- July 9, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This article begins with more baseball, but it’s about coaching salespeople, so please stay with me.
The Baseball Story
A sports-radio talk show discussed the Red Sox change in approach to coaching up their young players. They were referring to Roman Anthony and Cedanne Rafaella.
Roman Anthony is the #1 prospect in all of Major League Baseball. He was called up to the Red Sox in June, struggled at the start, but has been crushing the ball since and is the #3 hitter in their lineup. By the way, he is only 20 years old!
Cedanne Rafaella is probably the best center-fielder in all of baseball but his offense has been inconsistent, highlighted by chasing way too many pitches off the plate. Over the past two months, he is batting over .300 and going into last night’s action, had homered in three straight games.
So what was the organizational change that made such a huge difference in their offensive approaches?
The Baseball Lesson
The Red Sox were conducting group coaching with young players, with most of them tuning out. They didn’t think the instruction applied to them. They have different swings, plate discipline, intelligence, power, approaches, etc., so how could group coaching possibly work?
Roman Anthony had great plate discipline and he never swung at pitches off the plate, but he hit too many ground balls. Cedanne Rafaella routinely chased pitches off the plate and didn’t walk much. They coached Anthony to modify his swing and Rafaella to attack specific pitches and saw instant dividends with both.
So how is this baseball analogy relevant to sales?
The Sales Story
There is nothing wrong with group coaching, as long as we are aware of where it helps and where it doesn’t.
It helps to get everyone on the same page – like sales process and CRM. It helps to get everyone talking the same language. It helps to share success stories, war stories, applications, and challenges. It can even be useful for how to handle common challenges. But it doesn’t make salespeople better.
One-on-one coaching is the answer to that. It’s an opportunity to dive into why a salesperson gets the results they get and what must change to change the results. This can be accomplished through pre-call strategy, post-call debriefs, joint sales calls, and role play. But how many sales managers do this consistently and effectively? According to data from Objective Management Group and their assessments of 2.5 million salespeople, only 2.2%. Two.Point.Two.Percent.
The data shows that sales managers who coach consistently experience a 27% bump in revenue. We know that those who coach consistently and are effective with their coaching experience an even greater bump in revenue – as much as 42%.
Yet, even those kind of income-boosting, recognition-causing achievements are seemingly not enough for most sales managers to justify taking 20-30 minutes per day with each salesperson to coach them up.
Houston, we have a problem.
This isn’t a new problem. The data isn’t new either. I first found and wrote about the 27% increase seven years ago!. And my colleague, John Pattison, crunched the numbers to come up with 42% back in 2020.
The question is, what can be done about it?
How do we get CEOs to require their sales leaders, to require their sales managers to:
- Get the training to learn how to effectively coach up salespeople
- Set aside the time for the daily coaching
- Be held accountable for the activity and results of the coaching
If it were only that easy. But many CEOs are afraid of their sales leaders, don’t want to upset the apple cart, and don’t want to cause a morale problem among their sales managers. That’s funny because the morale problem comes from leaving everyone alone to do their own thing! Spending more time with everyone on the team is morale-building!
It’s not easy to make changes like these but these are the changes required to improve your sales culture. Coaching, along with sales process, a consultative approach, an emphasis on pipeline building and accountability cause remarkable sales growth.
The best approaches to help in this area are with training, coaching and sound-boarding. As always, feel free to reach out for help.
Image by Grok3