. If coaching is always added after everything else has been scheduled, it will remain vulnerable to competing priorities.

5. Keep Coaching Consistent When Managers Change

A coaching culture shouldn’t disappear whenever an experienced manager is promoted, transferred or leaves the organisation. Yet this can happen when coaching practices depend entirely on individual managers. One manager may have developed an effective approach, but their replacement may have little understanding of how coaching is expected to work.

Include Coaching in Manager Handover and Onboarding

When a new sales manager takes over a team, make sure they understand:

• The sales behaviours the team is currently developing.
• The coaching approach and tools used by the organisation.
• The coaching activities already scheduled.
• Any ongoing development priorities that require follow-up.
• Who can support them as they settle into the role.

This information should be part of the management handover, alongside customer accounts, sales targets and team responsibilities. Newly appointed managers should also have opportunities to observe experienced managers conducting coaching conversations. That helps them understand the organisation’s expectations before taking full responsibility for their teams.

6. Use Business Reviews to Identify Wider Development Needs

Field coaching can reveal problems that extend beyond an individual salesperson. For example, managers across several territories may report that their teams are struggling to explain the commercial value of a new product to customers.

If the same difficulty appears repeatedly, coaching each salesperson individually may not be enough. The organisation may need to review its sales training, product information, customer value proposition or sales tools.

Connect Coaching Findings with Business Decisions

During regional or national sales reviews, look for common development needs. Ask:

• “Are several teams facing the same selling difficulty?”
• “Do managers have what they need to coach this area effectively?”
• “Is there something we should improve in our training or sales support?”

The answers can help sales leaders decide where to invest their development resources. This is an important part of sustaining a sales coaching ecosystem. Coaching observations should inform decisions about how the organisation develops and supports its salespeople.

A Practical Sustain Checklist for Sales Leaders

If you’re responsible for several sales teams, use these questions to review whether coaching is becoming part of how your organisation operates.

You don’t need to address every area immediately. Start by identifying where coaching is most likely to lose momentum. For some organisations, the main issue may be inconsistent leadership attention. For others, it may be poor follow-up, frequent management changes or coaching records that are collected but rarely reviewed. Choose the most important gap and address it first.

Conclusion: Make Coaching Part of How You Lead the Sales Organisation

The Sustain stage is about keeping sales coaching effective as the business grows, priorities change and people move into new roles. That requires more than reminding managers to complete their coaching activities. Senior leaders need to take responsibility for coaching, review whether sales behaviours are improving and support managers when they face difficulties.

Coaching also needs to influence how the organisation develops its people, plans field activities and responds to common sales challenges. When these practices are established, coaching becomes less dependent on individual managers and more consistent across the organisation. That’s the longer-term purpose of Sustain, the third stage of the Sales Coaching Ecosystem™.

For the complete framework and how Activate, Enable and Sustain work together, read How to Build a Sales Coaching Ecosystem That Works.