Your CRM can tell you that a salesperson had a meeting. But can it tell you whether they learned anything that moves the opportunity forward?

I work with a lot of sales managers who are stretched incredibly thin. They’re selling themselves, putting out fires, pushing jobs through production, handling customer issues, and somewhere in between, trying to manage a sales team.

Coaching becomes something they’ll get to when they have time. They rarely do.

One-on-one meetings with reps, if they’re happening at all, become activity reviews. How many calls did you make? How many appointments did you have? What’s in the pipeline? When is that deal going to close?

Some busy managers replace individual coaching with sales team meetings. Unfortunately, these can turn into group venting sessions or what I call “growth badgering”—urging the team to work harder and sell more without providing any constructive guidance on how to make that happen.

Activity and pipeline questions are important. But they don’t tell us much about the quality of the conversations salespeople are having or whether they’re making meaningful progress with customers.

I’d rather hear managers asking:

• What did you learn about the customer’s business that you didn’t know before?
• What challenges are they trying to solve, and what’s the impact of those challenges?
• Who else is affected by the problem or involved in the decision?
• What did you learn that changes how we might help them?
• What did the customer commit to doing next?

These questions do more than help salespeople think critically about their opportunities. They also help managers determine whether the opportunities in the pipeline are real and whether the forecast is credible.

There’s a big difference between a salesperson who believes a deal will close and one who can explain why, based on what they’ve learned from the customer and the commitments the customer has made.

But here’s the catch. This kind of coaching takes time. Not five minutes between putting out fires, but dedicated time to discuss opportunities, challenge assumptions, and prepare for better customer conversations.

If we want salespeople to have deeper conversations with prospects and customers, their managers need to have deeper conversations with them.

And if we want more reliable forecasts, those conversations become even more important.

When coaching is always the first thing sacrificed when things get busy, we’ve effectively made it the lowest priority—even if we say otherwise.

Sales leaders: How much of your week is spent developing your salespeople and validating opportunities rather than simply reviewing activity?